The Tribe of Adminsa home for wayward admins

I know none of you believed me last  year. Don’t lie. I know it’s true…you were too scared to try it. It’s OK. Really. I understand. Honest. But now it’s time to get over it! If you have investment real estate, a business with employees, complex trusts…head straight for the CPA. Absolutely. If you’re a “normal” admin? Save yourself a couple hundred bucks.

TurboTax walks you through it…it’s like having your grandmother hold your hand through the whole process. You’ll still collect all those receipts from your purse, desk, glove compartment, still swear you’ll get organized next year..the difference is that you do it in your own time, in bits and pieces if you want and you can do it for FREE. Grandma wouldn’t charge you, right?

OK…here’s the deal: if you file 1040EZ, you can do the Federal return completely free. If you have enough deductions that you need to file a regular 1040, it’s costs $29.95. You can spend as much as $74.95 for the super duper Home and Business version. How’s that compare with your CPA again? Maximum refund is guaranteed, 100% accurate calculations are guaranteed and it comes with a free Audit Support Center and live tax advice. Hmmm. My CPA never guaranteed anything.

I’m not dissing CPAs. Really. It’s just that we don’t need ‘em.

Prefer downloading the software to doing your taxes online? Use this link:
Get your biggest tax refund, guaranteed. Plus FREE Expert Tax Advice. Download TurboTax® Deluxe to maximize your deductions.
 

 
 
 
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My laptop gets so hot that I have to stop what I’m doing periodically. This not only makes me grumpy, it shortens the life of the laptop, which doesn’t appeal to my “Thrifty Admin” soul. I’m always going to buy one of laptop cooler desks “when I have some extra money.” Of course, once hell freezes over I won’t need it anymore. This guy has solved the problem an it’s more or less free.

Of course, you can still go higher tech!

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I recently solved a problem that had been plaguing me for months. I inherited an email schedule that had been created for a client, laid out like this:

Week 1              Week 2                Week 3

Tier1 Name 1    Tier1 Name 2   Tier1 Name 3

Tier2 Name 1   Tier2 Name 2   Tier2 Name 3

Tier3 Name 1  Tier 3 Name 2   Tier 3 Name 3

Looks like one of those puzzles in the Sunday Times, doesn’t it? Here’s the thing: Tier 1 folks got contacted every 2 months. Tier 2 every 4 and Tier 3 every 6. So here’s this beautiful schedule, which, when it comes to the end of the names, repeats. Well, it didn’t take me too long, as measured by average ape mentation rates, to figure out that when we repeated the first tier 1 contact it wasn’t going to be time yet to contact the Tiers 2 and 3 people listed for the same week. What’s really embarrassing is how long it took me to solve it. When I’m embarrassed, I try to advertise how stupid I am so everyone else can be embarrassed for me. I think it’s a well thought out psychological strategy. But seriously, this problem had clearly also happened to the person who preceded me, and something similar may have happened to you.

I searched the web for templates or solutions. I consulted Excel experts and tried out their arcane and extremely labor intensive formulas. I squinted and scribbled and searched for different software. I cursed.

Sometimes you just need to look at data in a different direction. If you can’t make a spreadsheet work horizontally, try it vertically. Everything may look different to you. If you want to see my—really very simple—solution to this particular little hell, the details are on this page. If you’re struggling with one of your own, try turning your monitor sideways.

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There’s been a lot of talk among the admins in my life about the virtues of becoming a virtual assistant. In fact, there are many:

• You love the boss
• The commute is dynamite
• You hire and fire your own clients
• You set your work hours
• The dress code is the coolest!
• The costs of doing business are truly minimal

The downside? You are really, truly on your own. This brings some challenges:

• You have to learn to market yourself .
  • There are a couple of posts to get your started on a website here and here.
  • You’ll need to buy business cards and hand them out everywhere. Vistaprint offers the best deal. That link takes you to a big discount, and if you buy them through my links and I make my minimum to get a kickback, I’ll send you a kickback! (See? This is me, marketing) Just send me your info on the contact form.
  • You’ll need to network like mad. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter are all big helpers, but you need to get out and meet people. Tell them what you do. Ask what they do and tell them how you can help.
• The loneliness factor: you need to be able to work alone or have a place to work among people. Your networking can serve that purpose.
• Did I say you’re on your own? You’re on you own. Buy your own health insurance. Make sure you can handle a fluctuating cash flow. Figure out how to handle I.T. And don’t think you can call Employee Relations when the boss gets snippy.

If all that works for you, go for it! You may even want to join the team at The Tribe of Admins.

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This post is just an excuse to share that . Ever wonder what it means when you see something that says “Embed” below a picture you see in a post or on a webpage? When people – like Scott Adams – are comfortable with you reposting their material, they might offer this option in addition to the usual “Share” option, which allows you to repost to various social networks. Click “Embed” and you see a bunch of code come up. Copy it. In your blog or sometimes on message boards you can choose HTML view. In WordPress, your choices for creating a post are “Visual” and “HTML.” Click on “HTML.” Paste the code. Publish. Crow.

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You pay a tax professional? Shocking!

