Author Dwayne Melancon is always on the lookout for new things to learn. An ecclectic collection of postings on personal productivity, travel, good books, gadgets, leadership & management, and many other things.
Wow, I just found out that I got picked, or nominated, or mystically appointed as a "Red Hot Blog of the Day" for August 6 in Technology, by RedOrbit! Thank you, RedOrbit!
And, to make it even sweeter, I'm there alongside Tim Ferriss (author of the awesome book "4 Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich" ) who was also selected today.
By the way - Tim's book just hit #1 on the NY Times Bestseller list - congrats, Tim!
Read MoreAccording to an article just out from Discover Magazine, research is being done to figure out ways to use electromagnetic energy to somehow "tweak" your brain so you can get by with 4 hours of sleep per night.
While I like the concept, I don't want to be an early adopter of this technology. Consider this, from the article:
"The technique, transcranial magnetic stimulation, involves an electromagnetic coil that emits pulses of skull-penetrating, neuron-activating magnetic energy. Depending on where the wand is and how fast it pulses, TMS can play all kinds of tricks. It can make a thumb twitch, create the illusion of a flash of light, or even treat depression. Neuroscientist Giulio Tononi of the University of Wisconsin set out to see if TMS could switch on certain sleep phases."
I want to find out more about the long-term effects of this, and certainly don't want to get involved while it's still in the "tweaking and tuning" phase of development. The article mentions that the device is still quite large, so I don't think there's any danger of a forced sleep mode on your iPod any time soon.
The technology looks like it could have beneficial uses, once perfected (follow some of the links in the article for more). Of course, I can also envision not-so-beneficial uses of a technology that can make your body move uncontrollably - think "Taser without the wires" - I'm not ready for that!
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If you'd like to find out if you're a workaholic, check out the workaholic quiz by Neil Fiore, author of "The Now Habit." I found out that I'm not a workaholic, and "With minimal effort I can be even more effective and less distracted."
I know I've bordered on workaholism in the past, and Neil's book helped me shift my perspective and start to mend my ways a couple of years back. I revisit the book on a regular basis to make improvements in my "game."
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I frequently find myself in situations where I need to combine Word documents from multiple people into a single document. This becomes very time consuming when the original authors "hard code" their formatting and fonts into their document (for example, manually applying Bold, Underline, and a larger font size to headings in the document).
When you combine various hard-coded documents created in this way, you end up with a hodge podge of visual styles -- and a very unattractive document. The only way to make these hodge podge documents look consistent is to spend a lot of time manually adjusting the documents (you can save a little time by copying the format from one paragraph to another with the Format Painter tool in Word --
-- but that's still a big pain when cleaning up a long document).
Styles to the rescue
Based on my informal research, most people don't use Styles in Microsoft Word documents they create. I'd like to share a little about these powerful tools.
First, a little background: Styles are used for formatting in documents, but in a different way than describing how a block of text looks - instead, they describe the "role" a block of text has in a document. You "apply" styles to text to let Word know what role to assign to that text. For example:
There are a bunch of other common styles built into Word (and you can create your own if you'd like).
Once a document has been formatted with "Styles," you can easily update the look of a document by applying a different template. This is where the power really comes into play.
You can even save a Template that contains all your Styles, so you can quickly create attractive documents each time without having to redefine all the Styles again. Styles can be assigned hotkeys to make it easier to apply them - see my graphic sample to see some of the hotkeys I've assigned.
Learn about Styles and Templates
For more information on Templates and Styles, consult the help file with your version of Word, or check out the Office Online portal for tutorials. Microsoft offers Word 2003 Tutorials and Word 2007 Tutorials that are quite good.
I have a template that has served me well (see a sample picture above) - feel free to use this one - I've attached Word 2003 and Word 2007 formats below.
After you download and open one of these templates, do a "Save As..." and change the "Save as type:" value to one of the Template formats, as indicated below. This will automatically change the location to Word's default location for templates. Feel free to change the name of the file, if you'd like.
Recently, I wrote about pzizz, a great tool to help you with "power napping." During a very demanding business trip the other day, I tried a pzzizz experiment. I was taking a short, mid-day shuttle flight from San Francisco back to Portland, and I was dragging due to lack of sleep the couple of days before.
I was getting that "nodding off" feeling anyway, so I took out my iPod and loaded up a 20 minute pzizz "Energizer Nap" soundtrack. pzizz guided me through the relaxation process, I fell asleep, and it woke me up at the end of 20 minutes.
Afterward, I felt much better, and was good for the rest of the day. This is pretty cool. I'm still looking forward to testing out the jet lag angle of this on my next trip to Europe.
Some tips if you try this:
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