February 19, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Powerball or a powerbook, any book

I bought a Washington State lottery ticket when we were on vacation, while we were waiting for the ferry in Friday Harbor.  It cost $1 and offered payout of $1.8M, which seemed “enough” at the time.  It was the last real day of vacation, and I was entertaining the fantasy of being able to call in to the office and say, “I’m not coming back.”

Of course I didn’t win.  I would be writing a different post if I had.  I know someone who knows someone who won, once, and then lived on the income for 20 years, and now finds herself 20 years older and out of income and unskilled.  This is not a good place to be.

I also know someone who buys a ticket for every drawing.  He plays the same number every time, a pair of easily-remembered birthdays, and buys 52 tickets at a time, the maximum allowed.  He only has to check the website twice a week so his effort investment is minimal. I am tempted by his arguments in favor of the outgo being an entertainment expense; a cheaper fantasy trip than going to the movies.

But we are different people, with different brain patterns and different cash flows.  Every time I dip my toe in the “what would I do with all that money” pool, I come out covered in a nasty slime.  My thoughts turn to the winnings and how more money would change my life, and away from what it will take to change my life with the skills and gifts I have available to me today.

We came home to truly difficult news about my job; the rumored merger was going to happen; massive uncertainty affecting a huge global workforce.  I think about buying my way into relief with lottery tickets.  This is not a good way to think.

On the way home from a day filled with swirling rumors of imminent unemployment, I stopped at Borders, looking for a copy of the latest What Color is Your Parachute (41st edition is on the market.  Am I that old? I used the 1980 edition in college…).  I stopped at a bargain table of books marked at $2.  This is almost less than the cost of gas needed to get to the library.  I bought You Call the Shots by Cameron Johnson.  Amazon reviews confirm this book will not  make me rich anytime soon; suspect the value of a $2 book about making money.

However:  two dollars.  A book about business, or a week of powerball tickets.  Even if all I get out of the book is the opportunity to add one more review to my Amazon list, I’ll have more to show than I get for two losing powerball tickets.

For those times Borders isn’t selling books at $2, there’s the thrift shop.  Not long ago, someone retired and dumped an entire collection of best-selling business books into the Habitat Restore, where they eventually sold at $1 for a bundle of five.  Lots of information for not very much money at all.  Vastly higher ROI (return on investment) than powerball.

Caveat:  It’s not just the idea.

If you get one good idea per week, my friend Paul told me, it’s worth it. If you apply that idea, I can’t even guess how much it would be worth.

(Steph quoting Ramit Sethi)

I can do way more with a good book, much faster, than I can with any fantasy about winning the Powerball.

Filed Under: Leadership 303
February 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment

How to print a directory listing

I needed to create a list of all the information products I had purchased over the past two years in order to see what I had already read and what I needed to study.  I wanted to be able to manipulate the information in a spreadsheet.  Here are the ways I found:

Folder Size

Download the free Folder Size application from the people at Mind Gems to scan any directory on your PC.  The output report will tell you where your fat-files are hiding, should you need to clean up disk space.  This program solved my initial problem–why is my hard drive so full? but it wouldn’t produce a printed listing of a directory’s contents.

Add the Print Directory capability from Microsoft

Add the Print Directory menu item to your Explorer drop downs (link goes to an official MS help site), and you can print the listing from any directory with a right-click of the mouse.  This is better than nothing, but not by much.  The file goes to the printer automatically, and then deletes itself.  You don’t have the opportunity to open the file with MS Excel first and manipulate it.  Your printed listing comes out in whatever order the directory was sorted in.

Return to DOS

Are you old enough?  Do you remember managing your PC from the command line?  To tell the truth, I barely do.  But “barely” was enough.

From the Search box at the bottom of the main menu listing (if that won’t find it for you, maybe you shouldn’t be doing this), type cmd.  You’ll get the DOS window.  In that, type

dir full_directory_path > filename.txt

Dir command for DOS

Running the dir command at the DOS prompt


Open the *.txt file with Excel, allowing Excel to recognize how to handle the information, and you’re set.
(You don’t need to see the content in the image; the spacing is all you need.)

