Archives for category: General
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Frostbite

March 22, 2017 //
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On a Monday evening, if I’m in my hometown, I like to play some 5-a-side footie with my fellow middle-aged men, sans lycra of course.

Recently, I went out for a game. I had a sore calf – again – so I didn’t want to let the lads down and decided I’d play in goal. It was unseasonably cold, snowing and sleeting in fact, and I had a very thin, porous set of gloves on. They got wet very early on, and so did my hands.

An hour later, the pain was unrelenting. I can’t remember having colder hands. So much so that I went grey and felt nauseous. I made it home, but my fingers were so cold they felt solid. I had to gradually warm them up, in agony, for about half an hour before I realised I was, in fact, not going to have a heart attack, stroke, or die.

I probably wasn’t that close to having frostbite, and my fingers were 90% fine the next day. I can’t begin to imagine, however, what it must be like to be genuinely very cold indeed for a long period of time. I think the body and organs must shut down and you must literally want to crawl into a ball and die.

I also know now why scaling Everest or Arctic trekking isn’t on my bucket list. Sawing off frost-bitten fingers is not on my top-1000 list of things I’d like to do.

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Categories General

Fake News

March 17, 2017 //
0

Fake news has to be the word – or words, if you’re pedantic – of 2017 so far. You have your ‘proper’ news, and then you have your fake news. It’s either true, or fake, isn’t it?

Well, not really. News is really the current form of history. And history is not the truth, it’s simply someone’s account of what happened. A lot of that depends on your perspective. After all, one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter, right?

News is not black or white, true or fake. There are degrees of it, all the shades in between black and white. It’s one account over another. Or, in today’s world, it’s one person’s edit over another’s. Even in real-time streaming or television it’s one person’s camera angle over another, what they choose to frame in the shot, rather than what another does. Even if you’re in the thick of news or history being made, your view on what’s happening depends on where you are, and your perspective, both literal and otherwise.

The key thing here is that if there are enough people – or people with power – promulgating a certain view of the news, then it becomes harder to analyse fairly, examine and resist that view. That in itself is a very solid form of control that has served governments well since the invention of, well, governments.

 

 

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Categories General, Marketing

The Time-Waster

March 6, 2017 //
0

Beware the time-waster. The person that wastes your time, not theirs. They are the scourge of modern society.

We all know them. We see them at work or at play, they are everywhere. The most heinous individual – barring the bully or the abuser of any kind – is the time-waster. They suck the life-force out of you. They rob you of the most most precious resource you have. They don’t value your time.

The time-waster is the person who can’t see or or doesn’t care that they’re clearly taking up too much of your time. They love to talk, they love to unload. They can’t make their point quickly, succinctly, pointedly. They hog the oxygen at meetings, holding forth yet coming up with nothing of consequence or action. They are often shirkers, stallers, avoiders, prevaricators.

You see, you do know them.

Don’t suffer fools gladly. Be direct. Cut them off. Move on.

And what if they do that to you? Well, examine thyself. Either you’re a time-waster and you need to improve your interactions, or you’re not, in which case you need to find another way.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Language, Marketing, Sales

The Five Pound Bag of Manure

February 27, 2017 //
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There is a phrase used colloquially in business: ‘trying to fit 10 pounds of manure into a 5-pound bag.’ OK, so the word manure isn’t usually used, but here it deputises nicely for its much more graphic and vulgar counterpart. You get the message; it conjures up a vivid image of what happens when we don’t prioritise well.

It’s a topic I’ve dwelt on before and it goes back to how well we manage our own time.

You can’t get everything done that you want to during the day, so list the things you have to get done and estimate the time it will take you to do each of them. Then rank them by importance, rather than urgency. Then work down the list and figure out how many you can do in the day. You’ll not get to the others. If item 1 is going to take you more than the full day, then you need to break it up into manageable chunks, which you can then re-rank.

Sometimes I pick off the smaller, less important jobs first, but this is high risk because then you might be looking at a very long working day since you have to get the most important job finished before you clock out.

If you don’t take a prioritising approach to your work, you’ll see your key projects drag on far longer than they should.

So should you be spending your precious time on the advice dispensed in this blog? If it helps you be more productive and successful, then of course.

That said, and from my own personal perspective, I don’t know how this blog gets done 3 times a week. Probably because I don’t view it as work. It’s more like living in another country. The longer you stay, the more used to it you become, and the harder it is to move.

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Categories General

Thanking Your Suppliers

February 24, 2017 //
4

Here’s a thing. In business we’re maniacally focused on our customers. We even call them clients, or patients even in the caring professions. Everything we do revolves around them. We work hard to win them, and in the private sector we thank them, take them to lunch and send them corporate gifts. This is something I write about in my first ever blog post here.

I have customers in my business too, and I try to look after them so that there’s a fair exchange of value between us.

What I also really focus on as well is my suppliers. Often we treat our suppliers with a fraction of the care we provide to our customers. Whereas our customers are on the highest pedestal, our suppliers are often the afterthought in the basement.

Good suppliers are absolutely critical to your success, especially if you’re in an industry where you take what your supplier gives you and build on it or resell it for your own wellbeing. I don’t send Christmas cards to friends or family. They have plenty of them already. I send Christmas cards, each with a personal note, to all my suppliers thanking them for their service, help or support during the year.

Are you in the habit of thanking your suppliers? Do you award the best ones with a ‘supplier of the year’ accolade? If you do, you’re in a pretty small minority. You’re bucking the trend. When the world zigs, you zag.

