Category: Shel’s Personal Life

By Posted on Posted in Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Events, Politics, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , ,

30 years ago, Dina and I marched in the first-ever Gay Rights march in Northampton, Massachusetts. Organized by a very political—you could even call them militant—group called Gay And Lesbian Activists, the event drew about 500 people. We were proud and defiant in a society where being gay or lesbian was so threatening that some of the marchers wore paper bags over their heads to protect their identities and avoid reprisals. The speeches were all about claiming our place in a rejecting society.

Back then, there was a large contingent of counterdemonstrators from the local Baptist church, shouting slogans and carrying signs that today would be considered hate speech.

A few months later, some prominent lesbians in town received a series of threatening phone calls, and went to the police. A group of activists demanded and received a meeting with public officials. We pressed the mayor for a statement condemning the harassment. He waffled for quite some time until the District Attorney, who’d been quietly watching, said “I’ll give you a statement.” Once he had the political cover of the DA, the mayor quickly agreed as well. And later, the harasser was actually found, tried, and convicted. Yet, shortly after the second annual march, a City Councilor ran unopposed for re-election on a platform of stopping the Gay Rights march. (When his term was up two years later and he still had no opposition, I ran against him. He won that year and was defeated by another progressive two years later.)

Fast-forward to 2011: yesterday’s 30th annual parade, now officially called the “Noho Pride LGBT [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender] Parade and Pride Event” and organized by a group called Noho Pride. The parade stretched for blocks and moved down Main Street to a cheering throng of some 15,000, lining not only both sidewalks but also the midline of our very wide boulevard.

Spectators applaud the Forbes Library contingent, #Nohopride 2011
Spectators applaud the Forbes Library contingent, #Nohopride 2011

Contingents included students, teachers, and parents from several elementary and high schools…dozens of churches…our local public library, where I and several other writers marched along with the director, assistant director, and a couple of the trustees…and a number of prominent politicians including both mayoral candidates (one gay, one not), Northampton’s State Representative Peter Kokot, and a candidate for US Senate who actually took a booth.

Vendors at the rally site included banks, home improvement contractors, and other very mainstream businesses. There was almost no political content, although there was a large tent for activist organizations, and the tent was crowded.

One of the local newspapers described the scene:

The atmosphere was a jubilant one – with hula-hoopers, a group doing intricate formations with shopping carts, drag queens, Rocky Horror Picture Show actors, the Raging Grannies, and countless school groups, some chanting “five, six, seven, eight, don’t assume your kids are straight.”

In the intervening years, a lot has happened in the queer community around Northampton, including national press in the early 1990s in the National Enquirer (which dubbed it Lesbianville USA) and the TV program 20/20. Several openly gay or lesbian politicians have won their races, including Northampton’s openly lesbian mayor, Clare Higgins, who is finishing up her sixth two-year term—longer than anyone else has ever held the post. Same-sex marriage has been legal for years. You have to look really hard to find someone who isn’t aware of same-sex couples in their places of worship, their workplaces, or their circle of friends.

And the Pride event has gone from a defiant statement of our rights to a festive, touristy celebration of culture. So much so that the organizers were publicly criticized by a group of activists including at least two who were there from the beginning, for squeezing the politics of change out of the event.

To me, while I recognize the validity and sincerity of those complaints, that we can now party out tells me that yes, we are making huge progress in this area, among others.

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By Posted on Posted in Demographics/Psychographics, Diversity, Energy & Sustainability, People Helping People, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , , , ,

I have lived in a housing project of 55,000 people in New York City—so insignificant in the city’s eyes that we didn’t even have a subway stop; we had to bus or walk a mile to one of two different trains, one of which could have easily been extended a mile over Interstate 95. In all, I lived in New York City for about 20 years, including birth to 16. In my early 20s, I lived in four of the five boroughs: Bronx, Manhattan, Queens, and Brooklyn.

