Work Better, Not Harder

Every small business owner knows what it feels like to have a "million" things to do and nowhere near enough time. We are constantly prioritizing, sometimes deliberately and sometimes less consciously. During the past month, I've done a heck of a lot of prioritizing. Some of you may remember the old screensavers where raindrops would run down your screen. That feels like my calendar lately, all the tasks slipping later in the day. Last week I needed to start some strategic planning and knew I needed to get focused fast. On-the-fly prioritizing wouldn't cut it. My marketing hero, Bernadette Jiwa read my mind and came to the rescue. I encourage you to read her article Always, Sometimes, Never for a simple approach to business planning. I hope it helps you as much as it's helped me at a time when a quick way to get focused was critical to making progress. Click to Tweet this Article originally published in the Work Better, Not Harder newsletter May 30, 201

Email bots are coming. Now, your reaction might be "Ugh!" but mine was, "Yay!" And that's part of the challenge. Here's another part: they are heaven-sent for spammers. Yes, that deserves an "Ugh!" What I'm excited about are all the possibilities for improving productivity in our daily routines . As a simple example, I'm currently running an email bot to help me memorize a list of items. It "uses a spaced repetition algorithm to bring some piece of information to (my) attention at the optimum interval for memorization." This coming battle between productivity and bad marketing practices will be epic. It will likely cause the reinvention of email communication. This new technology has such endless possibilities to improve our work (and our lives) but it's already being exploited by spammers. We won't be able to ignore its coming. Email bots can chop through firewalls and other security measures, improving deliver

You know when you've been online for a while - scrolling, reading, tapping - and then realize the time? We may feel good (because we learned something), bad (because something pushed a hot button), or indifferent (what level on HayDay?). Regardless, we still think of these times as getting lost down a rabbit hole. According to Wikipedia,  "Down the rabbit hole" is a metaphor for an entry into the unknown, the disorienting or the mentally deranging, from Alice in Wonderland . Those words may be a bit extreme for our online adventures but the sentiment holds. In class this week, we were reviewing the homework assignment which was to research and sign up for relevant newsletters. One participant said she kept ending up down rabbit holes. Then she looked up and said, "I guess we really want to BE the rabbit hole, right?" Thank you, Cecelia, for that insight! Content marketing is something I've been preaching about since before it was called that. I

The words that make my heart sing are only sometimes the same words that make my potential clients' hearts sing. And I've learned that I can be quite wrong about what I think is the value I bring to each relationship. For instance, nagging can be a competitive advantage ... but I certainly never planned to be a nagger. Part of starting and growing any business is defining our 'value proposition'. Talk about trying to hit a moving target! The longer you're in business and developing your expertise, the more different types of value you'll have to draw on... and offer to others. A big inventory of value propositions! What little pieces of feedback (formal or subtle) do you receive every day that can help to shape a new value proposition based on people's needs... instead of what you think ? What problems do your customers and prospects wish you could solve for them? I'm going to start an inventory... will you join me in this experiment? My fir

Can you agree that's a subject line you don't see every day? Yet it describes something that happens frequently in small business - the mingling of ideas, processes and tools. One of the templates in my Quick and Easy Content Creation workbook is called "The Laws". I was delighted to recently discover that Megann Willson of Panoptika Inc. used this template to write an article about strategic planning. In essence, she used "The Laws" template as an outlining tool to create a useful strategic planning article that is sort of like a template for success for me - and you - and all her readers. (Thanks Megann!) Read Megann's article on LinkedIn here . Download the Quick and Easy Content Creation workbook with "The Laws" plus 14 more templates here . What "laws" will you write about? Click to Tweet this Article