iPod

Okay, that’s a question that a lot of new Certified Legal Nurse Consultants might not know how to answer. In the world of digital media and MP3s, we no longer have to deal with skips in the middle of a song like we did when we listened to CDs or LPs. I’m so glad the days are gone that I have to worry about washing the lotion off my hands before handling my Prince CDs, or having to carefully slide an album like Coldplay’s “Viva la Vida” vinyl album into its sleeve and then into the album cover at just the right angle to keep it from catching and scratching one of the tracks.

Digital media and the iPod^® have not only changed how I listen to music, but also the way that I think of music. Since music has become ultra-portable, it’s changed air travel, working on the road and vacationing by giving me the ability to add a soundtrack to my life at any time that I want without disturbing other people. If this wasn’t the best invention in the world, I’m still waiting to see what it is going to be.

Most of us have our own soundtrack running in our heads and sometimes that soundtrack has a loop in it, causing us to hear the same information, right or wrong, over and over. Sometimes, that soundtrack has a skip in it and that skip causes us not to hear what the other person is saying over and over again. There’s a high potential for looping and skipping that can happen to legal nurse consultants too, and when it does, there’s a need to stop it.

As a CLNC^® consultant you’ve been trained to carefully listen to attorney-prospects when you’re in an interview, to relax and not to get so caught up in the soundtrack of your nervousness that the attorney becomes invisible to you.

If an attorney says “You’re hired,” you don’t respond “Thank you, but I have to finish explaining all 32 CLNC^® services I provide as a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant” and then loop back into your script. You’ve got the job – stop, skip the script and start discussing the first case.

Likewise, have you ever fully and completely answered a question for a patient, friend, family member or other party but they didn’t listen to the answer and loop back to ask you the same question again? Or they make the same statement they just made and, no matter what response you make, they skip processing your response to loop and repeat the statement? They become so caught up with the looping in their heads that their soundtrack skips your answer.

In some situations, repetition can be entirely appropriate. I love listening to my twin brother Vince’s “True Hollywood stories” from our childhood in Louisiana. Each time he embellishes a little bit more and it’s fun calling him on those embellishments. One of my staff members has heard my “war stories” almost as many times as I have and to her credit she always laughs as if she’s hearing them for the first time.

But, there’s a big difference between repetition for its own sake and repetition due to lack of focus. I was mentoring a CLNC^® consultant over the telephone on some issues regarding her legal nurse consulting business. She kept trying to go back and rehash the issues we’d just discussed. I realized that if she was that unfocused with me, she would certainly be that way with any attorney-client or -prospect. I called her on it and challenged her to focus for our next telephone call by outlining her questions and checking them off after being answered and avoid the rehash. To her credit she did pretty well.

Recently at a live event I spent some time answering a woman’s questions. I went through all her concerns and questions and I thought she was satisified with my suggestions. To my surprise, the next day she asked me the same questions again. I politely told her that no matter how many times she asked me, my answers wouldn’t change. I later found out that after talking to me, she also approached Tom with the same questions. He politely told her to follow my advice. The internal loop of her soundtrack and story were causing skips in her listening and in her processing of the information she was receiving.

In your career as a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant, you’ll run into plenty of situations where repetition is necessary in education or the case review process. But in other situations, before you start repeating yourself, ask yourself why and if it’s really necessary. It may not be. I repeat, ask yourself why you’re about to repeat and see if it’s really necessary. It may not be.

You will have many opportunities to loop and skip. I challenge you to be like an MP3 in your business and personal relationships for the next three days and let me know the results.

Success Is Inside!

I had a chance to stand in line and look at the iPad^® this past week. As I always am with Apple^® products, I was very impressed with its quality and its display. It seemed to be an iPod Touch^® with a monster steroid problem, a little big to clip to your belt and too limited to replace your laptop.

Other than the ability to use its 802.11n Wi-Fi connection (and optional 3G) to download books in full color (as opposed to Kindle^®‘s gray-scale), surf the Internet, do email, watch videos, listen to music and download Apps from the Apps Store, I’m not sure what to think of it. It still won’t multitask and doesn’t support Adobe^® Flash^® which is a disappointment. If you properly synch it, it will do the same calendar functions as your iPhone, BlackBerry^® or other phone so, I ask, is it the future or just another half-step?

I’d like Certified Legal Nurse Consultants to let me know what they think of the iPad and how they might apply it to their legal nurse consulting business, versus personal use. One thing I came up with would be its terrific ability to show graphics to an attorney-client when trying to explain an injury. I’m sure Apple will eventually authorize Skype for the iPad – that’ll change how we make video calls. What can you think of?

