Business Traveler Toolkit

June 26, 2013 by Eric Butts Leave a Comment

My First Business Class Flight Experience and Why I Wish I Never Had It

I’m going to let you in on a little secret, one which flies in the face of the core of being a management consultant.

Flying really isn’t my thing.

Yes, I do it every week but I don’t enjoy it, especially when you’re talking international flights of 7+ hours. Yet, I still deal with it – it’s one of those necessary evil kind of things. If I had to drive everywhere I needed to go, not a whole lot would ever get done, so I travel and get through it the best that I can.
A big part of how I get through the travel is having a routine. Mine was I get on the plane in this tiny seat and fall asleep until I arrive at my destination. Lots of other people seemed to have to deal with a similar commute and something about knowing that made my nook of a seat just a bit more bearable.

A couple of funny things happened though. First, I was having a conversation with one of the partners I worked with who happened to be an Irishmen. Somehow the topic of travel outside the U.S. came up and I ended up sharing that not only had I not been anywhere that required a passport, but I didn’t even have one. It never seemed worth the time to get it since I had no plans of leaving U.S. soil. When he explained how I could potentially miss a great career opportunity or conference abroad because of not having a passport, it was clear I had to get one.

Not more than 3 months later I was on a project where I was going to Paris, France every month. The second trip back from France is when it happened, the moment when my traveling life would change forever. After I hand my boarding pass for usual nook of a seat to the flight attendant, she reaches under the counter for something…another boarding pass, and tells me I’ve been upgraded to business class. It didn’t seem like that big of a deal at the time since I didn’t know what I didn’t know, but that was about to change in a hurry.

The term business class doesn’t do this thing justice – people should call it “luxury class” or “business elite” as +Delta uses on its official menu shown above. Anything you could want or need is available to you there and it’s so absurd you might actually forget you’re on a plane. Let me break it down some of the amenities for you:

3-course meal
fully reclining seat
full sized pillow
real blanket
excessive amounts of legroom
wines, spirits, mimosas, etc. to your heart’s desired
noise cancelling headphones

I probably forgot some other stuff but you get the point. Traveling this way made me want it every time (6 times) I went back to France, and I got nothing. Now that I knew such comfort existed, my sad excuse for a seat which initially seemed like it wasn’t so bad now felt like torture.

Since nobody warned me I’m warning you if you ever find yourself in a situation where the gate agent tells you that you’ve been upgraded to business class, just politely decline and save yourself the disappointment of becoming a business class junkie…

April 23, 2013 by Eric Butts Leave a Comment

Sign Easy: An Option to Sign PDFs on the Go

Kiss your fax machine (if you haven’t already) and scanner goodbye

You ever have a situation where an idea sounds good and then once you see it in action it’s better than you thought? Well that’s the feeling I had when I stumbled across Sign Easy (www.getsigneasy.com). If you’ve read this blog for any length of time you know I travel for work…a lot…~~probably~~ too much (read more about that here).
So basically the more things I can figure out how to do from my iPhone or iPad the better, and now I can add one more option to my mobile tool belt – signing PDF documents.

The story goes something like this…because of all the time I spend in transit I don’t always have access to a printer, scanner, or fax either because I’m sitting in the airport or because of some difficult accessing the client network and I don’t have scanner or fax at home, so even I’m able to print some time sensitive documents at home, I have to pay FedEx to scan/fax the docs for me or wait until I go back to a client site or my office. In the case of the former, I try to refrain from printing personal docs while at the client. It’s not that anyone would get upset, but I don’t need my client to know I’m trying to close a deal to get new tenants.

Having been familiar with Genius Scan already, I thought the app store might have something to solve my problem so I did a basic search and just like that, Sign Easy sat before me with 4.5 star rating and my favorite price: free. So of course I download it to check it out and this is what I see:

Home Screen

My Signature & Initials

You can choose to store your signature and initials for future reference which is nice because you can then just copy it into the appropriate fields instead of actually signing multiple times, but those of us a little less trusting of technology may be hesitant because of the risk our signature could fall into the wrong hands. It wasn’t a problem for me but I can respect the cautiousness there because a signature is power thing.

My Documents

Sign Easy saves the original and signed versions of every document you sign for easy reference. The premium version offers integration with the various cloud storage systems that people love to discuss (Dropbox, Box, Drive, etc). I weighed in on Box vs. Dropbox here but Google Drive deserves its own post since it’s little bit of a different beast.

