HB Publishing’s Top 6 Posts of 2016

1. Incorporating Video into Articles and Posts (and vice versa)

2. Does Your Trust Battery Need a Charge?

3. Successful Professionals Use Slideshare

4. Not Worried? Maybe You Should Be

5. Working Out the Changing Nature of Our Work
6. Is Free Time Overrated?

*** Will you be podcasting in 2017? Take our InstaPoll and see you stack up to your peers.

From Trump’s surprise election victory to the Chicago Cubs’ World Series victory (ending a 108 year drought), 2016 was anything but a boring, predictable year. One thing we learned from your reaction to our weekly blog Online Marketing B2Beat, is that your desire to keep abreast with the constantly changing landscape in your working lives never strayed far from your subconscious. Your reading patterns revealed strong interest in content marketing strategies, such as incorporating video clips into your articles and posts and using Slideshare to expand the audience for your presentations. From a strategic standpoint, you expressed concern about disruptive factors in the marketplace, building trust within your team, having more work/life balance and turning worry from a negative to a positive. If you missed a popular post, here they are again with a quick summary:

1. Incorporating Video into Articles and Posts (and vice versa). As far back as 2014, we explained how adding video to your written content can substantially improve engagement and recall. On the flip side, a concise text-based summary that accompanies your video will greatly increase viewership. Our client, Coyle Financial Counsel found that viewership of its twice weekly video blogs increased substantially when it started offering a text-based summary right below its video player. The text summary always includes snappy “Key Takeaways.”

2. Does Your Trust Battery Need a Charge? Tobi Lutke, CEO of the e-commerce software provider, Shopify, described how every new employee starts at Shopify with their “trust battery” charged at the 50 percent level. As time goes on, the charge level goes up (or down) based on interactions with managers and whether the employee becomes more or less trustworthy and whether or not he or she delivers on what they promise.

3. Successful Professionals Use SlideShare.  If you’re not familiar with Slideshare (now owned by LinkedIn/Microsoft), think of it as a YouTube for professional presentations. The sharing site gets an estimated 70 million unique visitors per month and an estimated 400,000 new presentations are uploaded daily. Unlike YouTube, SlideShare gives you quality eyeballs, rather than quantity. SlideShare is a favorite hunting ground for journalists, speaker bureaus and conference organizers. Learn why.

4. Not Worried? Maybe You Should Be.  As a former boxer and wrestler, I’d rather have my guard up all the time than take a haymaker to the chin from seemingly out of nowhere. That’s not negativity or pessimism—that’s good old fashioned pragmatism and one of the most important ingredients for business survival. Some worry is actually good for you,” according to Simon Rego, a cognitive behavioral psychologist. Learn more.

5. Working Out the Changing Nature of Our Work.  Sally Krawcheck, CEO of Ellevest outlined five keys for success in the new world of work. She said businesses are changing, pivoting and being disrupted at lightning speed, thanks to “the forces of technology and globalization.” What that means she said is that “what worked for decades won’t be a given any longer.” She believes successful leaders will ditch corner offices, encourage more collaboration, give people time to think things through, embrace intellectual discomfort and a willingness to fail.” What do you think?

6. Is Free Time Overrated? A Stanford University professor argues that time is a “network good.” In other words, free time is only valuable if others in your schedule also have that time free as well. As Young observed, “We face a problem, of coordination. Work-life balance is not something that you can solve on your own.” Same goes for telecommuting, flex-time, job-sharing, etc. We’re freer than ever to work where we want to work, how we want to work and when we want to work. But if you can’t enjoy that time with others, how much is it really worth? Do you fall into that trap of “bowling alone” or in my case skiing alone?

From all of us here at HB Publishing, have a great 2017. You can work smarter without having to work harder.

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Tags: Top posts of 2016, time management, workplace trust, Slideshare, Video with articles, Sally Krawcheck

An Unexpected Gift of Time

Yesterday afternoon, one of our weekly client conference calls was cancelled at the last minute. Nothing remarkable about that, except the meeting organizer, who’s always very on top of things said: “Enjoy the gift of time” in her meeting cancellation notice. You don’t hear that every day.