If anyone out there plans on buying an iPad, click here to comment and tell me. If you’re dead-set against buying one, click here to comment and let me know why not. Either way, I’d love to hear what uses the CLNC^® community will come up with for this nearly way-cool device.

Keep on techin’,

Tom

I was speaking with a Certified Legal Nurse Consultant the other day who had just spent the last couple of days rebuilding her file system after a virus infected her computer. When I asked her why she didn’t reload her data files from her backup, she confessed that she hadn’t run a backup in over five months. The time she saved by not performing regular backups was minimal compared to the time it cost her to rebuild her system and search for “lost” files.

I backup my data files on my laptop to our corporate server every Friday. It’s a habit. I have a set of meetings I have to attend and those meetings run almost as long as my backup routine. When I get out of the meetings, my backup is almost done so it’s pretty painless for me.

“Hey Tech Tip Tom,” you might say to me, “How can I, one of your CLNC^® amigos, get the same backup ability?” That’s pretty easy. If you have multiple computers to back up, you can simply create a home network, jack in a portable hard drive like Western Digital^®‘s 500GB My Passport^® pocket drive which sells for just over $100. (Or, if you’re particularly flush, you could review my past blog and purchase a terabyte (1,000GB) backup drive), install the software and let it backup every evening or on whatever schedule you desire. Then, unless your home or office burns down (in which case you’ll have other worries), you’ll have a good backup of your legal nurse consulting business data.

If your computer gets wiped by a virus, lost or stolen or just plain crashes, you can simply restore the data to your new or cleaned computer from the backup. If you use a program like Norton Ghost (and have high-end computer skills) you can periodically image your hard drive, store the image (picture of all the contents of your hard drive) on the backup drive and then restore your computer from a good image (losing the data you created in between present day and last image).

These are fairly inexpensive methods (excluding “Ghost”) of creating backups because you buy the backup drive once and you’re good until it crashes or dies. It’s not for the faint of heart though. If you only have one computer to backup, connect it directly to the pocket or backup drive and skip the network.

Now I know some of you are thinking, “Holy backup beeper Tom, you lost me at hello!” Okay, I’m with you. Here’s the simplest, but not the cheapest method of backing up: an online backup service such as Mozy or Carbonite. These are great online backup systems that require ABSOLUTELY NO TECH SKILLS TO USE! Maybe I didn’t need to shout that, but it’s the beauty of these two systems. You simply sign up for the service, install the software, select the data you want to backup, the backup frequency and then just leave your computer on at night and it backs up to a remote server during “idle” time. Both systems encrypt the data so that it’s secure and can even be accessed remotely while you’re traveling (and your data is safe in the “cloud”).

Carbonite costs less than sixty dollars a year, Mozy costs under five dollars a month (so about the same) and both offer unlimited data storage. Here’s the kicker though, you’ll need to have a pretty fast upload speed on your Internet connection to make sure your backups run completely. You can test your Internet’s connection speed here. I’ve got about 30GB of data on my laptop including all my music and bunches of photos. At an upload speed of just over 640Kb/sec, my initial backup would take about 105 hours – not a great prospect. If I trim out the music and photos I’m down to about 5GB of data or about 17 hours of backup which is still not the most attractive prospect.

So, what can you do? First of all, get those vacation photos off your hard drive and back them up onto CDs or DVDs or onto a portable hard drive (we just spent more money). If you haven’t edited them by now you never will. See what else you can strip off that drive. You may be able to dump some of the music from your iPod^®. If you still have the source CDs you can always reload it later, it’ll take some time but you can do it. You can back up your “purchased” songs by burning them to a CD using iTunes’ built-in backup function. As for the rest of your music, experts tell us that once we’ve uploaded music to our iPods we can move the source files to an external drive (technically you can delete them but that scares me too much to try).

Once you take the time to get your backup data amount down to just what you think you need, excluding your operating system (OS) and installed programs (my OS and installed programs alone are 37GB), you’re ready to consider an online backup system like Mozy or Carbonite. That 105-hour initial backup could be done over a weekend, a very long weekend. All subsequent backups will be incremental and take much less time (only changed files will be backed up). If the amount of data with changes is still too much to backup in a reasonable period of time, then you should consider an external backup system.

Whatever backup solution you choose needs to work for you and your legal nurse consulting business. Take some time, evaluate the options but do make a decision to implement some form of backup. Can you afford to buy some backup solution? Yes, because you can’t afford not to.

Keep on techin’,

Tom

I’m a big advocate of brainstorming and often some of the best ideas for Vickie Milazzo Institute come from brainstorming, both formal and informal. People at the Institute are always brainstorming in the hallway, in each other’s offices, at each others’ desks and even in the restrooms.

The ideas are sparking and the atmosphere is almost incendiary. When we come together and engage in a conversation we raise new questions and think of things at a level we would not have reached on our own. Collaboration is genius.