Documents

Once you choose “My Documents” the below screen appears, showing the list of documents already stored within the Sign Easy app.

Pages

After you select a document to sign, you’ll be brought to a screen asking you which page of the document you want to sign. This is a jump or link functionality because once you select a page, you can still scroll through the rest of the document or come back to this page to jump to the next page requiring your signature.

Once you select a page, you can choose the type of signature or text you want to insert. Again, you have a nice breadth of options here that should address any sort of signature need you might have to turn time-sensitive documents around faster than if you had to print them out, sign them, and scan/fax them back to the recipient. The fact that you can do this from anywhere where you get service on your phone makes If you used the saved signature option, you can re-size that signature to fit the available space on each signature page.

Summary

All in all, this app does exactly what I wanted it to do, so from that standpoint I recommend the app 100%..BUT there was one thing that bothered me. Being the frugal guy that I am, when I went back into the app to grab these screenshots for your viewing pleasure, I was less than thrilled to find out the app only gives you 3 free documents to sign plus 1 extra when the app actually lets you know this “free” app isn’t actually free after all. I’m all for selling a service or app but cases that can be perceived as bait-and-switch (giving the benefit of the doubt here) simply don’t sit well with me.

January 7, 2013 by Eric Butts 1 Comment

How To Use Evernote To Become More Productive

It came to my attention last week via a discussion on LinkedIn that many people still are unclear about how to use +Evernote to become more efficient and/or productive in their jobs, so this post will touch on the ways Evernote can help you become productive in your day-to-day activities.

The biggest thing is that as a note taking tool, Evernote can easily capture all kinds of media (text, voice, image) in the same note without giving you some crazy HTML code as part of the note when you come back to make some additional changes. Evernote is also helpful as a blogger if you have some quick thoughts to jot down or even enough time to type out a full post but only have access to your phone (which is what I’m starting this post on as I’m waiting for my flight to take off). I use Evernote instead of the Blogger app when I’m on the go in this instance, because of the HTML issue I just noted.

Notes can be easily emailed to anyone directly from Evernote using the email address you designate. Notes can also be sent in various other formats (e.g. text, tweet, etc.) as shown below.

iPhone Version

Desktop Version

Several features make Evernote a useful tool:

Notebooks – Evernote allows you the ability to group different sets of notes as Notebooks. For example, you could have a notebook for each project you work on or each client that you work with during the year.
Notebook Sharing – Each notebook that you can create can be shared with others for collaboration on Evernote, giving access to modify notes using phones, iPads, or computers as different ideas come to mind.
Tags – You can tag each notes to index for searching. This could be useful in researching how you handled a particular issue from a different client/project and the documented outcomes
Search – All of your notes are indexed for search by the tags you apply to each note and the content of the note itself, which makes for much more effective searching than Outlook for example. To put it simply, you can find the notes you’re looking for much faster.
Location – While Evernote has the ability to geotag notes with your location, the benefit of this is somewhat limited since location is not part of the search parameters within Evernote. By that I mean if you click the places tab as show in the first diagram above, you can click into a location to see all notes associated with it, but if you type in a location in the search under All Notes it returns no results. This is fine if you only have a couple of places where you take notes, but I travel all of the time and this missing functionality seems like an oversight that should be easy to fix.
Email TO Evernote – This isn’t a feature that I would use but it’s worth mentioning that you can Evernote provides you an email address so that you can email notes to Evernote for safekeeping. The one instance I can see this maybe being useful is if you have an email sent to you from a friend or colleague that you want to add to an Evernote notebook, you can just forward the email instead of copying and pasting it. For the most part, if you have internet access you can use Evernote so I’m not sure how much value this email option has for most people.

I’ve heard that Noteability is a tool that has some drawing capabilities so if that’s something you need, that’s an app that may be worth looking at, but it will cost $1.99.

Microsoft OneNote appears to be almost exactly the same as Evernote, but it has increased security, so if the data you want to store is more sensitive in nature (client information), the Microsoft offering may be a better fit for you. It also comes with a much healthier price tag of $79.99.

When I started using Evernote, I was surprised at how much downtime/transit time I was wasting. If anyone has any other useful tips, I’d love to hear them in the comments. Also, if you’ve used Evernote Pro it’d be great to get some additional insight there as well.