Filed Under: How to 680
February 8, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Schedule the un-doing time

Have you ever come home from a fantastic class or seminar, brimming with ideas and vision and action items for your business?  Plenty of times, right?  And almost as many times, two weeks later, you come across your notes in a pile on your desk, coffee-stained and wrinkled, and realize you haven’t taken action on a single idea.

What’s the fix?  Take another class?

Unless you can find a class about “un-doing,” you already have all the skills you need to master this hack for a productive life.  You simply need to remember to do it, or rather, un-do it.

The fix for not implementing the new ideas or new information you learned in an expensive class is to schedule the un-doing time, aka implementation or execution time, at the very same moment you schedule the class.  That is, when you add the class to your calendar, book at least half the amount of time as follow up.  Hard-code it, as we used to say in IT.  Make an appointment with yourself.

If you’re taking a week-long class, it could be that an entire week of half-days of “follow up time” is too much.  However, you may do well to schedule at least one hour a day for the following week, or perhaps four hours a week for the following month, to act on the content, ideas, and information you gained.  You’d be surprised.

In most cases, I’m not fond of booking “activity” appointments with myself.  I prefer to use my calendar for hard-stop events—scheduled appointments, phone calls, and webinars, events that if I don’t attend, I miss altogether.  I my version of “getting things done” to keep track of assignments and project work.

However, booking a follow up time at the same time I move the class onto my calendar helps me to prevent calendar creep.  When I see an “open” day or week, it can be too easy to allow an appointment or four to creep in. I don’t always remember to look at the previous week to remind myself that I will be doing something then that will require follow up in what appears to be “open” time.

Don Aslett, the cleaning and productivity maven, is a big fan of scheduling the Un- time.

  • Party “afters”—dishes, food, cleaning
  • Cleaning and putting away tools after a construction project
  • Filing project papers and documenting lessons learned

In How to Handle 1000 Things at Once, Don adds that not scheduling and arranging for the “un-doing” of an activity, when that work has to be done anyway, casts a pall over the memory of the event (p. 64).  Brides who don’t think about who will handle wedding gifts brought to the reception impose on their friends.  When we don’t allow time to implement ideas from a class or presentation, we tend to blame the teacher, not our own scheduling ability.

In a recent blog post, behavioral economist Dan Ariely tells a story of a company that failed to allow any time for salving the emotional pain and de-motivation resulting from a canceled project.  The people who commented on the post have a range of opinion about who was actually responsible for the employees’ feelings and reactions.  Regardless, it is probable that a formal “un-doing” of the canceled project, rather than a curt, “quit working on that and do something else” message would probably have unruffled feathers and reduced turnover at the company.

When looking for new employees, hiring managers like to talk about “attention to detail” and “follow-through.”  Larry Bossidy, retired CEO of Honeywell, wrote an entire book about this trait, called Execution.  If you can’t demonstrate “follow-through,” you may be out of luck in the job hunt.  (Hint—get a friend to proof read your resume.  The #1 most common indicator of good attention-to-detail is no typos.)  Now, some people are clearly better at execution than others, and some manager are all too easily fooled by a resume that has been carefully proofed, true.  On the other hand, a substantial about of “attention to detail” is simply a productivity hack.  Learn to schedule time for follow up.

People who commute learn to build a schedule that allows for drive time.  If we live in high-traffic areas, we even manage drive times that vary by a factor of three, depending on rush hour conditions.  Use the same skills to master un-doing.  The longer the meeting and/or the newer or more challenging the material, the longer it will take to act on it.  Block “un-do” time into your calendar when you schedule an event, and you’ll amaze yourself with your ability to act on new ideas.

Filed Under: Project management 658.4
February 4, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Where’s the Willpower Store?

