October 2009

The other morning Tom and I were sitting in our favorite Starbucks casually eavesdropping on some of the conversations around us. Soon the conversation at one table came around to the death of Michael Jackson.

One of the ladies mentioned how upset she was and that she’d cried about Michael Jackson. Another woman told the group at her table how her mother had called her the night Princess Diana died and that they’d cried together over the phone. A gentleman said he’d been upset first by Heath Ledger’s, then by Patrick Swayze’s deaths and the one who cried about Michael Jackson said she also sadly remembered when Ronald Reagan died.

We all know that celebrity deaths are big business. Since Michael died, millions of copies of his music have been sold. The phenomena of celebrity death-watches got Tom and I talking about the “news tickers” in our heads. I believe that where you focus is where you yield your results and when you look at where our Starbucks neighbors were focused, you could tell it wasn’t on anything positive.

News programs thrive on the “if it bleeds, it leads” mentality. Did we really want to watch Farrah Fawcett dying? We may not have control over how the media reports these issues, but we do have control over how we respond.

Start your day on a negative track and which way do you think it will go? I’m not immune from the negative thinking track, however I do all that I can to avoid the negative news tickers. I don’t listen to talk radio (all negative spin) or television news (more negative spin). I do read The New York Times on Sundays (an extravagance accompanied by a cup of rich coffee or healthy green tea) but during the week, I know if there is something going on in the world that I need to know about, plenty of people are around to tell me. I can tell when a hurricane is in the Gulf of Mexico (3 days of office paralysis whether it nears Texas or not), when someone’s been kicked off “Dancing with the Stars” (no other discussion occurs at lunch) or an election is near (please don’t ask).

I understand feeling a certain amount of sympathy for the family of a deceased celebrity, but call me heartless, I’m not going to spend my time crying over a celebrity’s death (unless it’s Richard Gere or another I personally know) and I’m certainly not going to stand vigil outside the house of someone I’ve never shared time with.

As nurses, I think we’ve all been there for a grieving family, but we know that to pretend to feel what that family feels will not ring true. We support, we don’t collapse. When I was at my mom’s funeral at age 23, I was personally put off by a hysterical woman who wasn’t even that close to Mom. Some might disagree, but I believe that mourning is a right earned, not a privilege for the masses. Is this misplaced energy and emotion a way of not dealing with the real-life emotions we face every day?

In the song “Easy to Be Hard” from the musical Hair, the character Sheila asks “how can people have no feeling… especially people who care about strangers, who care about evil and social injustice. Do you only care about the bleeding crowd?” What would happen if we put our energy into our own families, friends, legal nurse consulting businesses and lives instead of a dead celebrity?

We don’t have an unlimited amount of time on this planet. Each minute is a precious gift. I am often guilty of squandering this gift like the next guy, but I always strive to keep my energies within my “circle of influence.” We can spend our days railing about this politician, that TV program or some anorexic actor, or we can get to work on our own lives. I don’t want to sound trite, but if you’re not part of the solution, don’t rail about the problem.

To quote a favorite Buddhist proverb, “Even the smallest act should not be underestimated, for even tiny flakes of snow falling one atop another can blanket the tallest mountain in pure whiteness.” Spending our time upset over things outside our control may seem insignificant, but over time these small flakes gradually smother our passion and obscure our vision. You owe it to yourself to be your best and think your best. Put down the Star magazine and start today.

Success Is Inside!

I love to travel to remote places. I’ve been deep inside the Arctic Circle, the Antarctic, the high Himalayas and the plains of the Serengeti. The farther I am from home the clearer my mind becomes. All of my energies (physical, emotional, spiritual, mental) realign and I’m renewed again. But only if I’m careful to leave my American comforts at home.

One year I was packing for a trip to Morocco and I noticed that even though I had invested a lot of time and money in the adventure of exploring an exotic new destination, I was trying to bring my American comforts with me. Tom says that I travel like those old British explorers with teapot, table and tent. He lovingly told me I didn’t need my hair dryer unless I was planning on blowdrying a camel.

It got me thinking, “If I’m going to bring the U.S. and all my comforts with me, I might as well stay home and watch it on the Discovery Channel from the comfort of my couch while enjoying a cup of healthy green tea.” In other words, if I replicated the comforts of home, I would actually miss what I was going in search of – an exciting, unexpected experience. The only way to spark my senses and stimulate my creative juices is to move me out of my comfort zone and clear my mind so I can return home ready to deal with all the challenges of life and my business.

