Focus on What's Important

Close tragedies often make us introspective and more focused on what is most important in life.  Unfortunately life soon takes over again and we often return to our fast-paced ways without much thought for the precious and irreplaceable people and moments in our lives.  We must try harder to see, feel, and experience the truly beautiful things around us.  Let’s try to focus on what is truly important.  Here’s a start:

Hug your child, spouse, friend, or neighbor,

Help someone, ANYONE, with something.  Hold a door, carry a package, mow your neighbor’s lawn. Practice random acts of kindness.  It doesn’t take much to make someone’s day. 

Look around and appreciate something on your street you haven’t really noticed before.

Watch the sunrise/sunset.

Let someone pull in front of you while you’re driving.

Realize that it’s not about the money and things.

Look a stranger in the eye, smile, and say hello.

Call an old friend out of the blue.

What’s REALLY important to you?

___
Kim Luedke is Co-owner of ProfessionalEdge Associates, offering a wide range of marketing and support services to businesses that want to increase their success, but aren't in a position to add to their staff.

Thought for the day

“-You can't just turn on creativity like a faucet. You have to be in the right mood.

-What mood is that?

-Last-minute panic.”

Calvin & Hobbes quotes (Fictional characters from the comic series created by Bill Watterson)

Tool Review: eFax

Recently I talked about that ancient thermal fax machine – you remember, the one that burned the incoming image onto smelly thermal fax paper that flipped around on a noisy cylindrical platen? We’ve really come a long way since then. Today, I don’t even use a separate fax machine to send and receive faxes.

Today I use eFax. eFax is an international fax service that allows you to send and receive faxes using your email account. When you sign up with eFax, you receive your own local or toll free fax number. Received faxes are delivered as attachments directly to your email inbox and faxes are sent from your inbox as well. eFax is compatible with Outlook and other email account managers. So I can send and receive faxes from anywhere I can send and receive email and I don’t have to be sitting in my office waiting for them to come through on the machine.

eFax offers a couple different options with a small setup fee and monthly or annual cost. There are corporate options as well and there are even new options to send faxes directly from your Android or iPhone.

See if the eFax tool is right for your business at www.efaxsend.com.

___
Kerry Brooks is Co-owner of ProfessionalEdge Associates, offering a wide range of marketing and support services to businesses that want to increase their success, but aren't in a position to add to their staff.

Goldspot "Friday"

What's the Next Big Thing?

Yes, I’m dating myself, but I can remember during the orientation to my first full time job when I was shown the thermal fax machine. This was a machine that had an actual handset you had to answer and put into a cradle. Its cylindrical platen then spun around while the fax image was burned into the thermal paper. It was noisy and messy and smelly, but I thought it was amazing. That anyone could actually send a written message to someone over the telephone was something difficult to comprehend. At that same job, we had the newest word processors so we didn’t have to use correction typewriters anymore.

A few years later, I was fortunate enough to work for a company that did have PCs. Now we could save and edit files and print them when they were complete. And, we used mail envelopes to deliver these printed communications throughout the company. Email and Internet at work came many years later.

Today, we work 100% remotely. We reside in different states and our clients are all over the country. We communicate using email, Skype, video conferencing, and phone. Our files are stored in the Cloud, faxes are sent and received via one of multiple email accounts, we conduct research via the Internet, and we stay connected via Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Google+, a web site and a blog.

I like to ponder what’s next. Wonder what technology advances will happen in my children’s lifetimes that will so drastically change the way they live and work. What technology nuances can you imagine will happen in the next 50 years?

___
Kerry Brooks is Co-owner of ProfessionalEdge Associates, offering a wide range of marketing and support services to businesses that want to increase their success, but aren't in a position to add to their staff.