It’s no secret that I use virtual assistants for a variety of tasks - actually, most of my administrative work is handled by a variety of competent professionals located around the world.

I get asked all the time about how I find my virtual assistants. The answer is complex - there are a ton of good resources out there, and each one has served a purpose at one time or another. It’s a frustrating process, but a fruitful one if engaged in properly.

I ran across this terrific post that brings together all of the best sources for VA help. take a look and bookmark it - it’s invaluable.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

There’s nothing more frustrating that calling up a company and getting stuck in the middle of a voice mail system. Unable to get out. Trapped forever.

Makes me think of that book where the passengers of a downed airplace were forced to resort to cannibalism in order to survive.

Anyway, the folks over at VOIP Review have put up this neat little article that helps give you you a leg up when it comes to getting a live person on the phone.

Read it here, then print it out and tape it to the wall next to the phone. You’ll be glad you did.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

I’m not going to do this, but I ran across a very neat article at LifeHacker about turning a PC into a Mac running the new Leopard operating system.

Very geeky, but very cool.

Check it out here.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

For a long time, lawyers with the urge to blog were stymied in their efforts by technology. You had to fire up a text editor to draft the posts, remember some HTML to position links and images properly, and get it posted properly. Spell checking, proper research, it quickly turned from a labor of love to a major headache.

But now, thankfully, there’s Firefox. If you’re a blogger and use Firefox you don’t need to open any other programs to draft blog posts. The beauty of Firefox is that there are so many extensions it can do much more than any other browser, and tools to help bloggers abound. For example:

Save Text Area: This allows you to save the contents of any text box; even better.

Spell Checker: Firefox has one built in, so more more spelling “blog” as “bolg” (OK, who can catch the reference?)

There are a ton of other add-ons specifically for bloggers; one of them is ScribeFire, which allows you to draft blog posts by hitting Cntrl-F8 from any Firefox window. I’ve already spoken about Zotero for research, and many use Google Notebook for down thoughts and blog drafts - kind of a modern-day Moleskine. If you use Google Notebook, remember you can use an add-on to open it in the Firefox sidebar menu.

For even more tips, check out 40+ Firefox Add-ons for High Speed Blogging and 12 Firefox Addons that Make Blogging Easy.

The upshot it this - if you sniff around long enough, you’ll find that there are a ton of tools to make it easier than ever to blog effectively and (relatively) effortlessly.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!

Technology blogger Amit Agarwal has posted the mysterious keyboard shortcut for deleting messages in Gmail:

If you are reading a message in GMail, press the # key (Shift+3) and that message will instantly move to Trash. Alternatively, select one or more email messages in the GMail list view, press the same # hash key and all the selected GMail conversations will be deleted in one batch.

Remember to make sure you have Shortcuts enabled in your Settings before you try this, or it won’t work.
Source of post: Lifehacker.

If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!