At the other extreme, for the past 12+ years, I’ve lived on a working farm in a village of about 200 within Hadley, Massachusetts—a town of 4753 people—part of Hampshire County, whose 20 “cities” and towns within 545 square miles increased over the past decade to 152,251. (City, as Massachusetts defines it, refers to a municipality administered by a mayor and council rather than Selectboard and Town Meeting, and has nothing to do with population.) And I actually serve on an official town land-use committee, where we wrestle constantly with shaping the future of our town.

New York City’s five densely populated boroughs comprise just under 305 square miles, and hold 8,391,881 residents. You could move NYC to my county and still have almost half the land area left —maybe to grow enough food for all those residents. My county has 1/55 as many people as NYC, spread out over 1.78 times as much land.

Between the time I first lived outside of New York, in 1973, and settled in Hampshire County, in 1981, I lived in various cities and towns ranging from under 5000 to 1,688,210. All of these communities can offer sustainability wisdom from which other places can learn—either by doing it right, or by doing it wrong (so much so that I could write a book on this—maybe I will, some day). Here are a few of the insights:

  • Vibrant neighborhoods require mixed use. In every city I’ve ever lived in, the exciting neighborhoods are those where people live, work, play, and shop in close proximity. The best US examples I know are Northampton and Amherst, MA, New York’s Upper West Side and Park Slope, and the Fox Point area of Providence. Much of Europe uses this model, and European cities are highly livable.
  • Car-centered cultures adversely affect quality of life. Strong mass transit usually enhances it. In New York City (where a car is a liability), commuting time on public transit is productive. People read, write, get through their e-mail, walk a few blocks to their destination, and don’t feel like they’ve wasted the time. Sometimes they even build friendships with the people they see every day on their commute. In Hadley, the shopping district is suburban-style, with big malls and strip malls along a state highway. Almost no one lives on that road, and it’s not a place for cultural events, other than movies. While the largest food stores actually do provide chances to hang out a bit with neighbors (all arriving in separate cars), having a brief chat with an acquaintance you run into in the produce aisle is not the same kind of community building as you can get in a cafe or a bookstore.
  • A corollary: planning must take into account the existing transportation patterns. Mass-transit thinking can’t just be grafted onto a car-oriented culture, and car-oriented thinking won’t work in crowded urban areas. Those patterns can change over time, but it’s a slow process.
  • A real community transcends ethnic and cultural differences. My current neighborhood of Hockanum  Village has a number of families that have been on the same land for 200 years or more. Some of them trace their lineage to the Mayflower. The whole neighborhood gets together every year for a Christmas party that attracts former residents from as far as Florida, and sometimes a summer picnic along the river. A few neighbors gather at the local coffee shop for breakfast once a week. I could knock on any door in the neighborhood with a request, and people would try to help me.
  • Cities lend themselves well to centralized renewable energy collection—but this potential to make a big difference in climate change and oil dependency has barely been tapped. Instead, many centrally heated buildings in New York are overheated to the point where tenants need to open windows on cold winter days, and that’s crazy.
  • Cities could supply a significant portion of their own food, but again, this potential is not tapped much.
  • Farmers and gardeners understand the food cycle. They know what it’s like to grow food for themselves, their families, and their livestock. They’ve seen crop failure. They pay close attention to weather patterns. Localism is not a theoretical construct; it’s an everyday reality.
  • Homeowners and farmers notice details and patterns, so, for instance, they anticipate and address maintenance issues before they become failures. They don’t expect anyone else to do things for them, though they might ask for help on a big project. Tenants (especially in urban areas) are much less likely to have this attitude.
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By Posted on Posted in Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , ,

In my last post, I described the demise of our radiator and engine while driving down the highway Wednesday. I had the car towed to our mechanic, who called this morning to tell us that the engine had indeed suffered a meltdown. Fortunately, the consequences are far less severe than in a nuclear power plant, but it meant we either had to spend $3000 to fix it or go car shopping in a hurry.

We’d gotten eight years out of the replacement engine we’d put in the last time this happened, and now the car was 14 years old. $3000 didn’t seem like a wise investment.

