You may need to unplug if you are anything like me and:

• Wake up and have a smart phone in your hand within 5 minutes.
• Own an iPhone & a work Blackberry. (multiple phones and Internet connections)
• Deal with multiple Internet related responsibilities from the time you wake to the moment you sleep.
• Deal with 100+ emails per day.
• Recognize that technology & the Internet, sometimes, is hurting the people you love the most; including yourself.

You may also need to unplug if you are:

• Feeling the Internet is affecting your personal relationships in any negative way whatsoever.
• Feel technology is getting in the way of you eating, exercising, sleeping or relaxing.
• Find that the Internet is interfering with your career or schooling.
• You may need to unplug if you even think for a second that ‘you need to unplug’!

We’ll get to the actual  7 DAY UNPLUG CHALLENGE in a moment, but first let me give you some background information as to how you can imagine it recently came about for me, and at the end, I hope you will join me in some fashion or another by accepting the 7 day Unplug Challenge.

With a two week holiday just coming to the half way mark,  Tanya, my awesome wife, was kind enough to encourage me to relax on the first week of my vacation, do all the things I want to; like play with the kids, stay up late watch movies, post a few blog articles, write some music, and spend quality time as a family in general and even putter around on my computer gadgets! Yipppeeee!!!!!!

Her request for my second week of my vacation was to PLEASE, PLEASE TRULY relax and 100% UNPLUG.

So my first response was, “OK, so you mean no computer?” Nope she said, “100% UNPLUG meaning No computer,  No Blackberry, No iPhone, No tablet, and NO INTERNET PERIOD. So if someone wants to get a hold of you they are just going to have to do it ‘Old School’ and call our home phone number!” I can actually count all the people on one hand who actually call my home phone! In the moment the thought of me actually fully and completely unplugging was making me a little queasy with worry how I would cope, and for that very reason alone I accepted the challenge. I knew in my heart it was time to unplug.

Now reality sets in and I am minutes away from the 7 Day Unplug Challenge. I guarantee I will go out of my skin for a few days with probably some fairly realistic withdrawal symptoms; phantom vibrating blackberry syndrome, iPhone envy, and even a little ‘what do I do now’ whining!

Here is my quasi plan:

• All devices off.
• Absolutely zero internet.
• Out of office response on all my email addresses (don’t ask how many
• Three books to read (The Hunger Games Trilogy)
• My guitar.
• A pad of paper and pen.
• My wife and three beautiful children.

Your guess is as good as mine how this will turn out (I’ll post an update next week) , but I am hoping that I come back a week from now relaxed , invigorated and ready to take on the rest of 2011. Thank again to Tanya for making this happen and my apologies in a advance if I’m a  grump for a day or two

Hope you’ll join me and create your own 7 Day Unplug Challenge.

Pass it on.

I’ll say that again, “Only three folders too manage all my email!” Life is simple again.

First off, I can’t take any credit for creating an uber email system or process. The awesome blogger/author(s) over at LifeHacker, Gina Trapani (blog post)  &  co-author of the LifeHacker book Adam Pash,  did all the heavy lifting and included an expanded version of this blog post called “Empty Your InBox With The Trusted Trio” in their book! For more detail definitely check out their book entlitled, “Lifehacker: The Guide To WOrking Smarter, Faster, and Better”. It contains an insane amount of valuable time saving tech techniques outside of your email inbox  just waiting to be discovered. They should be teaching this stuff to kids in school as far as I am concerned.

Here is the premise of achieving email inbox utopia and then I highly suggest you head over to LifeHacker to read their blog post then buy the  digital version on Kindle or hard copy of the book. It will be the best 10$ or $20, respectively,  you have ever invested:

• Every email you receive can be either dealt with immediately or assigned to a folder in less than a minute.
• You only need three email folders from this day forward; follow up, on hold & archive. (See the LifeHacker blog post and or book for more details)
• You need not be a slave to your email ever again.  (As the screenshots of my two email in boxes below prove email utopia or nirvana is indeed achievable!)

