Will the real culprit behind time management issues please stand up?

This is a guest post by Mona Andrei. Mona is a seasoned writer with a background in marketing. Driven by a hamster that never stops turning (ever), she’s also the blogger behind Moxie-Dude.com and author of “The Single Mom’s Manifesto – Remember your dreams”, a short ebook that demonstrates how even a single mom can create a life by design. Download your free copy here.

 

Have you ever looked at a successful person – someone who just seems to be able to get so much done in a day – and wonder how they do it?

I have a friend (we’ll call her Jennifer) and I’m always amazed at her list of accomplishments. Even now, as we approach the busy holiday season, she’s got everything under control. Her house is ready for the annual family gathering, she has a freezer full of prepared meals and baked goods, and she’s already finished her holiday shopping. On top of this, she runs her own boutique advertising agency.

“The more I do, the more I seem to get done,” she answered recently when I asked her how she’s able to handle everything so well.

She’s an inspiration and I’m in awe of her ability to manage every aspect of her life. I also hate her.

“Why can’t I be more like her?” Is a question I ask myself often, especially when I look at my own list of pending tasks.

Career, house, kids, deadlines – Jennifer and I practically have parallel lives and yet she’s on top of hers while I struggle with my dungenous to-do list. (“Dungenous” is not an actual word but clearly it should be.)

What is Wordpress and is it for me?

Last weekend a good friend asked me if I could help him understand Wordpress a little bit. He's looking at creating a new site but is not sure that he'll have the technical knowledge necessary to install Wordpress or customize it and he's a little bit confused as to what is involved in the creation of the site. The conversation was fun and it inspired me to write about it here, so I prepared a little video to answer his questions.

Getting introduced to Wordpress

I created my very first website back in 2007, for my wedding. At the time I knew of blogging and had tried Blogger, bit didn't know much about Wordpress and didn't realize that it could be used to create something more than a blog. So I looked for help online and created my website with Frontpage. It was a very basic website as you can imagine, but it was a great way to learn the basics about creating a website: hosting, domain, Html coding, etc..

Five years later, I have much more experience with website design, having worked with agencies to create a few websites, whether based on Content Management Systems or coded from scratch, and I have really come to love Wordpress for its simplicity and flexibility.

In fact when I see so many businesses paying a fortune to create their websites, I wish they knew about Wordpress and weren't so scared to give it a try.

What is Wordpress?

Wordpress is a great blogging engine that can be used to create many types of websites, including eCommerce sites. It's an open source product, i.e. free to install so the costs of running a Wordpress website are very low. In the following video, I discuss the differences between creating a free website on Wordpress.com and creating a self hosted website from Wordpress.org.

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Is Wordpress for me?

If you want to start blogging, definitely.

If you want to start a corporate website, don't want to spend 50k on it but still want a professional result with maximized flexibility, it's perfect.

It's probably not for you if you're in a very large corporation and IT specialists want you to use their preferred provider, or if you're running a very large shopping website. But in most cases, for small businesses, entrepreneurs and bloggers, Wordpress is the way to go.

Question: Do you have a website? Which platform did you use to design it, and are you happy with it?

Understanding layers in Photoshop

As I mentioned before, I am a big fan of Photoshop and all the other Adobe products. I really want people to understand what they can do with Photoshop and so I would like to create a few tutorials to teach the basics of how to use the tool. At this point I am not sure exactly what kind of tutorials I would create, but I can imagine that they would be for beginners, obviously not for graphic designers, and would target very specific uses, like for example how to cut the background around a product photo; things really practical for entrepreneurs who need to learn the basics.

With that in mind I went to see my husband, who is an entrepreneur and asked me a few times to help him with Photoshop, and asked him: "what should I teach first?". And he replied:"layers, because most people don't understand how they work, and it's not really a concept used in Microsoft products."

So here you are, this short video explains the concept of layers in Photoshop:
[video type="youtube" clip_id="loe7wKzsK10" autohide="0"]

PS: Sorry for the bad quality, I'm still experimenting with my setup..

Discovering Toastmasters

A couple of weeks ago I went to my first Toastsmasters meeting. For those of you who don't know Toastmasters, it's a American Association designed to help people  improve their public speaking skills. I'd been considering going for a while but only decided to give it a try when my good friend Matt asked me if I would be keen to go along with him. I really enjoyed the experience so I thought I would put a note on  my blog, for people who don't know about Toastmasters.



The club we went to in Lausanne, Switzerland is gathering twice a month at a local restaurant and follows a strict schedule that is common to all the Toastmasters clubs.  There is the president of the club who first introduces the meeting, the guests, etc.. There is also the Toastmaster, who is kind of the master of ceremony. He's there doing transitions between each presentation, each exercise that takes place and it's a really nice role to have. There are a few other roles, like the time keeper, the reviewers, the Ah counter (more on this leater), etc.. And there are guests, people like Matt and me, who want to see for themselves what it's all about before deciding to become a member. We were 11 guests that night and that was quite amazing, we got a lot of energy from this group.

And so we started with the first presentation which was given by a lady doing her very first speech. She was telling a story about her childhood in Malaysia and that was a very nicely  put together story. I have to say, for her first speech it was quite impressive. She was using very nice vocabulary, a good speech structure, nice gestures and even a little bit of humor. She was doing quite well, and the speech lasted I think 7 minutes, which is quite a long time actually when you're alone in front of a crowd (even if it's just 20 people), talking when everyone is looking at you or even evaluating your performance.