So off we went, car shopping. When we get into a riff like this, we’re like a couple of trucks. We go until we get the job done. When we bought our current house (in 1998), we viewed 16 houses in just eight days, and bought #15. And with three drivers, nowhere we can walk, and one working car, we needed to move fast. We had decided ahead that with a new teenage driver in the family, buying new didn’t make sense. The insurance would be huge, and so would the risk. So that made the decision simpler.

In two hours, we went to five different dealerships—four that only sold used vehicles, plus one local new/used .Oddly, we only saw one car that was worth test-driving: a 2005 Toyota Corolla stickshift with only 26,000 miles. (Corollas are typically good for 150,000 or more. Our current one has 165,000.) Considering that some of the other cars we saw included a $12,000 Prius with over 99,000 miles and a $17,000 Honda Civic hybrid with 36,000, we thought we’d found a pretty good deal.

Over the next three hours, we dropped the car off at our mechanic to check it out, stopped for lunch, went to the credit union and got financing through our home equity line of credit (that we had established earlier but never used), went to the library to make sure it wasn’t the kind with the runaway accelerator problem—and while we were there, we also googled the original owner, who had a distinctive name, to make sure there was no report of a major accident in the car (we discovered she’d purchased the car in April 2006, and died the following September of natural causes—and at some point later, the car was traded back to the same dealer that had sold it originally). Then back to the mechanic to pick up the car with a clean bill of health, and back to the dealer to go through the paperwork and specify the very minor repairs to be made.

Yup. In five hours flat, we chose a car, had it examined, and got it financed. That’s fast even by our standards, but we were under some time pressure, with the exchange student and some teenage friends of my son all descending on us in the coming days. By Saturday, the work will be done and we’ll have the car.

Know any Western Massachusetts takers for a 1997 Toyota that needs an engine and radiator?

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By Posted on Posted in Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , ,

In 2003, we were driving down the Wilbur Cross Parkway in Connecticut, on our way to pick up a high school exchange student from France at JFK Airport. Suddenly, steam started pouring out of the hood, the temperature gauge hit the red zone, and the car lost power. Cooked radiator, and broken head gasket (cooked engine).

With only 71,000 miles on a six-year-old Toyota, one of the car dealers we visited advised us not to replace the car, just put in a new engine. We took his advice, especially since he actually arranged the whole thing for us.

Yesterday, I was driving that same car, now 14 years old and with 165,000 miles, on my way to a business meeting. Suddenly, steam started pouring out of the hood, the temperature gauge hit the red zone, and the car lost power. Cooked radiator, probable broken head gasket.

And the craziest thing of all? Next week, assuming she’s still coming after the earthquake and tsunami, we’re scheduled to host a high school exchange student from Japan.

Hmmm. Are exchange students too expensive to host if we have to spend a few thousand dollars on fixing or replacing a vehicle? (that’s a joke.)

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , ,

“Give me a lever long enough and a place to stand, and I will move the world.” —Archimedes, 230 BC.

All of a sudden, it seems like the universe is dropping a lot of opportunities in my lap. The last few weeks have brought me these and other possibilities (all tentative):

  • A chance to speak in a country I’ve always wanted to visit
  • Working partnership with a startup that could very quickly scale up to be a major force in the environmental movement
  • Several big potential clients, including one who was recommended to me by someone who heard me speak and bought my book at the Sustainable Foods Summit in January, and whose CEO is an actual rock star
  • A remote, long-shot possibility to travel throughout Asia, Africa, and South America, making a movie and a book on sustainability (the longest of long shots, but I’m hoping!)
  • Agreement in principle from a new magazine in Asia to start running one of my new columns; that will make the third continent where a media outlet is running it.
  • An ongoing partnership with someone who has bought a quantity of one of my books in the past, and who wants not only to buy a few hundred of guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, but also to work with me on some ongoing speaking opportunities (for which he gets a nice commission, and therefore is likely to make it happen)

    • As you might gather, it’s been a pretty exciting few weeks.