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Categories Customers, General, Marketing, Sales

Nom de Plume

February 20, 2017 //
0

When you decide to publish a book, and put it out there for the world to consume, critique or ignore completely – either consciously or unwittingly – you have to decide what author’s name you’re going to use.

At first glance this might be an obvious choice, namely your own name. Then again, you might opt for a nom de plume. So it’s a decision between nom de plume or not de plume, you might say.

When it’s your own name, the not de plume option, there is the advantage of leveraging off and building on the reputation and social media equity you already have. Sounds obvious. But, there is a surprisingly long list of reasons why you might want to go down the nom de plume path. Here’s 9 I can think of off the top of my head:

  • you can distance yourself from your actual name
  • it allows you to forge a new identity that’s different from your ‘real’ one
  • it keeps you safer in the event of adverse reactions, mushrooming fame or notoriety
  • you can stay under the radar
  • your actual name may already be taken
  • your actual name might be not be easy on the eye, tongue or ear
  • your actual name might not be memorable
  • you can make something cool up
  • you can explicitly or esoterically doff your hat to someone you respect and want to acknowledge

Of course, if you go nom de plume then you do have to overcome the advantage of not de plume and build a following out of nothing, which is a lot of work.

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Categories Communication, Customers, General, Marketing

Single Point of Failure

February 17, 2017 //
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A regular refrain of mine on this blog is the single point of failure. Generally confined to transportation and infrastructure, it provides us with an instant reminder of how fragile the thread is that binds us to our daily lives.

We had a major burst water main recently in the local area. It took out the entire town and surrounding area, for more than 24 hours. No showers, no washing up, no toilet flushing. These are just household things, though, they’re easily manageable for a relatively short time.

But what about people running businesses? What about hospitals, veterinary establishments, garages, other things that rely critically on water? I hope they had – and have – a plan B.

Ironically, out here in the country, quite a few folk have their own wells, avoiding water bills and also drawing on Ireland’s plentiful – not to say incessant – rainwater supplies.

So, in some cases, the less civilised we are, in the sense of being city-tied, the more resistant we can make ourselves to the single point of failure.

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Categories General

24/7 Productivity

February 3, 2017 //
0

Just imagine how much more we could get done if we didn’t need to sleep, ever.

I’m one of those people that needs my 8 hours sleep, as I’ve mentioned before. If I don’t get my full allocation during the week, then I really need to recoup it at the weekend if at all possible.

I consider myself fairly active for the 16 hours a day that I’m awake, and I often imagine how much more I could get done if I only needed, say, 4 hours sleep a night. There have been plenty of well-known people in history who operated extremely well, with no apparent side effects, on a fraction of the daily recommended amount, but I’m not one of them, either on the famous front or the sleep minimisation front.

But if we didn’t sleep at all, with no downside, we would effectively reach 24/7 productivity. An extra 50% over what I currently get, which sounds pretty attractive, at least when you look at the pure numbers.

I’m not talking about not being able to sleep for long periods, something called Fatal Familial Insomnia, which sounds as bad as anything could be for a person. I’m really talking about not needing to sleep.

On reflection, though, and on balance, I spend about two-thirds of the week working, and the rest on rest and relaxation, so maybe doing the same on a typical day is about right too.

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Categories General

Insanity

February 1, 2017 //
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The comment usually attributed to Albert Einstein is that insanity is repeating the same mistakes and expecting a different outcome, or words to that effect.

For someone who regularly blogs about the primacy of productivity, I have a number of annoying habits that harm my productivity. They’re not mistakes as such, and I’m not insane, but they are silly and for that I am stupid.

One of them is that I almost never unsubscribe to emails from companies that I haven’t re-engaged with after the initial engagement. I argue to myself that I don’t open the email, and it only takes me a second or two to read the subject line and hit delete. When there are 20-50 of those emails a day, every day, it adds up, especially taking its toll on my attention and mental budgets.

Another peccadillo is the process for creating a new text document for writing. I was doing some personal writing the other day and I like to start a new document for each page, because each subject in the project I’m working on is no more than a page. Each new document comes up in the default font, which is not my favourite font, so I write a few lines, highlight them all, and change the font. Every single time.

Finally, I got round to searching the help function for how to re-set the default font and 2 minutes later my new docs were appearing in the lettering I like.

Why didn’t I do that a thousand documents ago? Madness…

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Categories General

Generosity

January 27, 2017 //
0

My son is a talented musician. He doesn’t get it from me, unless you count singing in the shower.

He’s just started busking in our local city to raise a few bucks to defray the costs of a summer school he goes to at a University in Dublin. It’s a pretty nerve-wracking experience for a young teenager to plant themselves on a busy shopping street and put themselves out there. He gets a little anxious before it, and worries about what people will think or say, but he gets it done. And he gets a bit of cash.

Quite a bit of cash actually. The other day I kept a distant eye on him for an hour, holed up in a nearby coffee shop. I was able to people watch as well, a favourite pastime of mine.

People are so generous. Their generosity amazes me. People of all ages and types gave him money. While he was playing, in between songs, even before he had started and was setting up. Maybe it’s because he looks younger than he is, or because he’s playing a relatively unusual instrument for busking with, I don’t know.

I know one thing though. We’re lucky that we live near a city which is well known for its friendliness, its arts culture and its generosity. I was blown away by how generous people are.

It restores your faith in humanity, for a while at least :-).

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Categories Communication, General
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