I quickly decided Tom was right. I didn’t need my blow dryer to ride a camel into the desert to camp out. By leaving some of those unnecessary comforts behind, I not only packed lighter (Tom said “hooray”) but I was able to fully immerse myself in the Moroccan culture. The result was a more complete sense of adventure and some slightly wilder hair for both me, and the camel.

Does the same thing that almost happened to me getting ready to embark to Morocco and the Sahara Desert happen to you as you embark on your legal nurse consulting adventure? Are you packing all your old “nursing career comforts” as you pursue your new CLNC^® career?

To experience all that legal nurse consulting has to offer, you must be willing to shed your old ways and habits. You’ll need to step out of your nursing comfort zone and let go of old beliefs that no longer serve you and may only hold you back. As a RN, you may have that steady paycheck, but as a CLNC^® consultant, you’ll have more fun and the potential for greater financial prosperity as soon as you open up to the possibilities within you. You’ll develop a new support group of other CLNC^® consultants through the National Alliance of Certified Legal Nurse Consultants association while abandoning the nursing station and cafeteria clique that may be dragging you down. Beliefs in administration, policy and procedures, red tape and “that’s not the way we do things here,” will be tossed overboard as you prepare for the faster moving world of business where your “life and death” decisions are made not for patients but for your business.

Start packing your bags today. One warning though, the wardrobe and accessories you take on your CLNC^® career are not the same as what you needed in your old life as a RN.

If you pack even one familiar “career comfort,” you might learn painfully that you could have stayed “home” and saved yourself a lot of time and money.

Success Is Inside!

Legal nurse consultants live in a Word, Word, Word, Word world. There are other word-processing programs, there are open-source programs and there’s even Google Docs for those of you who live in the cloud (and Word for Mac for those who can’t use real computers). But for main stream, main street, main line Certified Legal Nurse Consultants, there’s Word. If it doesn’t come preloaded on our computer we rush out to buy it. Why? Not because we want it, but because we need it.

In my all-too-many years of personal (and impersonal) computer use, I’ve had love affairs with Multi-Mate^®, WordStar^®, WordPerfect^® and a few other not-so-worthy predecessors to Word. But today, I’m a one word-processor man. It truly is a Word, Word, Word, Word world. That being said, we’ve got to make the best of our relationship with Word. Like any relationship, Word can be sweet at times, infuriating at other times but in the end, it’s still there for us – at home and at work. In fact, Word is probably the only word-processing program you need for your legal nurse consulting business.

This Tuesday Tech Tip is dedicated to the word-processor CLNC^® consultants love to hate and hate to love.

Tech Tip #1

Do you ever wish you could change that darn default file save location? You know, the place on your computer where Word wants to put all your documents whenever you hit the Save button? Well, my CLNC^® amigos, with just a few quick clicks of your mouse you can. Here’s how (this works in all Office 2007 programs as well): start by clicking that beautiful Pearl or Office button in the top left of your screen. Next, click Word Options, then Save. You’ll get a screen with a variety of options (including a choice of the Word document formats you can use to save your documents). Look for the “browse” selection next to “Default file location.” By clicking browse, you can navigate to the initial folder where you want to save your Word documents.

I have a directory called WordDocs under which I have all my other subdirectories such as TechTips, LegalDocs, Letterhead, etc. in which I store those relevant documents. Whenever I hit the Save button, up pops a screen asking me for a document name and giving me a list of subdirectories in which I can stash the newly created document. Whenever I click Open, it automatically opens to my WordDocs directory and I can choose where I want to go. You can do this in the other Office 2007 applications too, but in Excel and PowerPoint the programmers went on break and never put in the browse button so you have to cut and paste your new default file path after navigating to it in Windows Explorer (or you could just type it in).

Tech Tip #2

Not every legal nurse consultant or attorney rushed out and bought new software or a new computer loaded with Office 2007 when it first came out. Believe it or not, more than a few schlubs out there are still using Word 2003 and this includes major law offices! If all your attorney-clients haven’t yet ponied up for the latest and greatest, you can still create your way-cool Word 2007 .docx documents and then save them in earlier versions of Word with a few clicks of your magic mouse!