    So…if you believe in Law of Attraction (LOA) stuff, you might be asking what I’ve done to create this torrent of abundance. I’m not sure, but I have some thoughts.

    I’ve made two big shifts in the last few months, and have another one pending.

    First, I’ve launched my two columns, Green And Profitable and Green And Practical—and set a specific monetary goal and a timetable to achieve it that would convert these columns to the primary revenue stream in my business. It has been a dream since my teen years to be a syndicated columnist, and I’ve made a couple of rounds over the years pitching the big syndicates. I decided that the most likely way it would finally happen would be if, rather than waiting for a big syndicate to pick me up, I did it myself. And I’m doing it!

    And second, I’ve set myself a time management regime and have been pretty good at sticking to it.

    Thirdly, I am moving forward on a new way of structuring my business that will free up significant time for me to focus on the parts of my business I most want to build (writing and speaking).

    And while I’m far from an LOA junkie, I do believe that the things we choose to focus on tend to dominate our lives. I’ve been focusing on these deep goals and I think the universe is responding by showing me enough opportunities to convince me I’m on the right track.

    And I also have a Great Big Goal: making a lasting and significant impact on the world and helping to shift planetary consciousness to create a healthy, just, and peaceful planet. Yes, I’ve learned to think big. I have seen big ripples from the little things I’ve done, and I want the columns to provide me a big enough platform that I could, like Archimedes with his giant lever, move the world.

    It’s going to be a wild ride…and I’m ready!

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    By Posted on Posted in Shel's Personal Life

    Back in January, when I started my new time management regime, I promised you an update at the end of February.

    The goals, you may recall:
    * Work for paying clients: 2 hours (120 minutes)
    * My own writing, research, and marketing: 1 hour (60 minutes)
    * Processing e-mail: 2 hours (120 minutes)
    * Participating in social media: 15-30 minutes
    * Dealing with finances, bills, recordkeeping, etc.: 30 minutes
    * Office and household organizing and cleaning: 30 minutes
    * Professional reading: 1 hour (60 minutes)
    * Physical exercise: 1 hour (60 minutes)

    I’ve fine-tuned it a bit since then. I started tracking a few new things: how much time I spend on reaching out to reporters who might interview me, and meeting planners who might hire me to speak. I’m also tracking how much time I actually spend being interviewed, and also a category of “mitigations”: reasons why on a particular day, my goals are unrealistic because I’m out of the office for several hours.

    For instance, if it’s a day I have to drive my mother to one of her medical appointments in New Haven, that’s three hours of driving and up to two hours of sitting there, and there’s no way I’m going to make all my goals for that day. But if I see that I was out of the office for four or five hours, I don’t expect the impossible from myself.

    On the days where I am around, I sometimes skew pretty far. But by keeping track, I can adjust on a different day. For instance, last week, I had two days in a row where I really focused on some urgent client projects. My goal is two hours per day. Last Wednesday, I did almost three–but then Thursday, when those deadlines had passed, I only did about half an hour for clients, and I did more on some other things.

    Where I have utterly failed to adjust is e-mail. Keeping e-mail down to two hours a day is an admirable goal, and has caused me to streamline my inbox a lot. I think I’ve unsubbed from at least 60 newsletters since the first of the year.I’ve had exactly two days where I spent less than the quota, and entirely too many where e-mail has consumed three or four hours.

    Yes, I could probably find another 20 publications to unsub from, but ultimately, in order to grow my business, I need to have someone else processing the routine e-mail. And because I’m tracking this, I’m able to quantify what had been a gut feeling (e-mail is taking too much time) and plan some ways of moving forward.

    At the same time, once I started tracking it, I was able to bring social media down to something much more reasonable, and still have a good presence. Desiring to keep it to no more than 30 minutes a day has made me much more efficient. Yet my Twitter stream is still very active, I’m participating actively on a few LinkedIn groups, and I show up on Facebook enough to matter (usually feeding in from Twitter).