According to a number of long-term studies quoted in The Key to Health, Wealth and Success: Self-Control in Time magazine’s health website, children who exercised more self-control when they were four years old earned more income and did better in school 20 years later, than their peers who exercised less self-control.

It doesn’t take much social awareness to understand that people who exercise more self-control, as a rule, do better in life. Perhaps, years ago, the impulsive and quick to act survived better than the careful thinkers.  Perhaps they lived when the prudent, thoughtful person was killed by the sabertooth tiger. Today, we’re far more likely to die as a result of impulsive actions, then of taking a moment or two to think through our options.

Marshmallow Study

Widely known as the “marshmallow study,” scientists at Stanford looked at whether children could resist eating one marshmallow right in front of them.  If they could resist eating the one, they got two marshmallows 15 minutes later. As reported in Time Magazine, the study doesn’t say anything about what you could do today if you happen to be one of the children who ate the marshmallow quickly. It also doesn’t say anything about whether the children who could resist simply didn’t like marshmallows.

I can resist coconut frosted cupcakes until the cows come home. I can resist a lot of things I don’t like. The problem is resisting the things you do like.

The article was actually quite depressing. Apart from saying that 7% of the children appeared to be able to improve their self-control over the course of their lives, the researchers (at least as quoted in Time) had no suggestions to make.  However, people who study how people change know that there are a lot of interventions any individual can make to improve his or her own outcome in life.

No Willpower Store

There is no willpower store. If you find yourself saying, “I simply don’t have enough willpower,” it’s not like you can go somewhere and buy more.

The truth is, you already have enough. People who can resist temptation use strategies that are entirely different from the behaviors used by the people who succumb. A different report of the same study, covered in the New Yorker magazine a year earlier, provides direction.

If you’re thinking about the marshmallow and how delicious it is, then you’re going to eat it,” Mischel says. “The key is to avoid thinking about it in the first place.”

In other words, you can learn how to use the willpower you do have in a direction that’s useful.

Willpower is not about resisting. Willpower is actually about moving towards something else. It is very much easier to take action in the direction of a contradictory goal, then it is to stand still and resist the pull of something attractive, that isn’t in your overall best interest.

The twelve-step programs that fight active addictions work, in part, not by telling their members to stand outside the bar and not go in, but by teaching new and very different behaviors that have nothing to do with alcohol.  People who learn live without addictive substances develop lives that intersect very much less with drugs and alcohol.

People who stand around the buffet line at a crowded party are very much likely to eat more calories than the people who take a plate of healthy food and move to the other side of the room, sitting down in a low soft couch that’s difficult to get out of.

We know that telling people about savings rates and the benefits available to them in a 401(k) match does little to increase the savings rate of any corporate employee pool. What does work is changing the default. If people are automatically signed up for 401(k) deduction when they start at a new job, everyone saves more.  When you select restaurants that don’t have an “all-you-can-eat buffet,” or that don’t put chips and bread on the table when you arrive, you will probably eat much less than you will if you spend your entire mealtime using willpower to resist the basket of chips.

If you don’t have enough willpower, it’s usually because you’re trying to use it as “won’t power.” The truth is, humans have very very little “won’t power,” and enormous reserves of willpower. People who successfully use willpower focus on something they are moving toward, not on something they are trying to resist.

If you’re trying not to eat cupcakes, and cupcakes are in the room, it’s going to be hard. Even if you successfully resist the cupcakes, chances are you will use up all of your resistance for the day, and then succumb to some other temptation later that afternoon. However, if you ignore the cupcakes by engaging in a different activity that has nothing to do with eating, you will find that your small steps toward the new goal actually create more energy and resolve.

“Won’t power” quickly depletes and runs dry.  Willpower, appropriately applied, replenishes itself every time it is used.

Have you replaced “won’t power” with will power?  Let me know in the comments.

Filed Under: Process 153
January 12, 2011 By Leave a Comment

Innovation in a Be Here Now Model

Showing my age in that title, no?