If you don’t want to use the new .docx format with all its imbedded wizardry simply repeat the steps above, but instead of picking the browse button, click the dropdown next to “Save files in this format” and pick Word 97-2003. This will make your version of Word automatically save any and all your documents in the earlier version (until you change it back).

Tech Tip #3

If you have just one attorney-client who’s still typing it old school with Word 97-2003 and want to save documents (especially after you’ve created and formatted them for that particular, schlemiel in the older format), then after you’ve saved your document as a .docx and are sure it’s final, you can “save it down.” Start with the document open in Word 2007, then click on the Pearl, Save As and click on the dropdown next to Save as Type and pick the format you want to use. It will create a duplicate document in the format you select. For those law firms still using WordPerfect^® you can save as rich text format (.rtf) which will open easily in WordPerfect. Remember, you’ll now have two documents in your files – one ending in .docx and another by the same name ending in .doc or .rtf. Having multiple copies of the same document may cause some confusion later so be prepared to store them in subfolders and always, always make sure you keep track of both. Remember too that if you edit one document, you need to save it in both formats.

Tech Tip #4

Did you know you can encrypt and password protect your Word documents? If you haven’t yet purchased or obtained Zip or StuffIt software, you can use Word 2007’s built-in encryption tools. When your file is final, save it one last time then click the Pearl, next click Prepare, then Encrypt Document. You’ll need to type in a password that’s at least 8-10 characters long (and use my password tips). Click on OK and reenter the password (if you can remember it). Now you can feel free to attach and email that legal nurse consulting work product document to anyone of your choosing and Word’s 128-bit AES (advanced encryption standard) will protect that document from pretty much everybody. Now, when you give each attorney-client you work with their own password, you can safely transmit documents back and forth (just keep a paper logbook of passwords in case you forget them).

Keep on techin’,

Tom

Read Part 1. Read Part 2.

Tip #14

Get to the point quickly. Email is not a replacement for face-to-face communications and it’s not the place for long messages. You shouldn’t be sending the equivalent of a comprehensive legal nurse consulting report in the body of an email. Remember, a lot of attorneys read their email on their BlackBerries^® and don’t want to be scrolling and scrolling. If you need to send a large report or document, simply attach it to your email in Word or PDF format and put an executive summary in the email body. Break your email into short, succinct paragraphs. If your email has a point, and it should, get to it quickly without a lot of rambling. Attorneys like matter-of-fact, straight forward communications. That’s another reason to edit your email before you send it.

Tip #15

While you’re getting to the point, use standard fonts and only use a different color font when you need to emphasize a point. In most cases, you should use the standard font and colors, black for original email, blue for replies. If you need to highlight something, use the highlight function in Outlook to add a yellow highlight to a phrase (if your recipient uses HTML email). This keeps the page clean and simple.

While you’re cleaning up your fonts, also avoid using backgrounds that put the entire email thread on a background design which makes it difficult to read or to track comments. Remember, it may look cute to you, but it is unprofessional. Model attorneys and other successful Certified Legal Nurse Consultants who don’t use backgrounds.

Tip #16

Don’t rely on electronic files for your email storage. Computers can and do crash. If your email is stored only on your computer and you suffer a crash, you’ll likely lose all that information. Make sure that your data backup plans include all of your email files. This is one good reason to use a high-storage-volume email provider like Google’s gmail. If you maintain paper files on a legal nurse consulting case, print those emails and file them. This keeps all the correspondence about the case together. Email is business correspondence, so treat it like you would any paper business correspondence. You’ll kill a few more trees but that’s the price for complete files.

Tip #17

Always reply to your email unless you don’t need to. The purpose of email is not to generate more email. Everyone knows at least one person who has to respond to every email you send them. If you tell them “thanks,” they’ll tell you “no problem.” If it doesn’t necessitate a reply, then don’t reply. But, likewise people expect you to reply, even if it’s just to say, “I’m out of the office on vacation in Davenport” or “Got it and will be back to you shortly.” Remember not too long ago when we confirmed receipt of faxes? Do the same with your email – but keep it short.

