Who doesn't love free tools?  Once again, Microsoft is offering teachers and students alike the use of Office 365 for most up to date versions of Word, Excel, etc and a host of online collaboration tools.  For Free!  

Beginning today, teachers in the U.S. who are eligible to get Office from their school can sign up for Office 365 themselves using a school-provided email address at www.office.com/teachers. Students in the U.S. can check their eligibility at www.office.com/getoffice365.

This is a great opportunity for students to gain fluency with office and collaboration tools prior to entering the working world.

Have you seen the slow load icon on any of your favorite websites today? That is there to remind everyone what an internet without Net Neutrality would be like. 

Net Neutrality is the principle that assumes all internet traffic and data are treated equally - that is, NOT charging differently by user, content, site, platform, or application. Information and knowledge are power - restricting access to that is destructive.

Here is how to take action, and contact your representatives to urge Net Neutrality. 

Is your career stuck in a rut? Do you want to learn new skills, or perhaps pursue a different career path? Learn How To Become provides information on the steps to pursue a variety of careers. I wish something like this had been available when my only goal in High School was to earn good grades and participate in extracurricular activities that would look good on scholarship applications! My goal at the time was higher education....not so much the subject of that higher education. And, it's never too late to learn something new or of interest!

The website allows you to search through a variety of career paths to learn more about what those careers offer, and then provides a realistic learning plan to get you there.  

Microsoft is releasing free training information via their Virtual Academy. The depth and variety of courses is impressive!  They include Office End User, Office 365, App Development, Business Intelligence, Web Developer, and Cloud courses to name just a few.  

Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA) offers online Microsoft training delivered by experts to help technologists continually learn, with hundreds of Microsoft training courses, in 14 different languages. They offer free Microsoft training, on-demand, that allow you to learn at your own pace.  You do need to create a Microsoft account if you don't already have one - you can do that here: https://signup.live.com

Microsoft has released a whole slew of free e-book downloads, including Windows 8, Office 365, SharePoint, Lync, Azure, Powershell and more from Microsoft Developers Network. There is no need to be a developer - these resources include quick and easy user tips, too!

Here's the link to the blog site that provides a little more information on this annual giveaway.  Take a look to see what e-books might be of interest or use to you!

Behavioral advertising.  If you have visited a website in the last decade, or use any social media platforms, then you've been subjected to behavioral advertising.  The old saying goes, if an online service is free, then that means *you* are the commodity.  

We've all seen examples of this - visit Amazon, and see a list of recommended products based on your shopping or even browsing history.  The same applies to Facebook (friend recommendations, games and apps, linked ads related to commentary you may be making on the site); LinkedIn (based on your social activity), Twitter (based on your connections, tweet activity, and topic searches).  

All in all, this is not such a bad thing - some people may find it nice that the product they were thinking of just happened to be recommended to them on their next visit to that shopping website.  But in some cases, this type of advertising can not only be annoying and spammy, but downright aggravating. 

How to manage it, then?  Here are my tips:


If you want to have some control over your Facebook feed, install Social Fixer

1. It is a plug-in that operates through your browser (so it's not applicable to mobile devices).  
2. It is free.
3. It allows you to turn on or off elements of Facebook - in my case, I have turned off all of the targeted ads, suggested posts, hide all Games and Apps, default the news feed to Most Recent, hide the friend's activity ticker, and more. 
   

To eliminate pop-up ads, auto-play ads, sidebar ads, etc - install AdBlockPlus 

1. It is a plug-in that operates through your browser (so it's not applicable to mobile devices).  
2. It's available for Firefox, Google Chrome, Internet Explorer, Opera, and Safari browsers. 
3. It's customizable, so for websites that depend on advertisers to remain free, for example, you can "whitelist" them to allow their ads to display. 

Check and update your permissions on most of your platforms.  

1. In some cases, you don't have much control over permissions - if you sign up for a Facebook account, for example, you agree to their Terms of Service.  
2. Most platforms allow you some control over advertising - check your Settings or Permissions, take a look around, and make sure you're comfortable with how the website or platform is sharing your information. If you aren't, change the settings or consider an alternate platform.
3. Check on sharing settings as well.  Ever notice how sometimes after reading an article on Time's website, you'll see that a Facebook friend of yours has commented on it?  Check your social media permissions to understand what might be shared where. 
4. Create a calendar item to review this information annually - say, on your birthday, or on Daylight Savings Time change, for example. Remember, your online behavior and information is valuable to the Internet. 

Finally, Opt Out of online behavioral advertising.  

1. This effort is part of a transparent movement by over 100 advertisers to allow netizens to opt-out of behavioral, targeted advertising. The Opt-Out webpage will show you which of its self-reporting advertisers are targeting ads to you, and give you the option to opt-out.
   
2. This program seems to be effective, even though it is still in "beta" phase.  That means with the more information, users, and applicability it gets, it will become more effective.  

Do you have any additional tips to share? 

Have you ever been guilty of this..."humble-bragging" about how busy you are, how little sleep you receive, how stressed your work makes you? I have. But really, it's not wise to advertise your lack of resources or inability to effectively delegate or manage time. 


As an independent consultant, I have learned to appreciate the occasional quiet times between contracts. These allow me room to do the administrative things before and after jobs, learn something new, update my time allocation and bookkeeping, and it provides a little work/life balance....albeit in sometimes unexpected ways.  

Living and working at the speed of business in the last 20 years has seen an ever-growing expectation to to more, faster, with less.  This has become such a mantra that many employees and entrepreneurs alike have shouldered this to mean that if their day is not 100% absolutely filled and accounted for, they are somehow lacking.  This is a result of what Jim Collins calls "the undisciplined pursuit of more".  I refer to it as "much of a muchness" - busy-ness for the sake of appearing busy, regardless of whether the efforts you are busying yourself with have any real value.  

The good news is that there is an antidote to this, and Greg McKeown of Harvard Business Review calls this the Essentialist Movement. This movement consists basically of evaluating all of that which keeps you "busy", and stripping away what is not essential.  Key tips, which seem intuitive enough, include:

1. Rest well to excel.
2. Add expiration dates to activities - new and old - to filter out those that you wish to keep as traditions, and those you with to experience for the sake of experiencing them. 
3. Say no occasionally.  It will make your Yes that much more vibrant.  
4. Eliminate empty "busy-ness" from your life.
5. Move from the mindset of continuous "More" to one of "more of what matters". 

So how about you?  Have you found insight into ways to stop doing meaningless busywork?  Granted some of that is unavoidable...but the more attentive we are to what we are doing, the more effectively we can manage that work.