This is one of those annoyances I could have found a work around for many, many moons ago but never wanted to distract from the task at hand to do anything about it. Well, being unemployed gives you the luxury of saying “hey, I’m going to find a better way to do this” and you do!

I don’t know about you but I’m obsessive about my iTune library, I don’t add anything to it until the album, songs and tags are configured to my standard format. Recently we’ve been cleaning up the music library on the server and I’ve been transferring albums over to iTunes little by little. In the past when I wanted to transfer music or data from one location to another I would open Windows Explorer, grab it from one location and drag it over to another, simple right? Well what if you have a really long way to drag and drop or your using a tiny laptop with a touch pad, pain in the patootie right? Not so fast! What if you could just right click and “Sendto” the folder your working with? Here’s how:

“Right Click” [Start] Click [Explorer]
Navigate to the drive where Windows XP is installed (Usually your “C” drive)
Expand (click on the Plus sign) the Documents and Settings folder
Expand the folder of the User whose SendTo menu will be modified (Generally your computer user name)
Expand the SendTo folder
(If the Send To folder isn’t visible, click [Tools] [Folder Options] [View] tab and check [Show Hidden Files and Folders])
“Right click” any item you want to add, drag and drop it on the Send To folder and click [Create Shortcuts Here]

In my case I wanted to create a shortcut in my Sendto folder for “My Music” so every time I grabbed an album off the server I could just right click and send it over. So with Explorer open I navigated to my iTunes folder, right clicked and dragged it to C:Documents and Settings\Lorann\SendTo…BAM!

This is such a valuable lesson for all of us to learn not only professionally but in our personal lives as well. All to often we misinterpreted email or take a stray comment or missed connection as a personal affront when in reality it’s a simple misunderstanding.

“Making a choice to view conflict in the office as professional rather than personal accomplishes two key things. First, it ensures that you don’t accidentally overreact and see a personal component where there is none. Second, it effectively defuses any personality conflict that might really exist” – Cathie Black, President of Hearst Enterprise

I had an employee who was notoriously late; I could actually write a hilarious blog just on the excuses he used but that’s another day…Ok, I’ll give you one, it included a toe stubbing and it “hurt like hell”

On one particular day he was supposed to be at work at 8:00 am and he had about an hours commute.  At about 7:30 am his partner (also on my friend list) posted an update that read something along the lines that he was trying to be quiet so as not to wake his partner (my employee) up.  I commented on his post “he’s supposed to be at work in 30 minutes, wake him up!”

I started writing about lessons learned on the job but so often lessons learned on the job can be applied to your personal life and vise versa. I believe we learn something of value every day so my hope is to share with you, what I learn…daily