You can also click the below image (affiliate) if you have any interest in reading up on your own.

December 13, 2012 by Eric Butts Leave a Comment

Business Traveler Toolkit – New Gmail App

Google recently released an update to its Gmail app on the iPhone that, from what I’m hearing, significantly improved on the previous version. I never tried the previous release but saw enough chatter on this latest one that I figured I’d check it out, and I’m glad I did. Depending on how you most often use email on your iPhone, this app may be a better option for you than the native email app that Apple provides. Let me explain…

The Good

Search – Everyone knows that Google practically owns the word “search,” and they did not disappoint with the email search functionality here. The search renders results on the first try without you having to decide whether a search on “from,” “to,” or “subject” is going to produce the email you’re trying to hunt down.
Organization – Navigating between inbox drafts, unread emails and all mail is much more user friendly on the Gmail than on the native email application. In fact, the native email application doesn’t yet offer the ability to filter unread emails to the top of the inbox.
Vacation Responder – While I haven’t yet used this on my Gmail, having the option to set up an out of office adds a nice feature that could come in handy at some point.
Multiple Signatures – My favorite thing about the Gmail app is that you can have different signatures for each email account based on the settings in their respective desktop versions. You also have the option to choose your mobile phone’s signature as the default.

The Bad

Signature Edits – The one drawback of my favorite feature of the Gmail app is that you aren’t able to see/edit the email signature until after the email is sent. That means, if for some reason you want to edit your standard signature, you need to send your email using Safari from your phone or from a computer.
No Unified Mailbox – I’m “old fashioned” and always check my email accounts separately, but I know some people out there like to have all of their emails in one place. Those people won’t be getting that with this app, at least not yet.
No Single Mailbox Sign-off – If you sign into multiple accounts, there isn’t an option to sign out of each account separately. You have to sign out of all accounts and log into the accounts that you wanted to keep. It doesn’t make a whole lot of sense, but that’s what it is as far as I can tell.
Integrated Email – If you browse the web much on your phone and like to send various links or blog posts to yourself via email, the Gmail app can’t handle that for you. Performing that action will attempt to send an email from whatever email account you have connected through the native email app, which you may not want do.

The Bottom Line

The Gmail app offers a variety of features but not being integrated into the iOS operating system is a deal-breaker for me. If you really love the Gmail features and the only drawback giving you pause is the integrated email issue, there is a potential workaround. You can link your Gmail to the native app with all notifications turned off so that you can leverage email integration and then download the Gmail app to meet all of your other Gmail needs. A little too much work for my liking but it is an option. What do you think? Is Google offering enough for you to change your primary email app?

October 31, 2012 by Eric Butts Leave a Comment

Business Traveler Toolkit – MobileDay

My equivalent of an “easy” button

When you don’t live within 150 miles of any of the people you work with on a day-to-day basis, one thing that is inevitable is lots of conference calls.
What makes it especially fun as a consultant is that you have two different types of “stakeholders.” First, you have the project-related stakeholders, which on most weeks you’ll at least fly in to work with from Monday through Thursday. The second group is the internal stakeholders – the people that have somehow coaxed you into various extracurriulars with the promises of increasing your exposure with leadership (it’s not uncommon for you never to meet these people in person) and differentiating you from your peers come performance rating time. The thing to remember is that these extracurriculars, unlike client billings, don’t directly contribute to the firm’s revenue stream and as such have to be squeezed in whenever you have “extra” time, which many times means while you’re in transit. That’s where MobileDay comes in handy.

This little app takes every conference call in your calendar and allows you to dial-in with a single touch – no more going back and forth between your calendar trying to remember this call’s dial-in or passcode or scribbling the magic numbers down on the closest slip of paper. I’ve seen other programs such as meeting place include links that intend to provide this same functionality, but they have never worked as well on the iPhone as this application does.

Another nice feature MobileDay has is this dual notification type of system when you’re the meeting host. You automatically receive a notificaiton the day before any meeting where you’re the host in addition to the usual fifteen or five minute alerts you would normally expect from Outlook or your phone’s calendar.

I wasn’t expecting to spend this many words on this app but what can I say? It makes me all warm and fuzzy inside. Are there ny other tools out there to help the chronic conference caller on the go?