A focus on improvement- in self, in business, in life
June 22, 2011 Leave a comment
Men’s Health is cranking it up. I got three emails today and all of them caught my attention. I love it when I get a morsel of information that I’m able to use. I can’t wait to put some of these tips to good use.
Working on your core with a variety of side bridge exercises:
http://bit.ly/mFupxK
A quick 15-Minute complete body workout:
http://bit.ly/mNv90z
Weight Loss Tips with an hourly breakdown of meal and workout ideas:
http://bit.ly/iVjQza
June 19, 2011 10 Comments
My kids started math camp this week. I know what you’re thinking, “what kind of person sends their kids to math camp?” But hear me out. Aside from the fact that my kids love it so far, it’s a great learning and growth opportunity for their mother and me, as well. You see, they normally attend a small, private school, the kind where everybody knows everybody and you always feel like your kids are safe. Well, this Math Enrichment Program (sounds a lot better than ‘math camp’, huh?) is not at their normal school. And to our surprise–and as it turns out fear– there are 800 students in this darn program. So, dropping our kids off at such a large school, with so many kids is a little nerve-racking. To say the least!
But let’s put aside my issues– I mean emotions– for a minute. The purpose of this post is to point out something that struck me as I was driving away after the first day of the program. I’d just left my kids and felt a bit uneasy. For them. Never had they been thrust into such a situation. What I might call a social overdose–meeting and having to fit in with a whole new group of kids–they seemed a bit overwhelmed. As I was driving, I could still see my daughter’s face when I hugged and kissed her goodbye. My hand was also still hurting, a result of my son not wanting to let go of the security blanket he sometimes calls “daddy”. Read more of this post
June 6, 2011 Leave a comment
If you’re an experienced Excel use, it’s a sure bet that you’ve found yourself on more than one occasion with long, unwieldy formulas. While these long, often nested, functions are a necessity when building complex spreadsheets, they can be a huge headache. Luckily, Microsoft has created a way to help.
While editing a formula, using the F9 key will reveal the result of any selected portion. Doing this allows you to troubleshoot and debug any formulas that don’t seem to be working correctly.
Let’s say, for example, that you are in charge of a fundraiser at your child’s school. Read more of this post
June 5, 2011 1 Comment
Your business day is busy and information-packed. Dashboards are an effective way to make sense of everything without driving yourself crazy. A well-designed dashboard can save you hours of work and make you look good in front of your boss.
Of course most dashboards include graphs, charts, and even the occasional pivot table. But a quick, simple, and very flexible alternative involves the use of the REPT function, which repeats any character you designate any number of times that you wish. Read more of this post
May 22, 2011 1 Comment
Cracking the code to the safe is hard enough. You better write down the misses as you go along!
If you were trying to break into a safe that had a five-digit combination, how would you do it? Would you haphazardly guess at the sequence of numbers, hoping you’d stumble upon the correct digits in the right order? Not very efficient, right? Would you try to uncover any clues that might help you decipher what those numbers might be? A better approach, certainly, but still difficult. Knowing on what the combination was based—birthday, favorite numbers, anniversary maybe—is difficult enough. But then you’d need to figure out what the answer to those clues might be. Whatever approach taken, cracking the code of any safe is almost impossible. That’s a good thing, right? Unless you’re a thief, that is. With 100,000 combinations (10 possibilities, including ‘0’, for each digit, raised to the power of 5 for the number of digits in the combination), you have a better chance of becoming a pro athlete (a good thing: 1 in 22,000) or getting audited by the IRS (a bad thing: 1 in 175). But if you were stupid enough to try this feat, what would be the one thing you would have to do? Document all of the failed attempts. After all, if a combination is not correct, you surely don’t want to repeat it.
But that’s exactly what happens a lot of times in business. Especially in small businesses. Often, even, in successful ones. Let’s be honest; the reasons entrepreneurs start businesses are many. But one of the more common ones is to escape the rules, policies, and overall bureaucracy they have faced as employees in other companies. And as we can all attest, there are certainly reasons to dislike these rigid systems, often designed more to play ‘big brother’ and keep employees in line than to get real work done. Read more of this post
BobbyBluford.com 