Here are the screenshots of my gMail and Outlook email clients:

Outlook:

Gmail:

Lastly, here is my affiliate link to the book I highly recommend you read to achieve email inbox utopia and many more digital enlightenment techniques.

Whether you suck at typing like I do, or just need to take a break from typing for a multitude of reasons. I have put together this short demo of how I use a speech recognition software called Dragon Naturally Speaking to do my meeting notes.  Apparently, I could use the  software to completely control my computer with out my keyboard, but doubt  I will ever get there.

As a side note,  Dragon is also available as a free iPhone App which you can locate here: http://www.dragonmobileapps.com/ I have used the app and do like it, but just wish it wouldn’t force me to stop and continue after 30 seconds of dictation. I’m assuming that they will come out with a paid version that solves that problem

Here it is! Would love to hear what how you are starting to integrate speech recognition in your business or life?

Click here to view the embedded video.

Here they are:

10. Backup Drive, Google Docs or DropBox

Many of our precious digital memories or business related digital documents are considered irreplaceable. If you don’t take the time to back them up, you are at risk of losing it all if your computer crashes ( I speak form experience . Make this the year you sleep soundly at night knowing that your data is backed up via a back up drive, and or you have utilized a free or paid online storage service.

9. iPhone or iTouch (Top 10 there’s an APP for everything list!)

Gone are the days of frustrating mobile devices that make using the internet and other online services painful. I recommend that everyone have either an iPhone or at the very least an i Touch so that you can; unwind anywhere and rediscover the power of music, use abundantly available free WIFI to play games with friends, and or connect with business colleagues and create the next Google, even if you aren’t on the same continent.

Here are my Top Ten apps; WordPress, Skype, Google Apps, Dragon Dictation, Facebook, Echofon (Twitter), LinkedIn, Scrabble, PS Mobile (Photoshop), & PayPal

8. Skype

After recently teaching my parents to use Skype while they travel for two solid months, they were astonished that they could call any phone number in North America for less than the cost of  one  Star Bucks Latte a month. I’ll say that again in case you missed it… for about 3$ a month they have unlimited long distance to any phone!!!! So if you have been hiding under a rock until now,  and haven’t downloaded Skype, what are you waiting for? Skype is so much more than just cheap long distance, as its great for free video chatting, instant messaging and real time business collaboration.

7. Windows 7

Finally, Microsoft has hit the mark with their new operating system. If your PC is still running XP or Vista then it is well worth the effort to upgrade. Here are just a snippets of the 100′s of  improvements you could experience; very simple Home Networking (easy to connect all your PC’s to a home group), faster boot up & down times, and vastly improved user interface even if the changes feel ever so slight! Either way, it’s worth the upgrade!

6. RocketDock

This little free APP saves me time every day, and helps me keep my often cluttered desktop more organized. If you have too many icons on your desktop and want an easier way to get acces to your most frequently used programs, then this is the ticket. The price is right (free), but if you do like it consider donating a little cash to the developers, as they have been nice enough not to charge.

5. GoToMeeting

Ok, so this one is definitely not cheap, but if you are in business and need to conduct super effective remote meeting(s) with one or more people then Citrix has this market locked up. I have used GoToMeeting for several years and highly recommend it to anyone. Some of my favorite uses for this service are;  giving remote presentations, white boarding ideas with partners, connecting to a friends computer and helping, and so much more.

4. GoToMyMac, & GoToMyPc

Although I wrote about this back in 2007 (here), I still use GoToMyPC when I am on the road to work off of my main super computer Again, this isn’t a cheap service, but if your business life depends on you reliably accessing your main computer RIGHT NOW to help you close a deal, then this other Citrix product is for you. There are other alternative free services out there for sure, but I have never found anything as reliable and robust.

3. Elance.com

After reading Tim Ferris’s book (The 4 Hour Work Week) I was reminded of this outsourcing service, and finally took the plunge to get a few side projects completed. On Elance you can virtually post almost any type of job or project you can think of and experts around the world will bid to get the work. For often very reasonable prices you could have a script ghost written, hire a programmer or web designer, have a database expert create you the perfect database, hire a virtual assistant, and so much more. Make this the year that you truly act on delegating those tasks you need done, but really know you don’t have the time or desire to get to.