Tip #18

If you use an “out of the office” auto-responder and you have the ability to limit it to respond to people in your address box, do so. Otherwise, it just confirms to spammers that you have a valid email address. Since I’ve had my BlackBerry^®, I don’t use one – but I do have someone who checks my email and looks for fires that need to be put out while I’m on a “BlackBerry-free” vacation. If you don’t have that luxury or lack of privacy use the auto-responder. I personally don’t like telling people that “I’m out of the office until the 25th” but it can be a necessity. Another alternative is to tell your attorney-clients that you’ll be out on vacation and just let the box fill up.

Tip #19

Check your email on a regular basis but not excessively. There’s no greater hit on productivity than breaking your concentration to reply to an email as soon as it hits your inbox. It’s not a contest and there’s no reward for being the fastest responder. Instead I check email at regular intervals. That allows me to concentrate fully on the project at hand and not get sent off on rabbit trails. People expect a response – within a maximum of 24 business hours, but not immediately. If you’re doing nothing but responding to email, you’re working like a pinball and not the Certified Legal Nurse Consultant you’ve been trained to be.

Take some time to review these tips and incorporate them into the email communications for your legal nurse consulting business. Remember, your email may be saying more about you than you want it to say. Keep it clear, concise and professional.

Success Is Inside!

P.S. Comment and share your tips for professional email communications.

Read Part 1. Read Part 3.

Tip #6

Check the “To:” line before you send and don’t hit “Reply to All” unless you know who “all” really is. This is a great way to send an email to the wrong people (perhaps even the opposing side). If you use the “auto-fill” feature for addresses it will fill in the email addresses as you start typing. If you have any attorney-clients with similar names, you need to be extra careful. Only “Cc:” someone if they need to be copied. Be careful with the use of “Bcc:.” Once you send an email, you lose control over who it is forwarded to and what changes can be made in the body/content as it’s forwarded. Attorneys like to know who is being included on their correspondence so using “Bcc:” to show your friends how important you are is a bad move.

Tip #7

Remember that once you send it, you can’t call it back. Email has almost no ability to be recalled. In other words when you click “send” it’s off to its final destination, errors and all. We’ve all sent an email while feeling angry or upset about something and then wished we hadn’t. If you think you’re being a little strong, take a few minutes between finishing the typing and hitting send. Then come back and review it to make sure you really want to send it as is.

Tip #8

Irony, sarcasm and humor aren’t always readily apparent in an email. Remember that the reader can’t hear your tone of voice or see that you were smiling while you wrote the communication. They may misinterpret your communication in a way you did not expect.

Tip #9

Go ahead and break the chain. No one will die. It’s time to stop forwarding those “urgent pleas” for peace on earth, save the whales or other chain letter emails that would be debunked after a visit to Snopes.com. Your seven best friends or legal nurse consultant subcontractors have probably already deleted that same email without sending it to you, so return the favor. If you don’t know the kind of emails I’m talking about I can send you a few so you’ll get the idea.

Tip #10

Don’t forward jokes, even if you think they’re hilarious. Not everyone shares the same sense of humor and not everyone has a sense of humor (I can personally think of two attorneys and a doctor that I’ve never heard laugh – ever). A joke you might find funny will be offensive to someone else and you risk appearing unprofessional. If you do send the joke, spell check it first (unless that’s part of the joke). Just joking. DO NOT send jokes.

Tip #11

Remember, many attorneys didn’t grow up texting, so don’t think every attorney is familiar with those goofy acronyms your 14-year-old uses in her text messages. OMG that’s SHR2B trouble. While you’re at it, don’t use smileys or other cutesy emoticons either. You risk looking like an amateur. You wouldn’t put them in a business letter – don’t use them with your attorney-clients (save them for communications with your kids).

Tip #12

Close your email with a signature. Email signature files are a great way to do a little more branding. Your signature should contain your name, credentials, title and phone number (so you don’t have to type it each time) and can also include your legal nurse consulting company name, address, a confidentiality statement or whatever you want. Outlook^® allows multiple (selectable) signatures because not every email is created equally. I have one signature with a confidentiality statement, another that has my full over-the-top branded “Wall Street Journal Bestselling Author, Inc. 5000, etc.” information, one that says “DO IT NOW” (just kidding – but it’s a good idea) and a simple one I use on internal email that just says, “Thanks, Vickie.” If you have a BlackBerry^®, change the signature from the one that reads “Sent from my BlackBerry^® while sitting in traffic” to a text version of your full signature. If you’re using signatures, use your full signature on the first email and an abbreviated one on replies and on daily correspondence. It’s time consuming to have to scroll through a lot of full signatures to review the meat of an email thread that’s gone back and forth.