How can I say this politely? OK, I can’t. Admins aren’t the best paid people on the planet. Nor do most of us have complicated tax situations. So why are you squandering your hard-won pennies to retrieve the taxes that you overpaid because you weren’t paying attention in the first place? Who are you that you need a CPA, Donalda Trump, E.A.? Seriously!

If you can juggle travel, expenses, meetings, presentations, onboarding, offboarding and the hundred other urgent issues and crazed people you deal with on a daily basis, you can manage to follow step-by-step instructions to tell a piece of software to fill in your tax forms. I’ve gotten better refunds doing it myself than I ever have from a tax pro, and not because I’m good at it. Doing taxes myself makes me think about and dig up more deductions that hauling a shoebox to I & S Clock ever did. Take the leap. You can use the money you save to invite me to lunch. I accept chocolates, too.

Search for Tax Software

Buying your software through the links above helps support this site and doesn’t affect your price.

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Admins have high-stress jobs, right? We multi-task holes into our brains, rush like cheetahs on speed, smile until we have cheek cramps, and if no one is yelling at us, we’re yelling at ourselves . So what do you do for fun? If you’re lucky, you have a passion. I know it’s sick that I entertain myself helping people figure things out about work. I hope you’re better balanced. And I know you can write…so I’ll bet you’re thinking about blogging. And I know some little critter is whispering, “you could make money…do it!”

But can you? The truth is, most attempts to make money via blogging fail. You can’t just stick ads on your blog or website and expect it to make money – you have to do it right – you know, like you do everything at work. It’s referred to as “monetizing” your blog, by the way. Want to try it?

The first thing you need is a domain name. Tribeofadmins.com is the domain name of this site, for example. To do that, you must make sacrifices to the domain gods. The most powerful domain god is Network Solutions. They’ll let you choose a package and sacrifice anywhere from $9.99 to $32.99 in the form of Visa or Mastercard – no blood involved. I like them because they were here first and they’re The One and that’s that.

The next thing you need is a place to plop your site down. This is a web host. You can spend anywhere from nothing to the$ky’sthelimit on this…I recommend next to nothing. “Next to,” because it buys you a bit more service than “nothing.” Some of the popular services are HostGator, GoDaddy and BlueHost. This site is hosted by MacHighway. In spite of the name, they aren’t only for Macs, they’re all wind-powered, economical, and have great service.

Make sure that the host you choose supports your operating system (Windows, Mac, Linux), look at their “uptime” statistics (the higher the better – what’s the point in having a site if it’s down?), and good customer service reviews. A good place to look is the FAQ. If you see something like “We support Mac, but…” and you have a Mac, go elsewhere.

Once you’ve done all that, you can decide what software you want to use to create your blog, but that’s for another post. We’ve done quite enough for one day.

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Aren’t admins busy enough?!?

The short answer is yes, you must.

Your boss may just be discovering social media – and you may be, too. You must get ahead of that curve! An old-school admin will soon find herself in a new-fangled unemployment line – online.

What happens when your manager wants you to maintain the website and tweet regularly? Are you ready? You may be in the position of advisor. If that happens, you need to figure out whether or not Twitter is an appropriate means for your business to promote itself. Tweeting about caulking every five minutes isn’t going to win your company love or dollars.

If you think Twitter is all there is to it, you need to put down the quill pen and start start surfing. You might check out JK Virtual Office Blog. She’s a VA who has specialized in social media and she has some useful insights to share. Another one is the My Twitter VA blog. She’s taken a certification in social media marketing. We might not all want to become marketers, but if you don’t know the basics and it doesn’t come easily to you, find a course, online or otherwise.

And what about that website? The theory is that “all” you have to do is post the updates. The words “all” and “website” should never be used in the same sentence. You’ll need to learn more about it, and what you need to learn depends on what kind of website your company has. Something that definitely falls in the “can’t hurt” category is learning a little HTML. I know….it sounds like “ewwwww…programming,” but it’s really more like pig Latin. Once you get the gist, you can navigate reasonably without being fluent. I found this free online tutorial at W3 Schools fun and illuminating.

Leave the “I don’t need to know that” mentality to those who can afford it – admins need to adaptive learners. That’s the long answer.

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Do you sometimes wonder–or get asked–why your role should be recognized with a day while other hard-working people settle for a mere paycheck? Do you get a little embarrassed by it? Well, de-blush.

Admins perform services that are personal and beyond job descriptions. We have historically been treated with condescension and often with outright contempt. It has been a role of unrecognized importance and skills.

What was originally called Secretaries’ Day was created in an attempt to raise the public–especially managers’–consciousness about the role, and it has been somewhat successful. If nothing else, teammates are called upon to recognize the amount of work that has been done on their behalf; that alone makes it worth the effort to recognize the day.

Don’t forget the other opportunity inherent in AP Day: thank your fellow toilers! Who helped you set up that meeting with Mr. I’m Too Important for Meetings? Who helped you decode the evil PowerPoint that froze five minutes before the board meeting? Who made you shine? Our peers can do for us what we do for our managers.

So go forth and demand–and pay–tribute. Florists and Hallmark adore us.

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