- Photo Credit:© Gabriel Plata Stapper
Roughly 60 days ago (or so), you probably made some resolutions. Maybe to eat better or work out more frequently – which are resolutions that are similar to what everyone makes – but I’m more interested in your business resolutions. As you prepared for 2010, what did you decide to do this year that will make you more successful?
More importantly, are you doing what you decided to do?
I was thinking about blogging on another topic today but I stumbled across a great article and I just had to post it (along with my own thoughts on the matter).
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Paul Lemberg and I share a similar goal in the work that we each do. Ultimately, both of us strive to help business owners use productivity to increase business success.
Paul has developed something called the Formula 5 system in which he lists 5 aspects of a business that can be altered to grow the business. The first 3 parts of his Formula 5 are:
1) Increase your conversion rate.
2) Increase your value per customer.
3) Increase the number of leads.
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I’m not much into video games. I have nothing against them (although they can eat up time like crazy) but I just have other things on my radar that are more pressing for me. Regardless, I can appreciate a good video game, not just for its artistry but for what it can teach business owners:
Video games are a great intersection between technical proficiency, artistic ability, and user experience.
When those things intersect in the right ways, a compelling game is created. Your business is similar:It’s an intersection between those three things.
- You need technical proficiency to make sure your website and backoffice operations are running correctly
- You need artistic ability in your design, branding, marketing, content creation, packaging,
- You need a positive user experience throughout the entire process, from the time someone first interacts with your business until long past the time that they’ve purchased and used your products.
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Okay, usually when you hear that, it’s not a good thing. One of the first things you think when someone says that is: “Don’t drink the Kool-Aid”. The second thing you think is “How do I get out of this conversation as quickly as possible before the person asks ME to join the cult, too?”
But trust me, this is a cult you’ll WANT to join.
Here’s how I stumbled upon this cult: I was totally looking for something else but I found this blog and thought: “yeah, I’m all over this, It’s called “the cult of done”. Two people – Bre Pettis and Kio Stark – wrote a manifesto about productivity. It’s simple and elegant. It’s just 13 points. And when you read them, you’ll be inspired! Oddly enough, they wrote it in just 20 minutes and I wonder if that time pressure added to its simplicity and elegance.
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From time to time I subscribe to ezines and newsletters when the subject matter of a site is something I want to know more about. Unfortunately, they suck. Many of them.
Here are the things I hate about them:
- Your newsletter just rehashes your blog. Hey, I get it, you’re busy and maybe people want to review your blog titles at the end of the week instead of clicking to your blog every day. Make sure you tell people that is the case.
- Your newsletter is a totally different subject than your site. So your blog has pictures of kitten and you encourage people to sign up for your newsletter… which is your legal firm’s newsletter. Not cool. I want kittens, not your latest legal insight.
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In the last blog I talked about improving your business productivity by minimizing the amount of in-boxes, in-baskets, schedules, calendars, task lists, and other collection points you have. In this blog, I’m going to talk about how you can do that well… with the assumption that you can’t eliminate all of them, but you can consolidate a place to gather the information altogether.
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If you’re just starting out in business, this blog won’t apply to you… yet. But if you’ve been in business for a while, I think this will really resonate with you:
You get up in the morning to start your day. You open your email. There are 25 new emails plus a dozen from yesterday that you didn’t get to. You go to your task management system; there are a dozen tasks waiting, perhaps shaded with various colors of green (good!) and red (never good!). Then you look at your schedule. Then you look at your wall calendar. Then you check the proprietary task management systems that four of your clients have set up for you to use. Oh, and you haven’t checked voicemail yet.
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We all face professional disasters of one kind or another. It’s inevitable, whether you work in your own business or for someone else. And sometimes those disasters are brought on by us (whether we want to admit it or not) and sometimes those disasters are externally occurring but impact us anyway.
I was going to list a few disasters but then I realized that I could fill the next 100 blogs with disaster story after disaster story; and you’d be likely to match me with your own disaster stories.
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