With 2012 well under way some of my clients are probably wondering if RoyalGeeks.Com went of business.

That’s because I didn’t do my traditional holiday calendar mailing at the tail end of 2011.

Since inception, RoyalGeeks.Com maintained a mailing list of all of our clients and did an annual mailing around the holidays. The mailing consisted of a tri-fold full color glossy calendar of the new year. This mailing was made at great expense, I might add. All told it cost close to $1,000 in printing and postage coupled with a good chunk of time to process the mailing and get to the mailbox.

I’m happy to say RoyalGeeks.Com is alive and well. Thriving, actually. With change being what it is, I decided to discontinue the holiday mailing.

It seems unnecessary to mail out a calendar to hundreds of people who already have a calendar two clicks away thanks to their computer. As for keeping in touch, we already do that thanks to this blog, our email newsletter, our Twitter feed and our Facebook page. We all know that thanks to technology it’s never been easier to stay in touch.

So we discontinued the holiday mailing and pocketed an easy $1000 in savings while still maintaining open channels with our clients in many mediums.

Right around the holidays, the news reports of the greeting card business collapsing and the massive loses of the US Postal System make it clear that the handwriting is on the wall: Adapt or die.

Do I still use the Post Office? Sure. I pay a few bills that way. I send out urgent letters via Express Mail or Priority Mail and until transporter technology emerges from the science fiction world of Star Trek and into reality, there’s no other way to send a package.

I use the right tool for the right job. Sometimes it’s scanning a document and emailing it. Other times it’s an overnight delivery when official documents of great importance must arrive at a particular place at a particular time with third party delivery confirmation.

In 2012 I encourage you to use the right tool for the jobs that need doing in your life so you can make your life easier.

Once upon a time I bought a life-changing gadget. While it was delivering the results I was expecting, it seemed to be more difficult to use than it was supposed to be. Day by day my angst grew and grew as the frustrating side-effects of using the gizmo almost didn’t justify the benefits.

Then one day I decided to look at my wonder magic gadget from a completely different perspective. I studied it from top to bottom and side to side. I paid very close attention to every detail of its design. I picked up some key design elements that I failed to notice a hundred or even a thousand times before.

Armed with my newly-acquired insights I took a fresh approach to using my enchanted gizmo. Result? The gizmo delivered twice the results with the half the effort and none of the frustration I’d experienced before.

The gizmo in question was a food processor. But it could just as easily have been a computer.

If you find yourself pulling your hair out of your head because your computer just doesn’t work the way you want it to, borrow a page from my book. Learn all the feature of the software you want to use. Examine every button and menu.Study every nook and cranny and delve into the details. Know what your outcome is and establish the path of least resistance that will get you there.

If your computer frustration is still there then pick up a book or get some live computer training. Whatever you do, just don’t keep on being frustrated. Life’s too short to not get what you want with the least possible amount of fuss.

Changing Your Outlook On Using Microsoft Outlook Part 2

How to Tap into the Hidden Power of Microsoft Outlook

Over the years I’ve worked with hundreds of people who rely on Outlook to run their businesses, drive their careers or just manage their personal lives. In almost every care, I’ve found that users don’t take advantage of even the smallest fraction of Outlook’s features.

It never occurs to most people that they’re not even scratching the surface of Outlook’s full potential. Are you one of those people? Are you depriving yourself of an easier life or a shorter work day because you’re not making the most of Outlook?

Let me change your Outlook on using Microsoft Outlook yet again with these powerful Outlook tips and tricks.

1. Color Codes Come to Email

Would you like to know which of the 200+ new emails in your inbox you should read first with just a one second glance?

Color code your email.

Outlook let’s you assign different colors to different emails based on criteria like sender’s email address, subject like, etc.

If you’re working on a critical time-sensitive project as part of a team, you can set up Outlook to color code all such emails sent from the members of your team in yellow. Does your boss have ego issues demanding an instantaneous response to every brain fart he sends your way? Color code all his emails in red. If your friends send email to your work accounts (like jokes, funny clips, etc.) you can color code their emails in blue. With Outlook’s color coding system you can have a plan of attack to every new email in your inbox in a matter of seconds and blaze a trail with all that email knowing exactly which emails you need to get to get to first and which ones can wait. How do you do it? Select Tools, then click on organize, then click on using colors. Then match up the person with the color you want associated with their emails.

2. Don’t check email constantly

I learned this one after reading The Four Hour Work by Tim Ferriss and this one tip alone changed my life. Tim will tell you to check email as little as possible. How little? He checks email once per week. That’s probably not an option for you but I’ve found that almost anyone can reduce their email checking to twice or even once per day with no permanent damage to their career or personal relationships.

Here’s how to do it: Turn off the auto-check email feature so Outlook isn’t going to chime every time more email comes in. Instead, check email manually twice per day – at 11 AM and 4 PM. These two times, according to Ferriss, are the most strategic times to read and reply to email. Having adopted this practice personally, I can vouch for its effectiveness.

The result? I’ve gained an average of one hour per day of productive time NOT spent stopping whatever I’m doing to read and reply to email thus interrupting what I was doing and breaking my thought patterns.

3. Use your calendar for more than just meetings and scheduled events.

Personal development gurus and success coaches like Tom Hopkins, Brian Tracy and Jack Canfield all advise you to plan your time and have a to-do list ready to go. Your Outlook calendar can help you organize your daily to-dos by category and by time so you’re always making the most productive use of your time at any given moment.