Successful Blog

Be More Productive By Doing Less

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By Robyn Tippins

If you are a small to medium sized business owner, I’m here to tell you today that your time is limited. I know this will come as an enormous surprise, but there are a finite number of your hours to go around.

You can’t do it all, and I’m guessing you probably don’t want to anyway…

time lost cannot be regained

Information Overload

Your company has to be on the cutting edge, so you must read often.

You spend at least 15% of every day (and probably more like 30%+) consuming information — Tweets, Facebook statuses, Pins, Medium posts and longform blog posts.

Your company has to be a thought leader, and that means churning out clever sayings and deep thoughts, and lots of them, including social updates, blog posts, white papers, videos and case studies.

You are well-read, from strategy to productivity, fascinating and much loved, and none of this is getting the work done.

Your company requires work to be done, the financials to be straight, payroll to be paid and sales to be made, so between administration, billable hours, garnering new business and information consumption/creation, you are doing too much.

Something has got to give.

Choose Whom You Will Serve

Choose a few hours, each day, to get work done.

I go radio silent every day from 2-4pm EST. During that time, I don’t check email, I don’t check Facebook and I don’t answer my phone. I don’t read HackerNews, TechMeme, Reddit or Cracked (my guilty secret). I just flat-out work. I get more done in those 2 hours, than I do in the entire rest of the day.

I’ve become so committed to this schedule that I have been able to cut out work, completely, on some Fridays, just by working ahead during those hyper-productive hours the rest of the week.

I have literally found an extra 8 hours per week, just hiding from my distractions.

Have you established any “heads-down” working hours?

Author’s Bio:Robyn Tippins is Co-Founder and CEO of Mariposa Interactive. She has been managing online communities for 17 years, and her book, Community 101, is a primer on online community management. You can follow Robyn on Twitter via @duzins.

Photo Credit: gothick_matt via Compfight cc

Leadership Lesson: Accepting Help Gratefully and Gracefully

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We’ve all met her.

She’s neck-deep in work commitments, taking care of a family, trying to stay in shape, and writing a novel in her spare time.

She looks like Wonder Woman from the outside, but if you look closer, the costume is frayed. If anyone says, “hey, let me take care of that project for you,” she grits her teeth and says, “no, I’ve got it.”

Wonder Woman lego

Pew! She responds within seconds to an email.
Pew! She figures out how to fix the dryer from a YouTube video.
Pew! She cranks out a presentation deck for a new customer.

Maybe she fears exposing that she’s not invulnerable. Maybe she is terrified of anyone finding out she doesn’t know everything.

Hey, guess what? Cat’s out of the bag.

You can’t do everything yourself.
You don’t know everything.
You haven’t experienced everything.

I just returned from a fantastic event, the GeniusShared retreat in Chicago, where a group of less than 30 smart, connected people gathered to help each other work on their dreams/businesses/passion projects.

The key to success for the retreat was the willingness of every person in the room to publicly share. All were willing to accept input, ideas, and perspectives from the others in the room.

Unless you’re willing to reveal your vulnerabilities to someone else, you will never be able to progress toward your goals. It’s the first step toward being a leader as well. Effective leaders always seek out those who are smarter, stronger, more experienced than they are.

Leaders accept help from others with grace and gratitude. They offer help to others freely.

When someone looks you in the eye and says, “how can I help you,” do you have a good answer ready? Can you accept with an open heart?

When was the last time you asked someone else, “how can I help you?”

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Photo Credit: levork via Compfight cc

Do You Do Contract Work? Pay Attention To This Painful Lesson Learned

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By Lisa Jenkins

What This Is and Isn’t

It’s not a mea culpa.

It’s an object lesson I’m sharing so you don’t ever have to learn it for yourself.

here comes the rain again

The Backstory

Now, I either charge full fees for what I do or charge nothing for what I do – either way, the client gets my best effort.

Since becoming self-employed and contracting my services, I’ve had to rearrange how I give back to the global community. I don’t have the kind of time I had in the past.

Where I used to do things like work with a food bank to collect donations of canned goods that I built into a giant salmon sculpture in the mall in order to spur more donations, I now donate my service to organizations that match who I am as a person.

There’s no cookie cutter – if it’s a fit for me, I’m happy to help.

So last week, when a valued colleague shot me a message asking if I knew anyone who would be interested in a short term project that involved hashtag tracking for a non-profit, I offered to donate my services.

It was simple. Track and analyze a two-week history for a single hashtag across three social media platforms. A walk in the park, right? I told the client I’d be in touch on Tuesday.

It became apparent that the tools I use weren’t equal to managing what turned out to be a massive amount of historical data. Massive. I hit the thresholds of data collection before the first day was out. I requested upgrade quotes.

I should’ve let the client know but ever the optimist, I trusted that quotes from my vendors would arrive. Until today. I’ve still heard nothing and time is up. I can’t deliver what I promised.

If I hadn’t counted on vendors to respond and deliver, I would’ve contacted the client and had them make arrangements with someone else. I need those upgrades to do the job I took on.

If the client hadn’t counted on me to deliver, they wouldn’t have publicized the anticipated release of the data. They need that data to close their campaign.

I am professionally mortified. I’ve owned up but that doesn’t fix anything; apologizing never mended a broken plate. The client is left in the lurch. And it’s my fault.

The Lesson

Never count on having something you need from a third party until you have what you need in hand.