    Yesterday was a day with no mitigations. Here’s what I did:
    Client work: 99 minutes (a little under)
    My personal work: 73 minutes
    E-mail: 178 minutes (a hair under 3 hours)
    Social media: 20 minutes (right on target)
    Paying bills: 90 minutes (our once or twice a month big effort, an hour over the preferred average, but making up for many days where there was little or nothing)
    Professional reading: 15 minutes (I’ll do some extra today, as there’s a book review I need to move forward)
    Exercise: 35 minutes (would have been longer, but it was too icy to take much of a dog walk, and at night I was literally falling asleep on the exercise bike and had to stop early; thanks to the dog, I’ve managed to stay on track most days)
    I spent only 20 minutes on tidying the office yesterday, but it is emerging from the chaos and feeling a bit less urgent, thanks to putting it on the daily schedule (though I have some goals for what happens when I’m all dug out—like going through my filing cabinets).
    I spent 25 minutes querying reporters and meeting planners yesterday, something for which I haven’t set a goal but have been tracking as of February 15 (it depends entirely on who is looking for what kinds of sources and speakers)—it’s ranged from 20 to 65 minutes per day: sorting and responding to reporters looking for sources on HARO and its competitors, checking out and responding to speaking leads from Google alerts.

    This whole thing is not an exact science. Sometimes I forget to start or stop a tracking category (or I think I’ve hit the button and it doesn’t register), sometimes I get interrupted by a phone call and let a few minutes chip into the category, and of course, sometimes one activity leads right into another, such as responding to e-mails that bring me to social media. But it’s a good approximation of how I’m spending my time. I don’t beat myself up when I’m off-goal, but I do try to compensate for it in other ways.

    It’s also not perfect in that just because I’m spending a block of time on something doesn’t mean I’m experiencing high productivity. Yesterday, for instance, a full hour of my client time was chewed up researching something that should have been very easy to find. Sometimes, I’m not hugely efficient with a task even if I’m clocking it. But other times, I can power up and do a 1000-word article in 30 or 40 minutes (this one. 957 words, took 43 minutes), write a client project, and go go go.

    On the whole, I’ve had a very productive and focused two months, and I’d call the experiment a big success. One that will continue until I have a reason to stop.

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    By Posted on Posted in privacy, Shel's Personal Life, Web 2.0/Social Media

    Adam Boettiger, someone I’ve known online and respected for more than a decade, just put up a very provocative post speculating why Facebook, which clearly spends a lot of energy interacting with its user data, won’t make any of that data available in a meaningful way to the user him/herself.

    He’s not asking for other people’s data, but to know things like who has spent how long on his page within a period of time. Why? So he can more effectively reach out to the people who are validating him with the gift their time.

    Cultivating these relationships is certainly a worthy goal. I have certainly built relationships with people who I know because they comment frequently on my blog or my Facebook profile, or because they retweet or engage with me on social media. On a recent trip to Chicago, I took a couple of hours to have coffee with someone I know only through his reaching out to me on Twitter. Now that person has gone from someone who thinks I’m important on Twitter to someone I’d call a friend, and I welcome that. (Shout out: @WayneBuckhanan)—and he’s someone who I probably wouldn’t have paid attention to just reading his profile.

    But on the other hand, both from Facebook’s vantage and from my own as a Facebook user, I’m not all that concerned (of course, I’m not a very heavy user of Facebook).

    Looking at it from FB’s perspective: I assumed going in that there is no true privacy on Facebook. In fact, there’s no true privacy online, including one-to-one private e-mail. All of us who use social media have made a choice, conscious or not, that the value we get out of participating is worth the sacrifice of privacy. Those of us who are smart never post anything online that we would be embarrassed to see in our hometown newspapers. My son actually changed his profile name to something completely made up, because he doesn’t want anything he posts (and his posts are clean) to haunt him later.

    And I recognize that Facebook’s business model and valuation are based heavily on being able to sift the galaxies (mountain seems far too puny a metaphor) of data for a wide range of purposes, from displaying ads based on very narrow interest slices to suggesting friends. They’ve got enormous computing power, and yes, they ought to share an individual’s data with that individual.

