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The First 1000 Blog Posts

November 2, 2018 //
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I introduced the notion relatively recently that I might stop blogging on this page after 1,000 blog posts. I produce 3 blog posts a week, always on a Monday, Wednesday and Friday, and that cadence works for me, so 1,000 posts will take me a fraction over 333 weeks, the guts of 7 years.

And then I read Seth Godin’s post yesterday, which talks about the first 1,000 blog posts being the most difficult…Mr Godin’s blog is one of the inspirations for me starting my own back in 2013, but then again he writes a daily blog post, and we aren’t talking weekdays only. That’s over twice my input. That cadence obviously works for him.

His first para reads: “For years, I’ve been explaining to people that daily blogging is an extraordinarily useful habit. Even if no one reads your blog, the act of writing it is clarifying, motivating and (eventually) fun.” I could have written those words myself, except substitute ‘thrice weekly’ for the daily bit, because the sentiment is spot on.

Some of Mr Godin’s posts are very short indeed, and then some of them are quite involved, whereas I try and stick to a 4-to-5 para, 250-or-so words, couple-minutes-to-read kind of a thing. That said, his output is prodigious, helped no doubt by an enviable book-publishing remit that allows him to kill two birds with one stone.

Interestingly, Mr G sees a trend where people get the bit between their teeth after 200 posts or so, which is a little over 6 months. Maybe the time in the saddle is more important than the cadence, since 200 posts take me 15 months, which is a different proposition altogether. Or maybe it’s the cadence that counts…

As for the first 1000 posts thing, for me it could well be the only 1000 posts, and I think the daily discipline would become a daily drag, perhaps for you too, as the ‘customer’.

 

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Marketing, Sales

Typing, Looking and Autocorrect

November 1, 2018 //
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If you’re a good typist, a touch typist, you intuitively know which keys you’re hitting and you can focus on the screen. You can then see autocorrect suggestions as they come up, whether they’re spelling mistakes or typos, and choose to accept or reject them on the fly.

If you’re not a touch typist, you have your eyes focused on the keyboard as anything between 2 and 7 fingers flash across the keys in a blur of crossovers and other inefficiencies.

Autocorrect only works if you’re a proper typist who looks at the screen while you type. Most of our generation look at the keyboard as we type, and then it’s too late. We look up and our typed line is a mess of autocorrections we didn’t want that the system inserted by default as we typed on. So we go back and recorrect them, which is a huge time-suck.

I wonder what percentage of people touch type compared with those who are fixated on the keyboard? It’s pretty important to the usefulness of autocorrect on a laptop, where the keyboard and screen are a long way from each other.

Even with a smartphone, where the keyboard and screen are a couple of centimetres apart, I miss autocorrects because I’m looking at the keys.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General

Father Time

October 22, 2018 //
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It’s impossible to resist the slow, glacial and inexorable movement of father time. Father time, but mother nature: what’s going on there?

Once you’ve reached the peak of fitness, be it physical, sporting, cerebral, intellectual and so on, or if you’re lucky, a long, luxurious plateau of a peak, you’re on the decline, fact. You have to work increasingly harder with each passing year to keep your skills at the level they were.

I have noticed this with the sport I have played most of over the last 4 decades, table tennis. It’s hard to judge how you compare with your much younger self, even though I still think I’m as good as I was in my peak, but I have a general sense that my abilities are in decline, that my skills are dwindling. Table tennis is one of those sports where you can have a long career of being at or close to your best. It’s not like some of the other speed and power sports where the window is much narrower.

That said, when I’m playing against people half my age, or less, I see that the sport has moved on, it’s played differently, and my approach to the game is outdated. I’m pushing against the tide of better ways of playing the game, and younger, faster and better players.

The enjoyment is still there, but the proficiency is such that you’re competitive against the standard of player on your way down that you were on your way up. The only way you can reconcile yourself with the march of time is to confine yourself to playing against your age group or to be in competition with yourself, and not others, on a daily basis.

I’m sure it applies to work as well…

 

 

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Categories General, Marketing, Sales

Fiddly Stuff First

October 17, 2018 //
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I’ve written a few times before about tackling large projects and biting off small digestible or achievable chunks to eat away at the project and make it doable.

One thing I find useful when tackling a large project – though not too large or else the parameters may change and you have to start again – is to do the fiddly stuff first. If you’re writing a document, get the contents right before you move on to fill in the big gaps. If you’re working on a large deck, do the cover slide and the end slide first and get the title and content conventions down before you do your slides. If you’re working on a spreadsheet, to the tidying up and formatting of cells before you put the main body of numbers in.

You have to do the important parts, the major bits, so getting the fiddly stuff out of the way means they won’t get forgotten about or underserved at the end when you’re flagging. Yes, you run the risk of not getting the big, important part finished, but you have to get it done so you’ll get it done, and if there’s a time deadline, then your focus, your productivity and your output will increase accordingly.

If you do the fiddly stuff first, you know you’ll finish. If you leave the fiddly stuff til last, you run the risk of wanting a break after finishing the big stuff and not finishing the whole thing.

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Categories General, Marketing, Sales

Avocados

October 15, 2018 //
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I’ve had it with avocados. I’m done with them.

Yes, I know they’re good for me. They’re rich in those omega-thingies and they taste nice too. You just never know what you’re going to get. Sometimes they’re too hard, like cheese, but you’ve opened them now, so you have to eat them. You can leave the other half in the fridge, even with the stone still it, and they take about 5 mins to go off.

Sometimes they’re too soft, and have gone mostly black and bruised, not appealing to look at or taste, so they’re wasted. Even with the health benefits they’re a bit of a lottery.