Tip #13

Separate your private life from your legal nurse consulting business with separate email accounts. Use the branded email for your company and business communications. Set up an account with your Internet service provider or one of the free email services like Gmail, live.com or Yahoo! for your personal email. That way when you do send that ROFL Cats email (Bing! it) to everyone in your address book, it won’t go to your attorney-clients too.

Success Is Inside!

P.S. Comment and share your tips for professional email communications.

Read Part 2. Read Part 3.

I get a lot of email. Too much email some might say. My inbox starts filling up well before Vickie Milazzo Institute opens, with internal business. I had no idea how much email employees could generate, correspondence from vendors, email from students and Certified Legal Nurse Consultants who need mentoring and who just want to say hello and share their CLNC^® success. Fortunately, I am blessed to be the recipient of professional emails 99% of the time. But the other 1% is what I want to talk about in this blog.

Why is someone communicating to me in all CAPITAL letters or with bad spelling, poor punctuation, rambling styles and with no subject line (Really!). And if that someone is a legal nurse consultant, I worry that they are communicating with their attorney-clients and attorney-prospects, experts and other legal nurse consultants in the same unprofessional way. I have to assume they are. After all, with the possible exception of people with multiple personality disorders (You know who you are, and so do you and you.), most people don’t magically switch styles when they switch email accounts. In fact, some even use the same email account for business and personal – another no-no.

In just three blogs, I’m going to give Certified Legal Nurse Consultants the tips that will guarantee the professionalism of your email communications with your attorney-clients.

Tip #1

Get a real email address. Attorneys communicate with other professionals – attorneys, doctors, engineers, economists, etc. Professionals have email addresses like Marcus.Welby@GeneralHospital.org or B.Smith@SmithBarney.com. Those email addresses communicate more professionalism than NrseJckee2@email.com or LikesKittens@whatever.org.

When you send a business letter you use letterhead stationery and a matching envelope. Think of your email address as your envelope and make it reflect your professionalism. If you have a domain name for your legal nurse consulting business you can easily set up an email account with the hosting provider and have your email address be congruent with your business name. Think Susan.Smith@SmithLegalNurseConsulting.com. That’s called branding and it’s a powerful tool in the right hands.

Tip #2

Use a “Subject:” that makes it clear what the email is about. Many people do not use the “preview” function in their email client which forces them to open the email to see what it’s about. Have you ever opened an email only to find it’s not what you expected or because you couldn’t figure out what it was? I recommend you use a subject that is clear and makes sense, not only today but in a few weeks when you’re searching for an email in a cluttered inbox or “sent” mailbox. If you’re working on a particular case, include the case name somewhere in the subject. If it relates to a meeting, include the date (re: Hawkins case – 10/26 client interview notes) and anything else that will help the recipient decide what priority to assign to reading it.

When someone sends me an email with a bad subject line and I then either reply or forward it, I’ll often correct the subject line by putting my (sensible) subject in front of their (unintelligible) subject. By keeping their subject in the line, they’ll know what the email is about and can delete their subject from further replies, etc. Also, if you change the subject matter of the email, make the appropriate change to the subject line. It only makes sense.

Tip #3

Organize your inbox with folders. Certified Legal Nurse Consultants don’t just keep one general inbox with 547 emails on various subjects. They create subfolders organized by case names or other relevant naming conventions. You do this just like you create paper files in your office. After replying to an email, drag that email into the appropriate folder. That keeps your inbox clear and uncluttered. If you’re waiting for a response, you might keep the original email until you get the response and then file both. Depending upon the communication you can often put a “sent” folder inside each subfolder. Then file the sent email there for easier recall later. This beats searching through a crowded “sent” mailbox and is another reason for using strong subject lines. It makes it easier when searching through those archived messages weeks or months after they’ve been sent or since you last looked at a case.

Tip #4

When you need to communicate a really short message to someone, then do it inside the subject line of the email. End the subject line with “NoMsg” or “EOM” (end of message). This is a wonderful way to communicate a short message to someone. The non-preview people really love this one.

