{"id":13,"date":"2020-11-24T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2020-11-24T15:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/demo.themeisle.com\/neve-web-agency-gb\/?p=13"},"modified":"2023-06-12T15:30:31","modified_gmt":"2023-06-12T19:30:31","slug":"under-the-radar-tips-to-change-your-life","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gayleboyer.com\/under-the-radar-tips-to-change-your-life\/","title":{"rendered":"Under-the-Radar Tips and Tools That Might Just Change Your Life"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Sometimes it\u2019s the little things. Sure I\u2019d love to win an all-expense-paid trip to Venice, but there\u2019s something to be said for the quiet joy I feel when I discover that my fabulous husband has already emptied the dishwasher. Those small daily triumphs can be just as\u00a0sustaining as a big win, and are certainly easier to come by.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On that note, there are a few tips and tools that I use regularly. Not only do they save me a lot of time, they make my day just a little bit happier.\u00a0<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Text Expanders<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

How many times have you typed out the full name of your organization? \u00a0How many times have you written stock phrases like \u201cThank you for your inquiry\u2026\u201d \u00a0or \u201cPlease let me know if you have any questions or concerns.\u201d? Or even your own email address?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Text expanders come in a lot of different flavors, from the built-in Autocorrect on your laptop to the Text Replacement feature on your smart phone. There are also a number of 3rd-party apps (a former colleague introduced me to\u00a0 aText<\/a> years ago and I’ll be forever grateful). Text expanders all work on the same premise: you type a shortcut (for example, \u201comw\u201d) which is instantly and magically replaced by a longer phrase (\u201cOn my way!\u201d).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Beyond the built-in defaults, you can create and customize all kinds of shortcuts\u2014with or without formatting. Here are a few quick examples:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My shortcut\u2026<\/strong><\/th>\u2026expands to\u2026<\/strong><\/th>\u2026which is:<\/strong><\/th><\/tr><\/thead>
.eml<\/td>gayle@gayleboyer.com<\/a><\/td>my email address<\/td><\/tr>
.wsb<\/td>Wall Street Bound, Inc.<\/td>an incredible nonprofit in NCY<\/td><\/tr>
.lorum<\/td>Morbi congue ex id dapibus aliquet. Cras euismod hendrerit nisi, id porttitor quam consequat vitae. Pellentesque habitant morbi tristique\u2026<\/td>several paragraphs of formatted lorum ipsum<\/a> text – really helpful when I\u2019m designing a web page or newsletter template<\/td><\/tr>
bientot
francais<\/td>		bient\u00f4t
fran\u00e7ais<\/td>		adding diacritical marks for my Duolingo lessons<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

A tip I picked up early on: I preface most of my shortcuts with a dot, so they don\u2019t kick in unexpectedly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you find yourself repeatedly typing out phrases like\u00a0 \u201cWe will proactively leverage our dynamic strategy to innovate purpose-driven core competencies in order to foment an outcomes-driven paradigm shift,<\/a>\u201d please walk away from your keyboard.\u00a0 <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For everything else, try setting up an auto text, and see what a difference it can make. Here’s how to set up text replacements on Mac<\/a>\/IOS<\/a> and Windows<\/a>\/Android<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Email Subject Lines<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

No tech involved on this tip. Email conversations can sometimes continue for days or weeks or months, often evolving and morphing so what began as a quick question (\u201cplease re-send the Zoom meeting info\u201d) eventually becomes an important discussion about program development. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Do yourself (and everyone else on the thread) a favor and update your subject line to match the actual subject currently under discussion. This makes searching much faster and more accurate, and promotes quicker responses (folks are much more likely to open a message that\u2019s headed \u201cnew launch timeline\u201d than one headed \u201cRe:Re:Re:Re:printer is out of toner\u201d)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Get Some Styles<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Styles are combinations of formatting characteristics that you can apply to text to quickly change its appearance. All the major productivity suites support styles, including MS Office and Google Suite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Have you ever found yourself tweaking the font style or color in one heading, and then laboriously making the same change to all the other headings in your document? Instead of directly formatting each instance of a heading (or title, or bullet point, or\u2026), you can assign them to an appropriate style (Heading One, Heading Two, Bullet List, etc.).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

One of the best things about using styles is that they \u201ccascade,\u201d which means that if you decide to change a style, that change will apply to every piece of text that\u2019s been assigned to that style, all the way through the document. Not only does this save you a ton of time, it helps ensure that your document (or spreadsheet, or slide, or web page) has a consistent and professional look.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Styles are especially important when building web pages, because search engines give extra weight to Heading styles.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Once you\u2019ve mastered Styles, we can start talking about the magic of Templates, but we\u2019ll save that for another day.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bonus tip<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

A small piece of advice from my late father, one rainy cold day as I was searching for a parking space close to the entrance of Home Depot. \u201cNo no no,\u201d he told me, \u201calways park by the cart return.\u201d Sure enough, when we came out of the store with our loaded cart, it was a relief to be able to pile our stuff in the car, swing the cart into the rack, and drive away. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

I find the same principle applies in my own work: when I begin with the end goal in mind\u2014even when it means extra work up front\u2014I save myself a lot of headaches down the line.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

And now every time I go grocery shopping or run to Target, I smile and think of Dad as I pull in next to the cart return.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Sometimes it\u2019s the little things. Sure I\u2019d love to win an all-expense-paid trip to Venice, but there\u2019s something to be said for the quiet joy … Read more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5868,"featured_media":1662,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/gayleboyer.com\/files\/2020\/11\/pexels-wendelin-jacober-1447956-scaled-1.png","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gayleboyer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gayleboyer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gayleboyer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gayleboyer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5868"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gayleboyer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/gayleboyer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1685,"href":"https:\/\/gayleboyer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13\/revisions\/1685"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gayleboyer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1662"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gayleboyer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gayleboyer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gayleboyer.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}