Pinterest and LinkedIn

Connecting Pinterest and Linkedin

Apart from your profile picture, LinkedIn doesn’t offer a lot of support for images, but all is not lost.  Linkedin has a LOT of activity, and because most of the people on that platform are employed, they tend to have a bit more money than the average visitor.  Even if Pinterest is driving the bulk of your traffic, take an minute and make sure Linkedin knows about your Pinterest account.

Add a Website link to your Pinterest account

Pinterest displayed as one of three websites on your profile.

Your Pinterest account can be one of the three website links displayed on your Linkedin profile.

Use one of the website link options to point visitors to your business account, and one of the others to point to your Pinterest account.

Select the “other” option on the first drop down (rather than any of the fixed options) and Linkedin allows you to create your own label for the URL.

Linkedin's Website listing

Select the “other” category to create your own label for the URL, and then enter the full link to your Pinterest account.

Headlines that Backfire

Why isn’t your dog sleeping on an Orvis memory foam bed?

reads the headline in the email subject line this morning. The text in the image in the email itself goes on to say, “Giving your dog a memory foam bed makes you feel good inside. And sleeping on a memory foam bed makes your dog feel good all over. … every dog benefits from the perfect support and unparalleled comfort of memory foam.”

Please!! (multisyllabic….)

Memory foam beds start at $300. I spend $400, give or take, per head per year to feed and care for five dogs and two cats. Orvis thinks I should be spending an entire YEAR’s support on a bed? Has Orvis ever been to a thrift shop and seen how many couches can be purchased with $300? A LOT. Without any shopping at all, at least 10. I could get a new-to-us couch almost every month for that much money.

My dogs have clearly voted. They prefer to sleep “up”–on the couch or bed, depending on what we allow, or “under,” in the cave created by the bed or corner table. They’ll argue and whine to get the best positions.

Orvis products are marketed as being of “better” quality. We purchased collars from Orvis a few years ago. The boys chewed each other’s off pretty quickly, although they left their sister’s collar alone (and hers faded from pink to dingy pretty quickly). In other words, they weren’t high quality for the variables that mattered to me.

The company markets to my own, human-centric, sense of quality, which is remarkably different from my pragmatic understanding of my dogs’ habits and preferences. Why would I spend $300 on a foam bed when I’ve seen what this pack can do to a foam teddy bear?

The larger conclusion, with regard to marketing: when you write a headline, make sure it doesn’t inspire a “because I’m not stupid!” response!

Saw another headline that backfired in my email box:

You have to make up your mind today!

No, I don’t.  Rather, I made up my mind last week.  The fact that your offer ends today is not affecting that decision at all…

How Do I Start a Text Conversation?

I continue to be amazed by keyword research, courtesy of Wordtracker.

38,675 searches PER MONTH, US Google data, for some version of “how do I start a text conversation?”

I can respond to text messages.  I used to IM when we had a system at my last day job.  I have even initiated a text a time or two, but it’s simply not my preferred form of communication with my friends.

When I observe my surprise at the number of people who are searching for conversation starters for texting, however, I realize that I have made an attribution error.  I think because texters are a little more technically savvy than me, they must also be more socially sophisticated, perhaps?  I’ve made this error before in other contexts.

BTW, that number above is MINISCULE compared to the number of searches for “regular, in-person” conversation tips (within reach of a million a month).  Our technology hasn’t changed our confidence in our relationship skills very much at all.

The Little Book of Wrong Shui

In the course of study of professional organizing, sooner or later, you’re going to encounter Feng Shui. While in no way a trained practitioner, I can nevertheless drop a bagua on any building I visit and tell you where the Love and the Money sections are in the house. If you’re broke or lonely, declutter here first, the general advice holds, and your luck will change.

I found The Little Book of Wrong Shui at the checkout line at Barnes & Noble. If you, or anyone you love, has been the subject / victim of a drive-by Feng Shui treatment (look for octagonal mirrors and red ribbons on the drainpipes), you’ll get a chuckle.

