I know many readers are huge fans of Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office: 101 Unconscious Mistakes Women Make That Sabotage Their Careers (Business Plus)(affectionately known among commenters as NGDGTCO). I’ll be honest here: I haven’t read it yet myself! But I knew enough to sit up and take notice when the author, Lois P. Frankel, PhD, emailed me personally to see if we would be interested in running an excerpt of her new book, Nice Girls Just Don’t Get It: 99 Ways to Win the Respect You Deserve, the Success You’ve Earned, and the Life You Want (coauthored with Carol Frohlinger, JD).

This excerpt is on a topic near and dear to my heart: people who don’t write or speak in brief, to-the-point messages. One of my biggest pet peeves is having to weed through someone’s email message or voicemail to get to what they want, what the answer is, or what they’re trying to sell me. I hope you guys enjoy it!

Excerpt of NICE GIRLS JUST DON’T GET IT

Readers, what were some of your biggest take-aways from NGDGTCO?  What do you think the best way is to craft meaningful messages to people?

I’ve posted before of my love for Remember the Milk, but it’s come up in two separate conversations I had recently, so I thought I’d post on it again.

As a reminder, this is a free, web-based application, and it e-mails you when your “due date” is up.   (You can also check items off it before the due date, and e-mail it “to dos” from your Blackberry — it’s also available as a free “app” on the iPhone and Android, I believe).  I head there at least 4-5 times a week for the following kinds of things:

a) Online purchases – If, say, you’ve done a lot of online buying recently (cough, cough — great sales, I swear!) — then this can be handy to remember what you think is arriving in the mail, as well as by when.  (Or am I the only one who returns home sometimes to be surprised by a delivery of clothes I hadn’t remembered ordering?)  If I remember, I’ll also add “return by” dates as separate to-dos… and if I actually do return something I try to generally ballpark a date (yet another task) by when I should have received the refund on my credit card.

b) Group Coupons - If you’re a fan of the group-buying sites, it can be a total pain to remember what restaurants / spa treatments / etc. you’ve got discounts for, and by when those coupons/vouchers/discounts expire. Enter Remember the Milk…  I just throw everything in the bucket and it reminds me what deals are about to expire, by when.  (If you’re curious what group-buying sites I’m a member of (and want invite codes), click here — there are so, so many! And really good deals.  (In fact, the deals are SO good that Business Insider recently(ish) opined that “there are now so many daily deals for these services that anyone who lives in a major city and pays full price for a massage is being lazy and financially irresponsible.”))

c) Expirations - I blogged about this before, but I really do use it to remind myself of expirations — just in the past few months I’ve been reminded that some prescription eye drops went bad, and that I should really use that quinoa I bought a zillion years ago.  (I made a ton of “pork-fried rice” with it, using healthier ingredients, and froze it for later eating.)

d) Paperless Bills -  If, like me, you’ve switched a lot of your bills away from the paper statements (and, like me, you get a zillion emails a day and those reminders tend to get lost in the shuffle), this program can be really helpful.  For some, it’s because we forget to pay them without the reminder (like, say, my husband’s student loans); for others it’s because we want to make sure we have enough money in the account for an automatic payment (like, say, the mortgage).

e) Blogging -  For blogging purposes, I also use it to remind myself of great things I’ve seen while shopping/researching something on line and might want to post about it later. (I’ve found that for this blog, most of the posts are difficult to write far in advance because a lot of the products sell out or have drastically reduced quantities by the time I see something, and I do make best efforts to blog about things with lots of sizes in stock.) (It’s also a good “test” — I liked it then, do I like it now also?)

In terms of HOW I use it — I tend to type one sentence reminders in the text box, trying to remind myself of two dates: the date the item ACTUALLY expires, and the date I want to be reminded of it. So I’ll type something like this:  “use Scoop Street 50% off coupon at B. Smith’s near W.46 – expires 10/30/2011 – due 9.1.2011″  — it reminds me of the important things (which site I have to go to for the voucher, where the restaurant is, when the coupon expires, and when I want to be reminded of it.  RTM will automatically convert that “due 9/1/2011″ phrase to a deadline.  (You can also say things like “due tuesday” or “due four tuesdays from now,” and the program will figure it out.)

Here’s a screencap of my main page:

Readers, do you have a handy to-do program? How do you remember some of the dates/tasks I’ve outlined above?