I spent most of December rethinking what services belong under the Red Tuxedo umbrella. I’m really comfortable working with innovation design processes, change management and staying changed, metrics, and the intersection of behavioral economics and marketing (to the extent they’re not the same arena, as some marketers suspect). Created seven huge mind maps about these topics and my plan is to turn some of those notes into articles, blog posts, and possibly, products.

At this very minute, I’m not quite sure how the notes will turn into a business. That’s not the point of today’s post; and neither is it the point of the work itself. I’m letting the process tell me who the clients will be. I have some ideas, based on what I already know about the business world and who might benefit from this information:  patent lawyers, for one, actuaries, CPAs, and other degreed professionals whose gifts don’t often run to marketing or process design. But that’s just what I understand today, and it may change.

A business advisor told me that the next step would be for me to go out and meet these people and find out what was on their minds, what problems they had, and what they services they would be willing to pay for. I’m not surprised that I resisted; could have simply ignored the suggestion, although that would have been awkward to handle conversationally. It’s not where the work is, yet.  The work needs to be written; now, first, before I try to take it public. (I want to capitalize “work,” but Byron Katie uses “The Work” to describe her process and I don’t want to step on those toes.)

When I think about this decision point in terms of innovation and design processes, I can see that:

  • Not going public is one way on not “failing fast,” by not getting feedback
  • You can’t innovate through focus groups. Henry Ford said, “If I’d asked my customers what they wanted, they’d have told me, ‘faster horses!'”
  • Ideas need protection in their early stages.  The first sign of green rarely looks like the adult plant.

“‘Seeing what happens next’ is not a business strategy,” my advisor said. “Yes, it is,” I answered. Given that we cannot ever predict the future in all its detail, “seeing what comes next” is what we always wind up doing, regardless of what additional actions we take. Sometimes we poke the bear by taking action, and call it “business strategy.” Sometimes we just watch to see what the bear will do on his own. (Your bear may be different from mine.) In the end, we always get an opportunity (unless we’re dead) to see what happens next. For that matter, plenty of people believe that being dead is the ultimate vision of “what happens next.” I’m simply choosing not to poke the bear right now.

Thus far, my writing reveals that I have more research to do. Hum. Ideas are always perfect, until you try to implement or execute on them. That’s when things get really interesting, at least if you understand creativity. So my ideas aren’t as perfect as I’d like to think they are. I’ll stay with them. I’ll post most here, or at www.hiringhowto.com, or at karentiede.com (my art blog) as they take form.

It’s not that I think I have such a great process, exactly. Like Churchill said about democracy, “Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others.” Innovation by “being here now” may not be the “best” process.  It isn’t what they say happens in Silicon Valley, or what Wall Street invests in. But when you’ve tried everything else, it doesn’t hurt to use what’s left. Stay tuned.

Feel free to share your experience with “let it be” innovation in the comments–thanks!

Filed Under: Design 745.4, Process 153
November 25, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Gratitude, 2010

I wrote a list of 50 Things I’m Grateful For (not counting the freedom to let my participles dangle as much as I want) for Thanksgiving release on www.hiringhowto.com, so I’m not going to try to double up and create a different list here.  John Forde, of Copywriter’s Roundtable, sent this post out today.  I like his take on the challenge.  Sometimes, looking at a list of problems I don’t have can feel like “cheap” gratitude, but it’s still gratitude, and that’s good.

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COPYWRITER’S ROUNDTABLE #491

November 23, 2010

Pull Up a Plate and Feast:  A Cornucopia of Copywriting Delights

“Feeling gratitude and not expressing it is like wrapping a present and not giving it.”

– William Arthur Ward

In the States, this Thursday is a time of Thanksgiving.  Your ovens will bulge, the relatives will descend, the wine will pour, the belt buckles will loosen.

At least, let’s hope so.

I’m a sucker for sentimentalism and tradition.

Which is why, I guess, I felt inspired just a second ago to sweep aside the generic copywriting insights I had lined up for  you today, to instead dig up our CR message from two years ago.  You’ll remember, that was just in the wake of a worldwide financial meltdown.  And you guys were about edgy as a 30-lb. turkey locked up overnight in an ax factory.

