Category: leadership

Labor Day productivity tips

labor_day.gifIt’s official. Summer’s over, kids. Yeah, school’s been back in session for a week or two, but it’s a long haul from here to Thanksgiving. Lots of work ahead of us all. Maybe we could use some tips for being more productive. Here are a few I’ve culled from the RSS feeds.

  • Let’s start with three brilliant reads (all PDFs) brought to us by ChangeThis:
  • Before your start working on that next PowerPoint presentation, check out these clear and to-the-point PowerPoint tips. This is a summary by Garr Reynolds (of Presentation Zen fame) of a new book, Clear and to the Point: 8 Psychological Principles for Compelling PowerPoint Presentations, by Stephen Kosslyn, a Harvard cognitive neuroscientist. Kosslyn “aligns his list of presentation and PowerPoint ‘do’s & don’ts’ with sound psychological principles,” Reynolds writes. But the Harvard scientist’s pedigree offers a voice of authority that may help communicators change an organization’s prevailing PowerPoint culture. “It’s one thing when a designer [or you, to your boss] says the current methods are flawed, but it is quite another when a cognitive neuroscientist says so.” Reynolds’ post offers a thorough summary of Kosslyn’s ideas, with pictures.
  • Plans? Who needs a plan? What you need are skills and a problem. “Take a look at the biographies of great people. None of them actually planned to accomplish what they did accomplish. Their ‘life plans’ are something authors and historians (and sometimes they themselves) construe from the crooked path their life actually was.” Via Signal vs. Noise (link).
  • Five resources for creating and managing your brand, via Chris Brown’s Branding and Marketing blog, which is a pretty neat resource of its own.
  • How to get out of bed earlier. I swear, I’m going to try this one first thing tomorrow. Via LifeHacker.
  • And to wrap it all up in a nice, neat package, some nuggets from Seth Godin‘s Labor Day post.

    Today, working hard is about taking apparent risk. Not a crazy risk like betting the entire company on an untested product. No, an apparent risk: something that the competition (and your coworkers) believe is unsafe but that you realize is far more conservative than sticking with the status quo. …

    Hard work is about risk. It begins when you deal with the things that you’d rather not deal with: fear of failure, fear of standing out, fear of rejection. Hard work is about training yourself to leap over this barrier, tunnel under that barrier, drive through the other barrier. And, after you’ve done that, to do it again the next day.

    The big insight: The riskier your (smart) coworker’s hard work appears to be, the safer it really is. It’s the people having difficult conversations, inventing remarkable products, and pushing the envelope (and, perhaps, still going home at 5 PM) who are building a recession-proof future for themselves.

    So tomorrow, when you go to work, really sweat. Your time is worth the effort.

    • Kansas City Star on Avila’s blogger-in-chief

    The Kansas City Star’s education reporter, Mara Rose Williams, recently wrote about college presidents who blog and homed in on the blog of Avila University President Ronald A. Slepitza. The prez “cozies up to his office computer” on a weekly basis to post his thoughts “about life, death and spirituality,” Williams writes. Said Slepitza: “I try to talk a little about myself, the university and about matters I hope will be of interest to the reader.”

    It appears his online dialogues are attracting an audience. Most of them, like one titled “Rummaging for God in the Midst of a Busy Day,” have garnered what he called a “powerful response” from readers.

    In another blog posting, Slepitza talks about ingredients in a chili dip made with cream cheese, cheddar cheese and a can of chili to segue into a conversation about innovation.

    Slepitza’s posts are thoughtful and insightful. But he remains an anomaly — in Kansas City and across the nation.

    What’s interesting to me about this story, from a PR and marketing perspective, is Bob Johnson‘s comment that, in general, “PR people tend not to like unscripted messages going out from key university people.” Then Williams finds a PR person to say that monitoring the blogosphere “would be ‘just another chore’ for the public relations office, which already is short on time to keep up with goings-on at the university.”

    Just another chore?

    Until we change our attitudes about online conversations, we’re going to continue to struggle with new media.

    P.S. – Johnson blogged about his conversation with Williams before the story hit. I’m not sure I would have done that. To me, it shows a lack of respect for the journalist who contacted you as a source for a story — not so you could blab about it on your own blog and “scoop” the reporter. Maybe journalists need to better understand this new playing field as well.