And then there’s the process of how they’re made, and the vast distances they need to come to service the needs of a consumer in the north west of Europe. Take a look at this video (it’s 12 minutes long, but worth a quick look). An awful lot of the environment goes into creating one of those capricious little suckers, and the ramifications are pretty far-reaching, as you’ll see.

No, much as I like them, I think I’m done with avocados.

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Categories General

Degrees of Enjoyment

October 12, 2018 //
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Work, play. Day, night. Fun, no fun. These are pretty binary concepts, aren’t they?

I’ve always said we should find a job we enjoy, since it’s going to be occupying such a large amount of our healthy, active years, but enjoyment is hardly a binary concept.

No, it’s more of a spectrum. There are bits of our work that we enjoy more than others. The creative bits are generally more enjoyable than the humdrum bits. There are degrees of enjoyment. The most enjoyable parts of our job are not as enjoyable as our time off.Then again, being on holiday is often better than simply having time off.

If we play sport, then going to the gym is not as enjoyable as a game of footie or tennis.

I was out for an evening of 6-a-side soccer the other day, in the driving rain, and one of my pals joined the warm-up looking a bit glum. ‘Come on,’ I said, ‘you could be working. Playing soccer in terrible weather is always better than working. Are you telling me you’d rather be plastering right now?’

‘Yes’, he said, ‘I would.’ Like I said, degrees of enjoyment, just on a different part of the spectrum to me.

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Categories General, Marketing, Sales

Solitude

October 10, 2018 //
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Solitude is great for concentration, great for getting things done.

As someone who does a lot of writing from home, I find that solitude and silence are the most productive drivers. I tend not to listen to music, or even have the radio on in the background. It’s just me and my thoughts, with no distractions. I do sing to myself, out loud, on the breaks though, as one does.

Of course, it’s horses for courses. A mate of mine who also writes for a living always has the radio on in the background, usually something high-brow like BBC Radio 3, which might explain his encyclopaedic knowledge of music.

It’s what you’re used to, and it goes in waves. There was a time when I listened to music when I wrote and the mood the particular music inspires can influence the writing, which can be a good or a bad thing, depending on the subject matter and the tone.

After too much, though, the solitude and quiet gets to you, and mild cabin fever sets in. Then, for me, it’s time, not for music, but some old fashioned dialogue and some human interaction. A good home-working balance seems to be a mix of thinking, writing time in solitude and collaborative, team time in the office.

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Categories Communication, General, Strategy

Barcodes

October 5, 2018 //
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Barcodes are amazing things, aren’t they? They’re the kind of things I’ll never take for granted.

Barcodes have been around for a long time, ever since we’ve had the technology to point a device at a code – or point the code-bearing item at a device – and have it translated into a specific inventory record in a company’s supply chain or retail computer system.

The fact that all the billions of things out there can each have their own unique sequence of numbers and bars makes business flow at the pace it does. You can have a code for one item, another code for a box of them, another for a case of boxes, and for all I know another code for an entire pallet of thousands of them. They enable the entire supply chain and retailer to keep a electronic record of the physical movement of an item, from creation to distribution, to consumption.

Owning the code conventions and selling the codes is, of course, big business. But they’re worth every penny or cent, in my view.

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Categories General, Marketing, Sales, Technology

Personal Annual Goals

October 3, 2018 //
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Do you set PAGs for yourself – personal annual goals? Perhaps it sounds a bit too organised, a bit too much like work. Maybe you like to go with the flow and see where you’re at the end of the year. Maybe you don’t think of your life like that and go through it savouring every moment.

If you do like to achieve things, and see an improvement in your life and the lives of those closest to you, then PAGs are a good way of doing that. They stop time running away from you. We know from experience that plans very rarely survive the first incursion into reality, but having some high level objectives keeps us on track and focused on the here and now I think.

I know a guy who sets himself PAGs. They might be things like ‘sell house for x, clearing y profit’, ‘change car’, and ‘earn z before taxes’, those kind of things. He really values them and he’s flying through them at the moment.

I think they work well for achievable or binary things that you have control over, like selling your house for a certain amount. Where they work less well is with big hairy arse goals, or BHAGs as the business folk call them, like get your first book published – not self-published – or getting a child into a highly oversubscribed school. These have a low probably rate of success, yet they’re still binary.

Personal Annual Goals are great ways of stopping time from running away from you, that most precious of resources that you can’t ever get back. In that sense, further chopping your PAGS into half-yearly, quarterly and even personal monthly goals, PMGs, is not a bad idea either.

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Categories General, Marketing, Sales, Strategy

Epitaph

October 1, 2018 //
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What do you want your epitaph to be? What would you choose?

Epitaph is an interesting word, as it means a short summary of one’s life but actually comes from the Greek words epi and taphos, meaning ‘on a (tomb)stone’. So it’s the ‘here lies etc’ that we read when we wander around cemeteries.

Most epitaphs give a name, birth and death date, while a few have a choice quotation, but you don’t see many of them around these days, which is a pity I think. It’s nice to get a snapshot of a person you don’t know, something they chose to sum up their live in a handful of words. You tend to find them in obituaries, which is another fascinating word because it derives from the latin word meaning to come up against something, as in to meet one’s end.

I don’t think I’ll be bothering with a tombstone or a grave, as I’d prefer to rot away environmentally, but I think I’d like something like ‘Occasionally aspired to greatness, but humdrum most of the time.’ Never hitting greatness, but aiming for it, is, I think, a reasonable goal.

 

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Categories Communication, General
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