And, it was a gift. Due to some IT issues that shut us down for half the day, we weren’t as prepared as usual for our weekly “gut check” call with this no-nonsense client. Nice folks from the midwest, but you can’t BS your way through a call with them. Suddenly, we felt we had magically “manufactured” an extra hour of time in the day. Trust me, it didn’t go to waste.

For many of us, the next 60 days will be a series of moving deadlines, delayed decisions, interruptions, weather “events,” travel delays and last minute shopping and year-end planning. You won’t know exactly when a big hole will be blown into your carefully organized schedule, but sooner or later it’s going to happen. We’ve found our most successful clients are not necessarily the ones who are the most organized; it’s the ones who can adapt the fastest to a changing landscape.  

How to cope? Tough love

If you’re expecting us to tell you to take a deep breath, count to 10, make a nice cup of herbal tea and talk a long walk, you’ll be disappointed. As regular readers know, we prefer the “tough love” approach.

So does one of clients, Gary Klaben, of Coyle Financial Counsel in Chicago.  Klaben suggests placing boundaries around yourself and your team so you can’t procrastinate or get distracted. Klaben said the simplest way to accomplish this is to get tough tasks on our schedule. Right there where everyone can see it.

Borrowing a page from Tim Ferriss (The 4-Hour Workweek), Klaben only puts something on his schedule only when it’s a “Hell yes, man, I’m really excited about it!” In addition to “hard scheduling,” Klaben said you should tackle your most difficult tasks first thing in the morning. “I find that if you put those boundaries in place and really schedule things, then 80 percent of the time the task gets done,” he said. “By contrast, very little gets done if you don‘t put it on the schedule.”

A West Point grad (like his son and daughter), Klaben is clearly a disciplined guy. But he also recommends building in “focus” days, “buffer” days and even free days into your monthly and quarterly schedule. This forces you to take a step back and think. In other words spend some quality time ON the business rather than IN the business. But, if you don’t schedule those days, they ain’t gonna happen.

As many of you know, we advocate getting at least a one-month head start on your New Year’s resolutions and revisiting those goals several times throughout the year. It doesn’t matter how lofty or modest your goals are. You need tangible metrics to show progress and make them stick.

If you’re not a morning person like Klaben, don’t sweat it. Just try to figure out when you’re most productive and leverage the heck out of that time of day. For tips on how to do that, check out one of our most popular posts of 2014, The Best (and Worst) Times to Do Things at Work.

Conclusion

Time’s going to keep flying by; we might as well have fun adapting. Happy Holidays  (way in advance).  We also recommend Tom Friedman’s NY Times op-ed piece from yesterday, The World is Fast. He explains how the three biggest forces on the planet — the market, Mother Nature and Moore’s Law — are interconnected and why you need to pay attention to all three.

Fasten your seat belt and enjoy the ride. We’ve got a lot more to do before we ring in 2015.

Our blog has more, as does the FREE Resources page of our website.

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Our Top 5 Posts of the Year

With all due respect to January 1st and Times Square, now is the time of year that many of us start thinking about new beginnings, fresh starts, resolutions and goals that did or didn’t get achieved in the previous 12 months. Autumn officially started this week. The weather’s getting cooler and leaves are changing colors in many parts of the country. Kids are back to school. Offices are humming with full staffs for the first time in months, and tonight marks the start of Rosh Hashanah, the official kickoff to the Jewish high holidays.

Even if you’re not Jewish, you probably know that Rosh Hashanah (aka “Rush-a-Homa”) is a generally festive holiday for those of the Hebrasion Persuasion albeit more solemn than American New Year. Like the American New Year, Rosh Hashanah is a time to look back at the past year and make resolutions for the following year. It’s also when the Torah, (Hebrew Bible) resets to chapter 1, part 1. Regardless of your faith, why not take advantage of this short pause in the hectic work week and see if your work/life balance is really in balance and if you’re getting closer (or further away) from the reasons you started your own firm or practice.

Our 5 most popular posts of the year

1. Can Your Staff Really Work Effectively from Home?

2. Face to Face Networking and Why You Need to Take the Shuttle Bus

3. Do You Know Why Your Marketing’s Working (or Not)?

4. Were You Laboring on Labor Day?

5. The Best (and Worst) Times to do Things at Work

Based on our web stats over the past nine months, it’s clear that time management and work/life balance are top of mind for our readers. You’re also concerned about professional networking, face to face interaction in this digital age and finding the right metrics to gauge your marketing efforts. Management guru, Peter Drucker, famously said, “Business has only two functions--marketing and innovation. All the rest are costs." To that we’d like to add a third function—time management, as in finding the time to do marketing and innovation well.