So what did we do?

The same thing we’re about to do again, which is glare right into the business end of those worries until they cough a little wonder and light.

As follows..

  • Thank merciful God for procrastination. Can you imagine how many busses you never stepped in front of… or how “sure-thing” investment flops you’ve missed… simply because you were “too late to the party?”
  • Show some thanks too, toward that love of your life who dumped you back in college or high school or maybe kindergarten. Think of the people you never would have met, the places you never would have gone, or the family you might never have had if she/he hadn’t.
  • Kudos to the heavens for giving us November drizzle and icy winter blasts, a month or so ahead of schedule.  How else would we remember how great it is to feel warm and dry and to have a roof over our heads? Everyone should be so lucky.
  • Thanks, too, for the politicians who make mistakes… the loved ones who irk us… and the bone- headed strangers who blunder through their lives, as reported on the nightly news. Some of us would never know what it is to feel like geniuses, if it weren’t by comparison.
  • Let’s heap up some hefty helpings of heartfelt indebtedness to crying children, honking cars, and men with jack-hammers too. How else would silence sound so sweet? Not to mention what it’s done for iPod sales and my shares in Apple.
  • Let us honor, too, the hordes that descend on houses during holidays (say that six times fast) and stay for dinner. How much worse would you feel if they didn’t want to come?

And if I can get little more serious now (at this point, imagine the champagne glass — half full — held high as we bring the toast in for a landing)…

Thanks in endless waves to our mentors and colleagues, and our customers and friends — in all cases, a confluence in both definition and generosity, not just this year but in all those years that have preceded this moment.   Thanks to family. Thanks to our children, who make everything about waking up worthwhile. And thanks to my wife — all our spouses — for everything they do to hold it all together.   Most of all, again, sincere thanks to you, for reading these issues and writing in with comments. It goes without saying, I couldn’t and wouldn’t have done it without you.

Thank god for our health.

And thanks especially to all you who made donations to my family’s “Movember” drive to raise research money to fight prostate cancer.

(I know who you are, because your name pops up right there on the site… seriously, I’m deeply grateful.)

If you’re in America and about to celebrate Thanksgiving this week, I hope it’s a feast beyond feasts and the best of your living memory.

If not, well then, go out and hit a McDonald’s… or a top run restaurant… and have a great (and grateful) night anyway.

Happy Thanksgiving!

P.S. This is the last full week of “Movemember,” the anti prostate cancer fundraiser I’ve told you about.

So far, we’ve raised $1,220.

I hope we’ll manage to raise more. And a lot of that, of course, might depend on you.

If you haven’t given yet and you’re inclined too, make sure you stop by and sign up here.

http://us.movember.com/mospace/959346

****************************************************

THE MISSING LINK: The Stories that Shape You

Not to get all schmaltzy, but here’s something worth doing, now that you’ve got family coming to town.

http://nationaldayoflistening.org/

****************************************************

PETITE THANKS

comment@jackforde.com

Barka: http://copywritersroundtable.com/signup

Kiitoksia: http://us.movember.com/mospace/959346

Oh, and this…

Efharisto poli.

P.S. Everything Between the %%%% (above) and the %%%%%% (below) is © 2010 by John Forde.

BY THE WAY, if you ever want to reproduce one of these CR articles in a blog, in an email, in a book, on a milk carton… or on one of those banners they hang on the back of airplanes at the beach… GO AHEAD!

You’ve got my blessing.

Just promise you’ll make sure you’ll include a link back to my website and encourage your readers to sign up for $78 worth of free gifts.

http://copywritersroundtable.com

%%%%%%

John’s emails are useful if you write for a living, BTW.  You might want to sign up for his email list.

What’s on your gratitude list this year?  Let me know in the comments.

Filed Under: Leadership 303
November 9, 2010 By Leave a Comment

One grammar mistake you should always make

“And” or “but”

The two great conjunctions.