Tip #5

Spend a few minutes figuring out how to turn on the spell-checking function of your particular email client. We use Outlook^® and it’s got a pretty good speller. Just about every email client has a spell-checking function either built in or available as an add-on. If yours does not, then compose your email in Word or another word-processing program that has a spell checker and then cut and paste it over to your email. Nothing, and I mean, nothing (except bad grammar) spells unprofessional more than spelling errors. Even my BlackBerry^® has a spell-checking feature. This helps prevent minor and major typographical errors (but does not replace proofreading). If you do one thing for your legal nurse consulting career after reading this blog, please let it be this tip.

Success Is Inside!

P.S. Comment and share your tips for professional email communications.

Windows^® 7 came out last week and the Windows world is buzzing about its cool new features. Some of these features are familiar to Windows Vista^® users and are slightly upgraded. Other features are new and will be useful to legal nurse consultants while some are just cool. The new Win7 delivers a lot of highly technical upgrades and security upgrades plus one really cool upgrade – the ability to create “Libraries” which are collections of files of the same type, no matter what directories they’re stored in on your hard drive (it shows all your photos – no matter where stored). Let’s take a quick look at the coolest upgrades I’m excited about and how the average Windows XP^® or Windows Vista user can get them without suffering through the upgrade to Win7.

First, give yourself some CLNC^® “Snap.” If you’re a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant with a wide-screen monitor, Win7 has a feature called “Snap” which allows you to anchor an open window against the right or left side of the screen either by dragging it or hitting a combination of Windows keys and right or left arrows. The selected window will fill half the screen and leave room to open another window.

Anchor window to left with “Snap”

OldWin (Vista and XP) users can get a beta (meaning use at your own risk, unsupported, third-party program) version of this from AeroSnap. I love this because it eliminates the tedious process of resizing a window by hand (plus it’s neat). It works on my dual screens just as well as wide screens and is really handy on my laptop while I’m traveling. You’ll like it too. Remember to right click on the AeroSnap icon and click in the box next to Start with Windows. That way it’ll always be there for you.

Next, since CLNC^® consultants like to shake things up, you can bring this concept to your screen. In Win7 you can grab an active window by the blue bar (with your left mouse button), double click it, then shake it back and forth to make all the other open windows minimize themselves to the taskbar. Repeating the motion will restore all the windows. We all know we can click the little “Show Desktop” button to minimize all our windows, but then we’ve got to fish around and restore the one we want. Aero Shake from lifehacker allows those of us using the OldWin to have Win7 convenience. Way cool.

You can clear up the system tray in the bottom right side of your taskbar by hiding inactive icons. Between my Quick Launch bar, the list of open windows and system tray icons, the taskbar at the bottom of my screen gets pretty cluttered. Win7 allows you to selectively hide your unused system tray icons – OldWin users can do this too. Right click on any clear part of your taskbar. In the first pop-up make sure Hide Inactive Icons is checked, then click Customize to get the Customize Notifications pop-up (in Vista you have to go to the Customize Notifications pop-up to see the “Hide” checkbox).

XP Start Menu Properties Screens

On the Customize Notifications pop-up you can select the behavior for different current icons (Hide when inactive, Always hide or Always show). Pick the behavior you want for each icon then hit OK on each pop-up to save your settings. Your taskbar will appear cleaner and you’ll have more room for active windows.

Finally legal nurse consultants can stop the fishing expeditions (between open window icons) by allowing preview thumbnails of your open windows in your taskbar. This one is for XP users only and emulates the Vista/Win7 rollover Thumbnails or pop-up Previews that allow you to see the contents of your open windows if you mouse over your taskbar icons.

Preview thumbnail

To get it, visit the “How-To Geek” site and look for the “Download Visual Tooltip 2.1” link. Follow that link, fish around a bit and you’ll find the link to download the zip file for Visual Tooltip. Download it, unzip it, double-click on the VisualToolTip.exe file to install it. You’ll find a little icon installed in your system tray that tells you it’s running. Go back to How-To Geek and follow the instructions to resize the previews (and make sure you check the “start with Windows” box).

Those were easy weren’t they? You’ve just previewed some of the cool new features in Win7 and found ways to add these to your current Windows version. Remember that you’re using these at your own risk. They are beta or unsupported products, but they sure are fun.

Win7 will be a darn good version of Windows once the second service pack comes out. Until then, or at least until you choose to upgrade from XP or Vista, any legal nurse consultant can add the cool new features of Win7 to her legal nurse consulting business by emulating some of its best tools and tricks.

