ow much do you rely on technology to help you in your job? Do you use e-mail? Is there a cell phone attached to your hip? Do you have a personal digital assistant (PDA)? The idea behind the technology is to provide tools to help us do our jobs better, faster and more efficiently. Looking at how you incorporate these tools into your daily life can help you determine if they're helping you work smarter-or if they're just cool gadgets getting in the way.

Expect the Unexpected

When your e-mail goes down are you paralyzed? When your digital address book is inaccessible, are you unable to make phone calls or send e-mails? You are if you don't have your clients' contact information saved as a hard-copy back up. Tools, including e-mail and online address books, certainly make our jobs easier, but we can't rely on them 100% of the time.

If you save important files in your e-mail inbox rather than downloading them onto your hard drive or to a disk, you have no way to access the file if your e-mail goes down. If you miss an appointment because you couldn't find the prospect's address or phone number, you probably won't get a second chance to pitch your services.

Save important files on your hard drive or on another storage medium. It's important to have a printed copy of your contact information, or to have that information on another device, so you're never caught unprepared.

Do Your Own Thinking

What about your computer? Of course, these days laptops and desktops are a staple of business and we all rely on them to keep us working and connected. Are you letting your computer do too much? For example, Excel and other spreadsheet programs are vital components to working out a sales plan. Does yours calculate commissions and residuals for you? Do you have other spreadsheets for your customers that calculate savings and revenue? It's great to have tools that help you manage your business and for demonstrating rates and benefits to your clients, but it's important to make sure that technology is not doing all the thinking for you.

You don't have to know each figure off the top of your head but you do need to know how the numbers are calculated. You need to understand the formulas well enough so that you can explain them to your clients. This might mean you'll have to spend time studying the spreadsheet, getting out a pencil, a pad of paper and your trusty old calculator to prepare for any questions your clients might have.

Is it Worth it?

It seems that every day there's a sleek new gadget on the market, designed to make our lives so much easier. Remember how bulky and cumbersome cell phones used to be? Now they're slim and tiny, can take pictures and video, you name it.

It's so tempting to snatch up a just-released gadget: It's exciting (almost like Christmas!) and easily justifiable because it's "for work." Before you hand over that credit card, though, think about how this great new device will benefit you. If the benefits outweigh the negatives, such as cost-and not just the monetary cost, but also the amount of time you will spend learning and programming the device-then go ahead and make the purchase. But think about it first. Do you really need to send pictures or text messages to your clients?

What about the gadgets you already have? Are you using them to their full potential, and not wasting time playing with them? For example, it may take a while to enter all your phone numbers into a PDA but it will save you time in the long run. If you spend hours or days copying spreadsheets from your laptop to your PDA, and then even more time syncing the two, it may just be you're using technology for technology's sake and it's not really helping you achieve your goals.

Do you e-mail documents to yourself so that you can work from home or on the road? When you open the e-mails, do you save the documents on your home PC or laptop, and then send them back to your office workstation? Think about how much time this process wastes, and the risk of error it includes.

What if you write over the wrong version? Not only have you lost your data, you've lost the time it took to create the version, and the time it will take to recreate it. Use technology to your advantage. Have just one PC-a laptop might work best for your situation, but for someone who doesn't take the office home with them, a desktop would be fine.

If you travel a lot and have an assistant who handles the administrative work, maybe a PDA is the best solution. The important thing is to find the solution that works best for you. Use it to its fullest potential to give your customers the best service while saving yourself time, anxiety and mind-numbing file maintenance.

The latest advancements in business technology can certainly help us work smarter and faster. But it's important to examine what each is designed for and understand how it fits into your business strategy. Most of them help you save time. Make sure you maximize this new-found time by using the tools that fit your needs, and tossing the ones that create extra work.