Likewise, some of my best ideas for Vickie Milazzo Institute come to me not in the midst of a passionate brainstorm, but when no one else is around and I’m writing.

I confess, I write best alone – just me, Beethoven, my favorite pen, a legal pad and a stack of sticky notes for company. Even Tom knows to stay out of my way when the pages start flying. Sometimes, I even tune out Beethoven.

I love writing because it not only releases the creative energy that fuels ideas for my business, but also feeds my creativity which in turn fuels my endurance allowing me to create longer and produce more. Plus, I’m always careful to capture any random thoughts, even those that seem unrelated so as to not lose them. (Note to self: get much bigger sticky notes!)

Sometimes that stray idea is pure gold. Other times it’s only a sieve through which to mine the gold. And sometimes it’s nothing more than fool’s gold – but what have you lost beside the keystrokes or a piece of paper? The idea may not even be ripe for the time, but by capturing it, you can hold it until the time is ripe. Nothing gets lost (unless your desk is really messy).

Even if you haven’t had any training in writing (nursing school taught us to chart, not to write novels), you can still write. Buy yourself a Journal or notepad. Clear a space, sit down and take a stab at writing an opinion or write about a recent trip, a funny attorney experience or your last day off. Even better, just write what’s on your mind.

You’ll be amazed how new ideas for your legal nurse consulting business will emerge even when you’re not consciously thinking about your legal nurse consulting business.

Here’s a tip. Put on your iPod and play the scores from Slumdog Millionaire or La Vie en Rose or Beethoven’s 5^th and write away, write now.

Success Is Inside!

A couple of Thursdays ago, I posted a blog about my birthday (thanx again everyone). Then Vickie had a birthday and today I’d like to remind everyone of two more birthdays – both are about half my age and both are almost as important as mine. They’re the birthdays of whats, not whos. You either love or hate (or both at once) these whats.

On November 10th of last year, Microsoft^® Windows^® turned 25! Happy belated birthday, Windows. I’m sorry I didn’t send a card but I forgot while waiting to reboot (again). This year, coincidentally on my birthday (January 22 in case you want to mark your calendar), Apple, Inc.’s Macintosh^® computer, turned 25 too! Happy belated birthday, Mac^®, I’m sorry I didn’t send a card but I was loading the Slumdog Millionaire soundtrack onto my iPod^®.

Windows was really created in 1983, it wasn’t until 1985 that Windows 1.0 came around as a new product. My first experience was Windows 3.1, back in the early 90s. I remember moving very reluctantly from my trusty DOS version of Automenu to the scary Windows GUI (graphical user interface). It was so traumatic that I needed a techie friend to come over, install it on Vickie’s and my computers and teach us to use it.

Next we graduated to Windows 95, then moved up to the popular blue screen of death known as Windows 98. Believe it or not, I still have two laptops running Windows 98! I keep them to run some older programs I just can’t live without (no, one is not Pong). We passed through a couple of server versions and I advanced the users in Vickie’s growing company right past Windows 2000 to the best OS I’ve ever used, Windows XP. Now we have the SP2 version of Vista out (which shows it really is a good OS if you have enough computer power) and Microsoft is set to release Windows 7. All the reviews I’ve seen of Windows 7 say it will (eventually) knock our socks off (even though it’s really just SP3 of Vista).

Although Apple was started way back in the ‘70s, 1984 was the public introduction of the first Macintosh computer (which was the first computer to use a GUI as well as a mouse). Remember the cool “1984″ commercial that ran during Super Bowl^® XVIII? Most of you know I’m not a Mac user (although I did check my email on a Macbook Pro^® in the Apple store in Tokyo last year) so I have no history with them. I will tell you that I believe they’re some of the best computers built and have the best operating system on the market.

Today, technology has given Certified Legal Nurse Consultants many more choices than we had in the 80s and 90s. There are advantages to both systems and with the vast array of software available (like Windows for Mac) there’s nothing stopping you from using a Mac in your legal nurse consulting business. You won’t find Macs in too many big law firms but you’ll probably find them with solo practitioners and possibly small firms. Whichever OS you choose for your business or next computer upgrade, you’ll be in good shape tech-wise. Things will just continue to get better. You can look as cool as you want in Starbucks^® or for your kids – there’s nothing holding you back! One last thing – there are Mac viruses out there (contrary to popular belief), if you’re a Mac user check out this article.

A lot of things have come and gone since 1983/1984, Ronald Reagan, George HW Bush and Cabbage Patch Kids included. We’ve experienced the frustration and fun (hah) of Windows and Macs for over 25 years. Can you think of many other products, especially in the personal computing field, that have lasted that long while improving themselves? If you do, let me know.

Keep on techin’,

Tom