Examples:

  • A bright idea: if parts of your home are prone to darkness, a light, carefully located, will solve the problem.
  • Nice to see you: attract visitors to your home by placing stereo, video, and computer equipment where they can be seen from the road.
  • The ups and downs of stairs: stairs going up are good Wrong Shui. In your home only have stairs going up.

New copies are less than $5 and you can get them used for $2. Buy a handful and help all your friends to a more prosperous, love-filled life. At least, they’ll be laughing so hard at the Feng Shui jokes, they won’t notice they’re still broke and alone.

Components of a Decision Support System

Traditionally, the term “decision support system” is used to describe tools with some computer component to help people, usually managers, identify and evaluate options when faced with a complicated decision.  However, you don’t need a computer to use all the components of a decision support system.  A number of brain-based ways of thinking about decisions can be useful and are often much more accessible.  What you need is a way to systematically think through possible outcomes of your choices and compare the relative benefit of each.

10 Minutes, 10 Months, 10 Years

Suzy Welch’s book, 10-10-10, helps you think about the future outcome of decisions you need to make:  what will the outcome be in 10 minutes, 10 months, and 10 years?  (Mixed reviews on Amazon; I found the book helpful.)  Many times, what appears to be more important in 10 minutes (finish the assignment) has a different outcome in 10 years (get more exercise).

Some of the books reviewers think this system is nothing but common sense, without acknowledging that “common sense” is the least common of all the senses.  Other reviewers, including me, realize that regularly thinking through the long term outcome of any of our daily decisions can be a discipline.

Her system gets a little complicated if you have to decide between more than two options or a “go-don’t go” situation.

Round the Clock

When I read Peter Bregman’s post about Visualizing Failure on the HBR blog this morning, I was reminded of another, brain-based, decision support tool I use called “round the clock.”

To use the Round the Clock system yourself, draw a circle on a blank sheet of paper.  Mark at least the quarter hour positions, at 12, 3, 6, and 9.  Now, close your eyes and imagine the best outcome possible for the decision you face.  Make a note of that outcome at the 12 position.

Next, imagine, per Visualizing Failure, the worst possible outcome, given the realistic facts of the choice you are considering.  This outcome goes at the 6 position.

Next, imagine two, different, outcomes, halfway between best possible” and “worst possible.”   One is more good than bad, one is less great and a little more difficult, but neither should be a total failure of the concept.  These outcomes belong at the 3 and 9 spots, respectively.

If your facts and imagination will accommodate you, keep going–differently successful, or un-, outcomes at each of the numbers on the clock face.  However, many decisions only need the major four positions covered, before you understand what course of action you need to take.

If you’re still not sure, give yourself a day to think about the worst possible outcome that you can imagine.  What exactly would that be like?  What warning signals would the situation provide to you, that could indicate a need for a change in plan?  Is it true, like one commenter suggested (admittedly as a very unlikely outcome), that:

What if you quit your job to start your dream company, and you fail, lose all of your money, can’t get another boring job, lose your house, can’t support your family, your family disowns you, you end up on the street, you acquire some deadly disease, and are homeless.

Equating “not starting your dream company” with “homelessness” is an awfully big leap.  Very few people make that leap in one step.  Very few people wind up homeless, as a result of entrepreneurial failure alone, although sometimes stories about business failure make for better cardboard signs than stories about other causes of homelessness.

If you’re pretty sure that your family would not disown you, or that you would find some job any job if your business could not provide the income you needed, then your “worst case outcome” is NOT homelessness, and “living on the street” should not be in the 6:00 position.

You may want to make a note of any warning signs you thought about as you imagine the worse case scenario.

Outcomes are Unknowable

The truth is, any outcome reasonably far into the future, involving other people, is pretty much unknowable from the start.  If it were a 100% sure thing, you wouldn’t need to put your idea through the components of a decision support system, by evaluating individual steps and outcomes against what you know about the world.

We know from research in a number of fields that people are pretty bad about predicting accurately.  However, most people are actually reasonably good at responding to out-of-the-blue unexpected events.  What hurts emotionally are the events that are completely predictable, that we didn’t predict, often because we became too attached to one potential outcome too quickly.