2. Dragon Naturally Speaking

When it comes to typing I had two choices. Either spend the time to truly teach myself how to type or accept my limitations and use technology to my advantage.  What do you think i decided? I finally bought Dragon Naturally Speaking and now talk to my computer, and watch as my words are magically typed out on the screen. No word of a lie, this has probably saved me a 100+ hours in the past year. I have found Dragon to be 98% accurate, and it works on any program I have on my PC that accepts typed text like Word, FireFox,  gMail, etc.

1. Life Is What You Make It

I think I have saved the best for last, but you can be the judge of that.  I know in my heart that there is NO technology on the planet that can truly  make our lives better like other human beings can. Yes, software and online services can save you time & money, of which can be applied to the other areas of your life that mean the most to you. Let this be the year that you consider hiring an executive or life coach to assist you in making this your best year ever. I use & highly recommend Deb Raven.

I hope one of these Top 10  saves you time & or money! Please let me know what tools you use and I truly look forward to hearing your comments. All the best to you in 2010!

Is Google sending users who search for music to iLike & LaLa a game changer?

In my humble opinion NO. (Great for iLike  & Lala though)

It’s certainly different that you may now actually be able to find songs your looking for and listen to them via Google Search, but apparently to start ONLY if you are in the US of A.  In speaking to my US based friends and business partners today, they are anxiously waiting to start seeing song results… but we are expecting, as usual,  nodda up here in Canada! My hope is that Google doesn’t go off strategy of providing the most relevant results versus pushing people to partners.

If you are outside of the USA and want to see what it looks like check it out here: http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/10/21/google-music-service-the-screenshots/

Is it a game changer in the online music distribution industry? Nope.

Is Apple’s  iTunes having late night board room strategy sessions as a result? Maybe.

Will people buy music after searching for it for FREE on Google! Wait and see…

The one thing I will say, is it’s going to be an interesting year in the online music distribution world

What do you think?

Think of it this way.

If three companies were sending similar PDF proposals to a potential buyer, and all things being created equal the documents where about the same, the company who added a personalized video message, product demonstration or other dynamic video content would STAND OUT in a crowd. Does it guarantee you WIN the business? No, but in the short term until everyone is using VIDEO you will be memorable.

Plus adding video to PDF’s, I have found, is just plain fun.

In the early phase of this technology its is free for readers, but if you are producing a PDF with video then you need Adobe’s Professional version of Acrobat. It’s not cheap, but as an owner of Adobe Professional who has already closed deals using video in PDF I feel it is well worth the investment.

You can get the Free Adobe Reader  that handles video here:  Get Adobe Reader

To produce PDF’s with video you will need Acrobat Professional 9 or above:  Get Adobe Professional

Please tell me if you disagree with my experience, but this past week of my life I have seen added value at work! Yes, added value may be cliche and even an over used term, but when it is genuine it is a game changer!!! Too often I hear companies, sales people and professionals try and over deliver or add value in the same way. If I offer you the same ‘added value’ service as everyone else does, then it no longer achieves it’s purpose! Most likely, it makes me come across the exact same as my competitors, and in a competitive world that just doesn’t cut the mustard!

This week I gave away expert Internet Marketing advice to businesses who expected to be sold something. This week was a game changer, and it was all because of ‘added value’!

How do you add value in a way that differentiates you from your competition?

Your answer could be your personal game changer!

Mahatma Gandhi was quoted as saying, “Be the change you want to see in the world!”

I agree and don’t know too many people that would dispute Gandhi. This quote has been an inspiration to me, but for some reason, has always seemed incomplete… So my deepest apologies to Gandhi but I changed it!

“To be the change you want to see in the world you must constantly be changing!”~ Lee Raito

Change is the one constant we can all count on. Whether it’s changing to an iPhone, changing your income, or changing your lifestyle…

YOU just have to decide to change and go for it.

Mahatma Gandhi would have loved the iPhone!!!