“Or, yet, for, nor, & so” are the other five.

“Yet” is a useful word, and I’ll come back to that one later.

Yesterday morning, I was writing something about business and I found myself saying, “I need to do more networking to find out what people want to know about hiring, but I have the right attitude,” meaning, at least in rough draft form, that “at least I knew what I needed to be doing, which was half the battle.”

Only, just as my pen was reaching to start the top of the “b” in “but,” I caught myself, and changed the word to “and.”  “And I have the right attitude.”  In most cases, when I’m thinking about business or self improvement or any kind of change or betterment, “And” is the more useful word, even if “but” actually expresses the situation more accurately.

“But” is an ender, a thought-stopper, an argument.  “And” extends thoughts, allows for new ideas, encourages brainstorming and creativity, and awards accomplishment.

When I used to do Big Sister work at the local women’s prison, the women I worked with were allowed three “yeahbuts” a conversation (of course, only after we discussed and understood how this worked).  I was always able to work with “I hear what you’re saying and I don’t understand how it applies to my situation.”  When I heard “Yeah, but,” the sentence always goes on to end with “it’s different with me and that’s not going to work,” in the sense of “no point in trying.”

The Glaser-Kennedy marketing machine says the biggest objection they hear, even from members, is “yeah but, my business is different.”  Different audience, same response.  Just as trapped by their own language.

Whenever possible, I try to create a sentence that uses “and” rather than “but,” even if “but” may be immediately true.  I don’t mean this to be an exercise in positive thinking over accurate thinking.  I do mean that working to see possibilities and expressing them in written content has helped my brain to stay open to new ideas.

Not Yet, rather than I Can’t

In one of my other lives, I teach and re-teach adults to huula hoop.  I frequently hear, “I can’t do that,” even when someone is clearly keeping the hoop rotating.  (Once they get the hoop going, they’ll start in with the “I can’t do those tricks.”)  My response is, “Not yet.”

“I don’t know how to do that yet” is much more powerful than “I can’t.”  “Not yet” allows for the possibility of a different outcome in the future.  “I can’t” sounds like forever.

Back to writing style

Sometimes, the sentence simply demands a “but,” and rather than write that word, I’ll use a period and start a new sentence that goes in the new direction.  There’s a benefit to this practice:  I get shorter sentences.  This is a good thing.  When I look at my own writing on paper, one of the most common edits I make is to shorten sentences that go on and on and on, generally correctly written but way too long to read out loud (always the best test of length).  Therefore, working to get “buts” out of  my content has an added benefit:  it makes my content better.

Try it yourself, and let me know how it works in the comments!

Filed Under: Leadership 303
November 8, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Print to Edit Your Content, Before Publishing.

Last week, I paid a writing coach a small chunk o’change to give me some guidance about creating content.  It feels like it takes too long to create the material that makes up my business life, from home study courses to blog posts to comments in the blogosphere.  I want to be faster.

As part of her coaching package, Ali Luke will review and edit up to 2000 words of your writing, so I sent her links to three substantial blog posts.  She pasted the content into MS Word and then used Word’s “comment” feature to share her thoughts about my material.

Friends, I am a bit miffed.  Her editorial comments were useful, and actionable (good “business” word there), and except for one or two tiny typos, substantial.  What struck me is that I probably would have seen most of the edits myself if I had printed the content onto paper and read my own material on the couch first.  I can make these edits for free.

To be true, Ali and I are 25 years apart in age, so she has an eye for my tendency to preach in a way that perhaps my peers wouldn’t sense.  That is good stuff.  And I’m not in any sense denying the value of her editorial suggestions–the fact is, I hadn’t seen the sticky spots she pointed out, and the posts are better for the changes.

Before I work with her again, however, I plan to print out all my site content, double-spaced, and sit down on the couch with a green pen (kinder on self than red) to edit and mark it up.  Then we’ll see what she has to say about flaws I can’t see myself, rather than sticky spots I would have seen had I looked.