Keep on techin’,

Tom

Windows^® 7 will officially be released into the wild on October 22 and will be sold with new computers. If you’ll remember, Windows XP^® is no longer officially supported by Microsoft (although it will be available for limited purchases until 2010). People who are buying new computers with Windows Vista will be given the opportunity to make a free or low-cost upgrade. That’s the news.

Here’s the good news. Everything I’m reading, and everyone I’ve talked to who has run the final version of Windows 7 loves it. It has a few bugs but overall, it will be a vast upgrade improvement over Vista. (To be honest, Vista wasn’t really as bad as people like to think.) In fact, 7 is even better and more stable than XP. Some would say that it’s a worthy opponent to Mac’s Snow Leopard, but not being Mac-impaired, I can’t confirm that.

Certified Legal Nurse Consultants may wonder if it’s time to upgrade to a new computer with Windows 7 or instead, suffer through the upgrade process on your existing system. I’d say that depends. If you’re running XP, I think I’d wait until you upgrade to a new computer. There’s no direct upgrade process from XP to Win7. You’ll need to backup your personal data, wipe your hard drives, load the Win7 operating system, reapply your data and finally reload all your programs from their original media or downloads. Any patches or software upgrades would need to be reapplied also. It’s a complicated, but not impossible, process. For this reason alone I recommend holding off until you buy a new computer.

If you are a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant who is running Vista, the upgrade process is easier and you can upgrade directly to the equivalent version of Win7 while keeping all your files and programs in place. If you’re not happy with Vista, this is your chance to upgrade to something faster and more stable.

If you’re seriously thinking about the upgrade process, you’ll want to be sure that your hardware is robust enough to run Win7. Some of the biggest dissatisfactions with Vista resulted from users trying to run it on underpowered machines. Savvy legal nurse consultants will check their hardware before making the same mistake. If you’ve got a machine running Vista comfortably, you’ll probably be safe. No matter what computer you’re running you’ll need to have a DVD-RW (or CD/DVD-R) drive. For the rest of your hardware, these are the minimum specs (and experts tell us to double these numbers) you’ll need to successfully run Win7:

1. Older 32-bit PCs should have a minimum of 1GB of RAM (I’d install as much as the system will hold and recognize), at least 16GB of free space on your hard drive and a processor faster than 1GHz. Your graphics system should be DX9 graphics compatible with at least 128MB of memory (to best utilize the Aero interface).
2. New 64-bit PCs should have a minimum of 2GB of RAM (again I’d install as much as the system will hold and recognize) with at least 20GB of free space on your hard drive and also be DX9 graphics compatible.

If you don’t know how to tell whether or not you have a 32- or 64-bit PC, follow this link. A faster, but less accurate way is to see how much random access memory (RAM) you have. If you’re running 3GB or less, you probably have a 32-bit system. If you have more than 4GB, you’re running a 64-bit system. To see the amount of RAM you have installed (and recognized), right click on the My Computer icon on your Windows Desktop, left click Properties and then look at the General tab. If you have a 64-bit system, it will tell you, but if you have a 32-bit it will not!

The fastest way to find out if your existing computer can run Win7 is to download and run the free “Windows 7 Upgrade Advisor” from Microsoft. Make sure your computer is connected to all your peripheral devices (and they’re turned on) when you run it. It should let you know what you will need to be aware of in the upgrade process. With my cough-cough, ahem-year-old Dell Latitude D820 configured with a 2.00 GHz Intel Pentium T2500 CPU, 3GB of RAM and a 320GB hard drive, it took about 5 minutes and only found a few issues that would need to be corrected prior to any upgrade. Microsoft also has a nifty help site to ease your way through the upgrade process.

If you decide to upgrade, Win7 comes in four consumer flavors, Starter (which will be found mostly on netbooks), Business (which handles remote connectivity), Home Premium (for average users) and Ultimate (for the geeks). You can explore them here, but Home Premium or Professional are the best choices for most Certified Legal Nurse Consultants.

Supposedly, Microsoft has expanded the security software and external hardware compatibility features of Win7 to avoid the issues they ran into with Vista. But I recommend you always search the Internet for information on particular programs before upgrading. For users with Win7 Professional and Ultimate, there’s also a cool XP mode that will allow those users to run applications that are XP but not Win7 compatible. I’ll get into features found in Win7 in a later blog. For today, I just want to let you know that Win 7 will be here before we know it.

