Millenium Marketer

Lately, life has felt like a marathon. For a while there, it worked like a well oiled machine: wake up early, take the train, go to work, solve problems, have discussions, etc., etc. come home, cook dinner and then go to sleep. Do it again, four more times. Until, the routine just seemed too much of the same. It felt like I was running as fast as I could and for dear life.

It was just earlier this month when I got sick with achy muscles that wouldn’t move right that I realized I had not stopped. I was frantic, and my mind was running a mile a minute. During intense periods of work, lunch would become a work-and-eat affair over my keyboard, and I had forgotten on many occasions to stay hydrated and drink more H20 than I would coffee.

Then I had some very simple advice, so simple, that you wouldn’t think it would change your perspective. You can’t run a marathon (or a 100 mile bike ride) without training. Training a marathon means you track your progress, celebrate the wins and take time to evaluate where to go next or how to improve. Work, believe it or not, can be the same way.

When setting goals or setting your to-do list, your goal is to identify one of three actions as you check things off the list: execute, assess, or reschedule the task for another date. Having a system is important to keep order and I think it also helps the brain’s long term memory to keep a system that repeats itself daily. This way the brain doesn’t need to remember the routine and can focus on more complex problems.

One of my big problems was that I would forget to drink water. But, by scheduling water breaks, it suddenly was not something I had to remember to do, but rather something I had planned to do, like another task in my day that had to be checked off. And checking it off my to do list was both satisfying analytically as it was gratifying for my body to get much needed hydration. :D

One tool I have found very useful to do this is David Seah’s 2010 Emergent Task Planner. It allows me to estimate how much time a goal will take and then mark how much time it really takes. While timing yourself might seem like a good way to be in a rush, actually the opposite is true.

For people who simply like to count things, putting on a stopwatch will seem satisfying enough. But for contextual thinkers like me, estimating blocks of time allows me to ask big questions like, did the task get executed well? Where do I need to improve? Why did it take less (or more) time than usual? And so on.

What are some of your favorite productivity tricks? How did you like the ones suggested? Share your thoughts with us in the comments.

Creativity is so important although we don’t always give it enough space to breathe and grow. As I recall, although I don’t quote correctly, it was Mitchell Baker at Mozilla.org that pointed out that software engineers (and others) have the duty to create products that will best suit the lifestyles of people today.

With so many apps out there, and there being increasingly more, you can’t solve real problems without taking down conventions and structures that people are most used to.

Negativity cancels out creativity

The first rule of brainstorming is to bar out criticism. This means if you brainstorm individually like one Microsoft Chief who goes away for vacation to create “white space,” or if you are brainstorming in a team, negative comments, such as “That won’t work” should not be allowed until the brainstorming session is over.

The same rule applies to supervisors and higher-ups: standing in as a threat to employees is counter-productive to solving problems creatively.

It’s too often that brainstorming and approaching ideas creatively gets a bad rap or is not executed well enough. That takes technical skill, but it’s those who succeed in creative brainstorming will produce elegant solutions for new & existing markets. White space is closer to Blue Ocean Strategy than most people realize.

Frameworks

The second step in creativity is to develop frameworks, such as the “Reframing” approach or a mindmap. The reframing approach attempts to look at a problem from a various number of perspectives, for example from the perspective of a marketer, an engineer, a potential consumer, etc.

Third, don’t let your hard brainstorming work fall away–create action items that get results. If you or your team are not sure exactly how to do this, check out David Allen’s definition of Getting Things Done (GTD) and translate tasks into results. In other words, if you decide to write a document, consider the impact it will have, otherwise known as “So What?”

By thinking through your end goal, you should be more likely to want to work towards the result.

What frameworks have you tried that have worked successfully to break barriers and create new and interesting products, ideas or conversations?