Doing a “preview” out of WordPress and looking at the content on the screen is simply not the same thing at all.

In the course of preparing Hiring is Hard:  How to Hire Your Third Employee for release, I printed the entire document (150+ pages) at least three times.  I used a professional printer, so that I could get the document bound.  Reading a “real” manual made the needed edits jump out at me in a way they simply didn’t when I looked at the material on the screen.

It may be that people who learned to write on computers have a different editing process, and that printing, for them, is a waste of time.  Can’t say.  All I know is that for those of us who learned to type on manual typewriters, who thought correcting Selectrics were simply the greatest thing since sliced bread, printing out a blog post and taking a good look at it with an editorial eye while you sit on the couch can do wonders for your internet expert status.

Filed Under: Design 745.4, Process 153
May 11, 2010 By Leave a Comment

Use a good picture

Clearly, I am not a big believer in the power of photographic illustration for my blog posts.  I had to laugh this morning, when I received an email newsletter with the heading, “Three Hurdles for New Businesses” and this illustration:  Hurdler wearing socks

People who know me in person understand what I mean when I say, “both feet rarely leave the ground at the same time anymore.”  I have never been a hurdler, or a runner of any distance, for that matter.  I put the shot in high school.  But even when I was in high school (back in the dark ages, when high school athletes first started weight training and Wake Forest football trounced the ACC because their players worked out in the gym in the off-season), hurdlers worked to get over the hurdles as smoothly as possible.

Good hurdling looks like this.

So what am I supposed to think when the illustration is completely wrong for the point of the article?  I get that images are supposed to capture the eye and engage the mind and make your writing more interesting to the casual reader.  Just sometimes, you create exactly the WRONG outcome.

Filed Under: Content marketing 658-8, Images 770
May 10, 2010 By 1 Comment

Creating High-quality Audio Files

I drive about 500 hours a year, and I listen to audio files most of the time I’m in the car, especially when I’m on the longer legs of a journey.  I listen to lots of “how to be in business” content, as well as the occasional fiction; recently, I discovered college classes available for free from Open Yale.  At 500 hours a year, a body gets a feel for what makes a good audio file and those courses from Yale crystallized my thinking. Here are some suggestions that can make your audio files easier to listen to, and perhaps, therefore, easier for your listeners to recommend to their friends.

File naming

Remember that MP3 players sort and display by the Title field, while many people work with their files by file name. Ideally, the two should be the same. If you are selling a series of files to your listening audience, it can be helpful to select file Titles that alpha-sort in the correct replay order. If you want your listeners to be able to select your file from a list in their player, you may want to think about including your name (or business name, or series name) in the file name. We your listeners are more likely to remember that we wanted to listen to “that latest download from John Gold” than we are to remember exactly what he called it.
We have the length of a red light to find the file. You can help us find your file, or not. We’ll listen to whatever comes next on the player when the light turns green if we haven’t found your file yet. (In addition, if your listeners are likely to be wearing reading glasses, they may not be able to see the display clearly anyway. The shapes of names we know are more easily recognized than the shapes of words in a title we don’t remember.)