As I type, it seems like I should’ve known this before now. Maybe I’m naive or maybe I’ve just been lucky up to now. The point is, I don’t want you to have to learn this lesson for yourself. So I’ve shared it.

In the interest of making life easier for fellow colleagues and their clients, feel free to share your own hard-learned lesson in comments.

Author’s Bio: Lisa D. Jenkins is a Public Relations professional specializing in Social and Digital Communications for businesses. She has over a decade of experience and work most often with destination organizations or businesses in the travel and tourism industry in the Pacific Northwest. Connect with her on Google+

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Small actions, taken consistently, can move mountains

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When Rosa Parks decided she wasn’t going to give up her bus seat, she may not have had in mind kicking off a movement that would change life in America.

Herman Melville, writing the sentence “Call me Ishmael,” probably didn’t sit down to write “the novel of the century.”

Mother Teresa simply decided to care for one person at a time. She had no thought of becoming beatified by the Catholic Church.

We all have to find our own first small action.

One organization that is truly living this credo is Milaap. It’s a crowdlending platform that has raised more than $1.5 million, with a 98.48% repayment rate. They are celebrating their fourth anniversary with a 24-hour online conversation about sustainable giving.

Members of the site choose a project/borrower to support, and how much they wish to lend, and Milaap gives 100% of your loan funds to the borrower.

You then receive updates on the project via email, and get repaid. The funds can be reinvested in another micro-loan if you wish.

The concept is so simple. With each small loan, lives are changed. With each changed life comes promise and possibility for everyone touched by that life.

Reading through the available campaigns to support, you see families who can use a $100 loan to buy chickens to expand their chicken coops, to help abused women start their own businesses, or bring potable water to underserved areas. Each of these project groups are taking a single small action to improve their lives. The ripple effects over time will be enormous.

Maybe today you’re reading this post with a mountain sitting in front of you.

Is it a physical disability?
A financial hardship?
Do you have an enormous challenge at work?
A burning idea for a new business?

Whatever the mountain is, you can find a first step. Even if you’re moving it with teaspoons, you can make progress right now in this moment.

Maybe you can be inspired by Milaap and gather supporters to help you carry teaspoons.

Molly’s lovely post from this past Monday reminded us that we can’t do it alone. That’s even more true when the mountain looms large.

If you’d like to learn more about Milaap and the work they’re doing, visit their site at Milaap.org.

If you’d like to get help and support from your fellow teaspoon carriers, let us know in the comments. Let’s take the first action together.

Milaap infographic
Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee

Sharpen Your Marketing Skills with MOOCs

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What’s a MOOC?

It’s a trendy name for online college courses–Massive Open Online Courses.

It’s college without the beer pong.

In many professions, it’s common to have a requirement to do continuing education. Accountants, educators, attorneys, and many others are obligated to keep learning in order to maintain their professional status. Entrepreneurs should be doing it voluntarily.

Why You Should Always Be Learning

Even if you have 100 business and marketing blogs in your RSS reader, you should still go deeper. With the latest online courseware technology, you can communicate with fellow students, receive the information in video and/or audio format, work on collaborative projects, and often get course materials as well. This is a much richer experience than the hit-or-miss method of reading blog posts or e-books.

Stephen Covey’s 7th Habit of Highly Successful People is “sharpen the saw.” Anyone who wants to run a successful business with longevity should pay attention to this important habit.

Sharpening the Saw means preserving and enhancing the greatest asset you have–you. It means having a balanced program for self-renewal in the four areas of your life: physical, social/emotional, mental, and spiritual.

A key component of many MOOCs is the sharing of real-world experiences and projects by the participants. You may get inspiration, support, and new ideas by joining. If you’re feeling stuck in a rut, this could be something to give you a good kick in the pants.

First, Decide What You’re Studying

There are courses available on a huge array of subjects. You can either follow a course series from a specific institution, or set up your own path of study.

Are you interested in honing your branding skills? Need help with market research? Want to build on your knowledge of competitive analysis? Do some research and gather a group of courses that you can “stack” consecutively for maximum reinforcement of the key concepts.

A Sampling of MOOC Resources

  • edx.org (https://www.edx.org/) – Free online courses for an array of schools, sortable by category/subject area. This is a collaborative effort by several institutions. Includes a lot of Ivy League content.
  • MITOpenCourseWare (ocw.mit.edu) – Free online courses from MIT; includes a marketing subject area.
  • Entrepreneurship Corner (ecorner.stanford.edu) – Stanford’s excellent series of videos and podcasts for entrepreneurs. There is a mobile app available as well.
  • MOOC List (http://www.mooc-list.com/) – An aggregator site that is searchable by subject; huge list of MOOCs from all over the web.

Drawbacks of the MOOC

  • You may not earn credits; if you’re looking to end up with a certification or course credits, check up-front. Some offer college credits and some do not.
  • Might be outdated material (check the date on the course before starting it…some were recorded a long time ago, and best practices do change).
  • You get what you pay for. If it’s free, remember that you won’t have full attention from the professor, and there may not be technical support available if you have problems accessing the course.
  • Might not be structured enough for some types of learners. Most MOOCs are free-flowing and study-at-your-own pace. This won’t work if you don’t have some discipline to keep going.

So, are you ready to give it a try? Please share any good online courses you’ve experienced already!

Author’s Bio: Rosemary O’Neill is an insightful spirit who works for social strata — a top ten company to work for on the Internet . Check out the Social Strata blog. You can find Rosemary on Google+ and on Twitter as @rhogroupee