Too busy sawing to sharpen the saw

In one way or another, most of you have told us you’re well on your way to living the true American dream. You your own boss and making a very comfortable living doing work that you find challenging and fulfilling. You’re spending most of the day with intelligent clients and co-workers that you like and respect. You’re making a difference in their lives.  But how many of you are really spending enough quality time with family, friends and community organizations—and pursuing your favorite avocations such as tennis, golf, fly fishing, chess, auto racing and triathlons? C’mon be honest.

Conclusion

Drucker also said, “follow effective action with quiet reflection. From the quiet reflection will come even more effective action.”  However you do it, take a little time this week for some quality introspection. Make sure the important people in your life (and your health) do not fall by the wayside as you take your business to the next level of success. You may not have another time to catch your breath until the next set of Holidays in December.

Have a Happy New Year (L’Shna Tova).

PS: Click here if you’ve always been mystified by the Jewish Holidays, and you’ll find answers to many of the questions you’d like to ask, but weren’t sure if they were politically correct. For instance, why don’t the Jewish Holidays fall at the same time every year?

Our blog has more, as does the FREE Resources page of our website.

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TAGS: Peter Drucker, Rosh Hashanah, time management, work life balance, self reflection

No Time to Think?

Get off the grid and don’t be afraid of your own thoughts

Many of you are familiar with Stephen Covey’s famous observation that we’re “so busy sawing we don’t have time to sharpen the saw.” We’ve all been there. Done that. We know it’s not a good way to be. But many of you have told us lately that you feel you’re spending way too much time at the saw mill lately. Guess the Dog Days of Summer got cancelled this year.

What to do? If you’re expecting us to recommend deep breathing, long walks on the beach and some yoga or meditation, you’ve come to the wrong place. Most of you are Type A, if not Type A-plus! You need something more concrete, more tactical!

That said, we’re not knocking deep breathing, long walks, yoga and meditation. All can be helpful. But what most of you need is tough self-love, not navel gazing. You need to unplug from the grid and carve out some time to think. Really think without distractions. Bring a pencil and a yellow legal pad if you like, but nothing more high tech than that.

Personally, I take a 24-hour break from all technology every weekend. Usually from mid-day Saturday to mid-day Sunday. Unless it’s a life threatening text or cell phone call, I’m just not going to address it during my 24-hour “quiet period.” Try it for yourself some weekend. The world won’t come to an end and see if you don’t come back Sunday evening a little more energized than you normally are.

Kate Murphy had a great piece in today’s New York Times that talked about why people who complain about being “super busy,” “crazy busy” or “insanely busy” never take advantage of a rare moment for “reflective thought” when they get it. Stuck in traffic or a long grocery line? What do we do? Out comes the mobile device. Sound familiar? As Murphy observed, the journal Science published a study that showed how far people will go to avoid introspection.

Turns out many of us don’t like introspection. Or we’re afraid of our own thoughts. Or we’re afraid that we’ll just dwell on what’s wrong in our lives. But, according to Silicon Valley psychologist, Stephanie Brown, “suppressing negative feelings just gives them more power.” And you can’t solve or let go of problems if you don’t allow yourself time to let go of them. Brown is the author of “Speed: Facing Our Addiction to Fast and Faster.”

Conclusion

While we agree with the experts about the importance of self-reflection, it doesn’t mean you have to focus exclusively on fixing what’s wrong. You can also focus on potential good things. Try this: Substitute the words “opportunity” or “innovation” for the word “problem” during your next self-reflective time. See what happens. Just as many people are afraid to face their fears head on, you’d be surprised how many people are afraid to bring their BHAGs (Big Hairy Audacious Goals) to light. Don’t be afraid to see how good you and your team can be.

Stay focused this week, even if many around you seem like they’ve checked out for the summer. Doing so will pay big dividends come September.

Best, HB

Our blog has more, as does the FREE Resources page of our website.

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TAGS: No time to think, time management, adrenal burnout, stress, Science journal, Stephanie Brown