Technical tweaks

  1. Repeat the name, host and basic identification information of the call after you start the recording. It’s disconcerting to be dumped into a conversation with no way to verify which file queued up next in the MP3 player, esp. when your listener may have loaded a dozen MP3 files onto a player at one time, and be driving on the highway while listening.
  2. If the call belongs to a series or package, identify its unit within the package.
  3. If the call has any kind of seasonal content, identify the at least the month or time of year during the introduction.
  4. Please please please put a large audience on auto-mute. Unless audience members have practice participating in large corporate conference calls, your call-in audience hasn’t learned to keep their own phone on mute. We, the listeners of your recorded product, do not want to hear you asking users to “press *6” a dozen times as people turn away from your content to address their own lives. I decided against purchasing a collection of one vendor’s products because the vendor managed “group mute” so badly on the free example audio files.  I lost access to her content.  She lost access to my $250.
  5. Lock your own dog up.
  6. Make sure the conference call software does not audibly announce hangups. It’s embarrassing to hear people drop off in the middle of the call and the speakers working not to pay attention to tones announcing that one more person got bored and left the call.
  7. Listen to the prompts your conference call software gives when you put the audience on and off all-mute. “Presentation mode enabled” takes eight syllables to convey two syllables of information: mute on.
  8. Consider your vocal volume, particularly for female speakers. The older your audience, the more likely they are to have some hearing loss. Please adjust your recording volume so that they can increase the playback volume on the audio file, if needed. More than one MP3 file is inaudible in parts to me because the speaker allows her voice to get very soft.  (Few files recorded by men have this problem.) I am already have the volume cranked all the way up. (People who sell much more product record at a louder volume, and I am able to adjust the volume on their files downward.)
    Note: It turns out that some conference call software has trouble with the volume for “remote hosts,” that is, when the voices of two people in different locations both matter to the quality of the call. (This is less important in a Q&A setting, where the host can always (and should) repeat the question.)
  9. About those Umms and Uhhs: listen to yourself before you distribute the call. You will give a better impression of your expertise if you edit them out. Better yet, learn how not to use filler words and phrases in the first place: See the post, “Umms in Public Speaking” for a simple and easy-to-implement fix.

Content considerations

It’s highly probably that the worst offenders will not see themselves in the following items, in part because they have never given the matter serious consideration.  Here’s a hint:  they call it content for a reason.

Fill your audio file with CONTENT.  Real information, steps, facts, your experience, perhaps even stories.  Dale Carnegie teaches the “incident, point, benefit” model for public speaking and it works.  Following any of a number of similar models helps speakers stick to the point.  Read Made to Stick and check your transcripts against Chip and Dan Heath’s six factors.
Get the “I love us all, aren’t we great” welcome messages out of the way before you start the recording. I don’t want to hear very much at all about how fantastic, unique, special, devoted, determined, or any other adjective describing the audience, we all are for having the wisdom, good sense, foresight, judgment, or lack of productive alternatives to be on the call today. Chances are, I couldn’t make the live call and I’m listening to the recording some months later anyway.

Consider carefully before veering off into opinion or advice that you are not linking to a specific situation or incident.  Very few speakers are skilled enough to deliver useful opinions into the ether.  (I might add that few professional commentators are, either, but I don’t buy their files and they don’t read my blog.)

Interviews are particularly vulnerable to this problem.  The host says, “tell us what you think about creating products….” and the guest goes off into, “Well, you have to work really hard to figure out what your audience wants…” and “then you may not sell very well if you don’t get your launch right…” and “people want to do joint ventures with me but they don’t bring a good game to the table…” and on and on and on.  I yearn for a audio file transcript that I could edit with a red pencil, crossing out entire paragraphs of rambling opinion that fails to educate.

Here’s another hint:  I don’t care what you think.  I care about what you know, and about what you did, and what happened, and possibly about what you would do differently next time, as long as you can point to the reasons you would try something different.

I grew painfully conscious of rambling in audio files after listening to Kelly Brownell at Yale talk about food politics for semester.  In 30 hours of audio downloads, Dr. Brownell and his guest speakers don’t waste a sentence on unsubstantiated opinion; every lecture is full of tangible facts and real information about food as we produce and consume it around the world today.  Similarly,  Ben Polak, although inclined to a few filler words and phrases, manages to deliver his understanding of Game Theory week after week without diverging into unsupported opinion.

I came back to “amateur” audio files with a shock as I found myself daydreaming not long into a call.  I couldn’t have told you what the host and guest were saying.  The third time it happened, I caught on.  The speakers weren’t saying anything–that was the problem.  It was just opinion, and advice, and telling us to work hard, and be original, and this, and that, and other rambling.

Phooey.  Give me Game Theory if you can’t give me real marketing.  At least Game Theory can explain elections.

Filed Under: Design 745.4, Leadership 303, Process 153
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