When you do a round-the-clock exercise, you have an opportunity to consider and document the warning signs that could appear along the way, telling you that your path is leading to a 6:00 outcome rather than the noon version in your best dreams.

Similarly, if you regularly practice 10-10-10 thinking, it’s much less likely that you’ll turn around on your next “0” birthday and say, “I sure  wish I’d exercised more…”  At the very least, you’ll understand that you made decisions in favor of some other outcome along the way.

Make a decision to decide…

Big decisions can be intimidating.  Using the components of a decision support system, even with pencil, paper, and your imagination, can cut a big decision into much more manageable parts.   All you need is a way to systematically think through possible outcomes of your choices and compare the relative benefit of each.

 

 

Organizing Your Website Files

I recently changed a licensing arrangement I had with a provider and needed to make sure I had all of their trademarked content off this website. I was a bit at a loss–there’s a lot of content here. I use WordPress to manage it all, and WordPress does not play well with paper. I suspected there must be a way to dump my content to a flat file that I could search for any of the controlled keywords, and after asking around on forums, I found it:

Export to Text

Export to Text is a nifty little plug in that takes content and meta data from posts and pages in a WordPress site and exports them to an MS Excel *.csv file.  VERY handy.

I exported my site and spent a day or two searching for the relevant words, hunting through pages that were in draft, published, published but private, published but not linked to, and otherwise hidden from easy access.  I could mark up the paper list as I worked through each page.  Along the way, it was easy to check for <title> and <description> tags, because that information was exported.  As I went, I could make notes on the paper copy about changes, links, and rearrangements that need to happen some time in the future.

I had to ask more than a few people before I found the plugin.  Perhaps most of my WordPress friends don’t need to review all their content, or maybe they’ve found an in-app solution that works.  If you know that paper has advantages that WP doesn’t yet offer, look at Export to Text.

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.)

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.

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.

Frustrated Frugality

I can, in some cases, be exceedingly careful and frugal with my money; not all the time or I’d be considerably more well-off.  I set the thermostat at 80 in the summer and 65 in the winter.  I save the clean water that runs while it gets hot and use it to fill the dog bowls.  I saved spare change and increased my downpayment on my own home by 1.5%, enough to put me in a different category for PMI. 

Then the lid caves in on the septic tank in my rental property, and I discover it’s possible to spend $1500 before 9 AM on a Monday morning.  That’s hard to do.  House closings don’t start that early.  Stores that sell expensive merchandise don’t open that early.  Car dealers aren’t open before 9 AM.  The repair person showed up with a backhoe at 6 AM and the new tank was delivered at 7 and a good bit of the dirt was pushed back by 9 and I signed the check and they all left.  I suppose I could offer the fill dirt for sale, but not until the earth pushed into the old tank has thoroughly settled, and it takes a LOT more dirt than I have on hand to make up a $1500 bill.

It may have been possible to prevent this problem.  The last owner of the house told me where the tank was.  We took her word for that and carefully avoided parking on that part of the yard.  She was wrong.  The current tenant has parked where the tank actually was, and eventually, the lid cracked, taking enough of the tank with it to prevent repair by replacing just the lid. An entirely new tank, taking up a huge section of the yard was the only solution.

There is no discount fix for a broken septic tank.  There is no DIY solution, either.  The only answer is writing big checks to people who have access to and know how to use big equipment.  I am practicing gratitude, for knowing plumbers who return calls, who know the guys that can replace septic tanks, who show up ready to work at 6:00 AM on a Monday morning, even if that means they’re operating a backhoe before I have a chance to mark the gas line.  I can try more gratitude for its being July, so the gas was not flowing at the time the backhoe sliced through the line.

I don’t want to say “now I’ve replaced every system in that house,” because it’s still running on its first central air conditioning unit.  But when I read David Giffels’ All the Way Home, I could identify.  It’s never done.  There’s only so much money you can save.

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