Something on your mind? Chat about it here.
Pictured: Mikasa “True Blue” Espresso Cup/Saucer, available at Macys.com for $16 (was $23).

Wow — in what was one of our most unpopular polls ever, we asked last week whether people nap at the office and whether they have a system to it.  The poll is still open, but the initial results were split pretty much in thirds:

- 32% said that yes, you had napped at the office more than once

- 30% denied ever napping

- 38% said they’d only napped once and weren’t proud of it.

As various articles report, napping for just 20 minutes can increase your productivity by clearing your mind’s clutter, as well as improving memory, stamina, and motor skills.  One article even weighs the different benefits of naps lasting anywhere from 2 seconds to 90 minutes.  Some companies are even installing “sleep pods” to help their workers recharge:

Some articles to consider, if you’re not currently napping:

• How to Get the Perfect Nap [Stepcase Lifehack]
• How and Why to Power Nap [Lifehacker]
• How to Nap like a Pro [Boston Globe, via HuffPo]
• Top 10 Ways to Sleep Smarter and Better [Lifehacker]

Photo credit:  Cat nap, originally uploaded to Flickr by Mr. Miyagi. Note that there’s actually a difference between a cat nap (which one does on a lazy Sunday) and a power nap (which one might do at your office).

In this feature, we’ll explore one tool that makes the busy woman’s life easier in some small way.

Every busy woman’s got a growing pile of things to do — immediate things to do at home and at the office. Things to do at some point in the future (update the resume, congratulate Theresa and Ben on their 5-year anniversary, get vacation photos printed). It helps to corral these things into a list. Really! We’ve unfortunately left our copy of Getting Things Done, by David Allen, at home, but there’s a lovely passage in it where he talks about how all these tiny things that must be done nag at your brain, tugging at your conscious (and subconscious) mind until you’re exhausted, worrying about all the things that need to be done. His solution (which we’ve found really does help) is to write EVERYTHING down. Build a system, and trust the system.

We’ve been fine with using Outlook for office tasks, but we truly love using Remember The Milk for personal tasks. Some great things about it:

1) The service is free and allows you to do the basic stuff you need to do: add priorities, due dates, categories, et cetera

2) There’s a Firefox add-in that you can download and integrate with your Gmail account — your to do list is never far from hand

3) You can e-mail additional items to your list (very handy if you’ve got a Blackberry) as well as text items to your list

4) You can create separate in-boxes — some for checking daily and some for weekly. (We’ve got ours set up for daily lists like “Personal” (pick up the drycleaning) and “Corporette” (things to investigate and blog about) as well as ones we check less frequently, such as “Someday” (for things that we don’t need to worry about — museum exhibits that are closing in 4 months, etc) and “Expirations” (see below). Other ideas for lists: “To buy” lists (for the grocery store, for the drug store, on iTunes, on your next trip to Target or Bed Bath and Beyond), Gift Ideas (divided by person), and more.

5) You can even share the task list with others, “assigning” things to be done. (A modern version of a honey-do list, we suppose.)

6) Nontraditional use: We also have a category for “Expirations” — we can’t tell you how often we’ve bought something at the grocery store or gotten a prescription of something and then let it go bad because we just didn’t realize the expiration was coming up.  So now, whenever we get stuff that will expire, we add it to our Expirations inbox in RTM.  (Just to give you an idea of how far in the future it goes, we’ve got stuff on the list as far as 2013.)  We don’t have to check the list more than once a week, but so far it’s been a big money saver because we’ve used stuff that would have gone bad otherwise.

Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity

Also, here’s a random screen shot of our RTM list:

- Ask a Working Woman Survey: Indeed! You’ll learn all sorts of stuff. Such as, nobody likes pantyhose. But seriously, go take the survey! [Feminist Law Professors]

- WaPo thinks Vogue’s shoots of lady politicians is a window into how these women would like to be perceived. [WaPo]

- Uh oh: Barack has now been caught calling women “sweetie” twice. [Chicago Trib, bastard.logic]

- Wired tells us how to hack our brains to get smarter, including which drugs to take. [Wired] Oh, and Real Age advises us to drink lots of tea. [Real Age]

- Information overload? Part of the game is knowing when to give up. [NYT: Shifting Careers]