As with any new operating system (or new car model for that matter), I wouldn’t rush out and buy it, or rush to upgrade to it, but once it’s here, we’ll be living with it for a long time. I’m going to wait and see how it shakes out before I make my decision.

Keep on techin’,

Tom

Once a year I drag Tom to a health spa in the desert for a week (he calls it the “bunny ranch” because of the predominance of salads, veggies and other healthy “rabbit” food on the menu). The spa I like has a great medical department along with its other amenities (massage, yoga, hiking, etc.). I go to get a medical check-up, nutritional evaluations and a fitness assessment with the goal of reigniting my commitment to wellness.

We try to eat pretty cleanly. Lots of healthy soups and two different versions of a killer roasted chicken (one with butter and garlic and one without) are examples of what we eat at home. I have to eat clean for half of the year because the other half of the year, I’m on the road for business or for pleasure. Out in the wild, just like in the hospital, it’s hard to keep to a healthy diet – especially with so many tasty items on the menu (most of them either fried or served with sour cream). I’ve learned to develop will power but it’s still hard passing up the bad for the good.

Nutritional integrity is like our own integrity. I always tell Certified Legal Nurse Consultants that integrity means always doing the right thing even when nobody is looking. Sure, when Tom isn’t around I could sneak a piece of southern fried chicken, a bowl of Haagen-Daas dulce de leche or some other tasty, but unhealthy treat. (I could probably do it with him because I know he’d gladly share it with me!) But the point is, making a decision to eat healthy means deciding to do so more often than not.

But let’s go back to the bunny ranch for a minute. The spa proclaims to be dedicated to healthy eating. They ban alcohol (even healthy red wine) from the premises, give the protein, carb, calorie and fat content of every item at every meal, but to me, they “cop out” in three areas. First, while they have cold herbal teas available (it’s necessary to stay hydrated in the desert), they also have lots of artificial sweeteners at every drink station. Second, they serve a lot of breads, French toast and pancakes at breakfast, sandwich choices at lunch and rolls at dinner. Third, there are ice cream, chocolate chip cookies and other desserts (all lovingly described down to the last gram of fat) at every meal.

I expect this blog to get a lot of dissenting comments, but to me the bunny ranch is copping out. My personal belief (and research backs me up) is that sugar is bad for us and Americans eat too much of it. Instead of helping to move bunny ranch survivors off of sweet drinks, they’re just shifting them to an alternative form of sweetness. In other words, enabling them (Sure it’s okay to eat Splenda^® – it’s sort of natural.).

I like a good dessert as much as the next person. I also know that there are other choices for dessert than ice cream (even if low calorie) or cookies or low-fat cheese cake. One of the women at the pool told me, “I love the deserts here – they’re so small compared to home and you can try two or three different ones!” When she goes home, her sweets habit has been reinforced – not altered. Why not shift her paradigm to consider fresh fruit as a dessert alternative to something sugary? I’m not anti-dessert but I’d rather spend my calories on something tastier than sugar and train other people to make healthy choices.

Before I come off like a total food-Nazi, this recent experience got me thinking about how easy it is for legal nurse consultants to cop out on your attorney-clients. Do you ever find yourself tempering your opinions of the medical or nursing care because you don’t want to give your attorney-client an opinion he doesn’t want to hear? Are you trying to “go along to get along?” Have you ever agreed with an attorney’s position just because you were afraid to take a stand? Have you said, “I’ll have to research that and get back with you” when you already know they’re wrong?

If you have, you’re not offering the full critical value that the attorney-client is paying you for. As a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant, you bring a wealth of experience and ability to a case and you have to be willing to take a stand and offer your own thoughts – not a reflection of someone else’s thoughts. One of my employees is called “the other voice.” She’s not afraid to take a stand, even when she’s wrong. As big of a pain in the butt as she can be, I know she’s thought through the issues pretty thoroughly and is offering her true opinion. I’d rather have her than any number of “yes-men” or “yes-women” around me.

You may need to be a bit diplomatic but in the long run, you’ll be appreciated for giving your full critical value. The truth may not always set you free and it may not always be appreciated, but you have to be willing to do what’s right – even if someone is looking.

See you at the bunny ranch and until then, stay off the sugar!

Success Is Inside!