    But as a user…do I really care that I don’t have that data? Would I have the time to deal with it if I did have it? Both questions get a no vote from me. Heck, I don’t even have time to check out the profile pages of every new follower on all the social media; that would be many hours a week. I check out a random few, and I feel a bit guilty about the rest. But I also have to get my work done, andmenwhile there’s the little matter of 300 new e-mails every day.

    The way I use Facebook is to dip in to my profile occasionally and Like or comment on a few things that catch my eye, and follow a quick swath of what’s happening to people in my world. Yes, I’m aware that I could be much more strategic with Facebook; certainly, people like Mari Smith have been very successful using it for business. But I’ve chosen Twitter as my primary social media platform, followed by LinkedIn (where I participate in a lot of discussion groups, and where those discussion groups give me much more leverage than Facebook groups. The friends set on Facebook is too randomized. Even something as simple as sending a message to everyone I’ve identified as part of a particular interest group (and I do categorize my friends) is too much work for the return in most cases, because of FB’s ridiculous limit of 20 people getting the same message at once, and suspending accounts of people who send too many batches of messages (or even accept too many friend requests) too close together. And because there’s no e-mail channel, I rarely participate in discussions on someone’s fan page. On LinkedIn, when I post to a discussion list, everyone on that list gets an e-mail notification. Not true with FB pages I’ve liked. This allows me to be promiscuous with the Like button, which I could never do if every page sent me a stream of mail—but it also means the Like button is essentially meaningless to me.

    And as Adam himself notes, there are lots of other ways to interact on FB besides spending time on a profile.

     

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    By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Customer Service as Marketing, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies, Shel's Personal Life, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , , ,

    I just had a very unpleasant experience buying a ticket on Delta Airlines’ website. And since, in writing and speaking about creating green, ethical, and expectation-surpassing business success, I often address customer service issues, I’m going to transform this crappy experience into a no-charge customer service consultation to Delta. I get a blog post; they get free advice. Deal?

    1. Thou shalt prepopulate your required telephone “country code” field with the United States country code, especially if the passenger has a U.S. address. Most Americans have no idea what our country code is, and if they do know, they’ll type a 1. +001? You’ve got to be kidding.

    2. When thee kickest back my form for not having the country code properly, thou shalt remember my preference on whether I want travel insurance, and not subsequently kick it back out because YOU unchecked my preference.

    3. Thou shalt load pages in a reasonable time. If I can read one to three e-mails every time I wait for my page to update over my broadband connection, you have a service delivery problem. And when the session requires 20 or so pages because of all those ridiculous kickbacks for the country code or the insurance, you have a frustrated customer spending half an hour of forever-gone time and computer eye fatigue in order to complete a transaction that should have taken under ten minutes.

    4. Thou shalt not tell me my session has timed out while waiting for YOUR page to load, and then not really mean it, causing confusion. Fortunately, I’ve seen this before and just hit the back button several times until I got to a screen that remembered I was actually still logged in. I’d have been pretty annoyed if I had to log out and relog in.

    5. Thou shalt not try to route me from Orlando to Fort Lauderdale via New York. It would be faster to drive! If you have to send me in the wrong direction, how about someplace a whole lot closer?

    6. Thou shalt not try to take 40,000 of my hard-earned miles for a measly domestic flight from New England to Florida. That should get me to Europe!

    7. Thou dost earn my gratitude for a reasonable fare when I switched to cash, and thou didst receive my business as a result.

    8. However, thou shalt NEVER raise the fare between the time I click the Purchase button and the time you process my credit card! That, if you had been a human and not a computer, would be called an illegal bait and switch. That is also a way to get customers really mad at you and badmouth you publicly over blogs and social networks. If it says $230 when I hit Purchase, you should honor that price and not tell me, oh, by the way, we raised the price while you were having trouble with our webform. (Your exact words were “Due to changing availability, the fare you selected is no longer available. Here’s the lowest fare for your flight(s).”) Yeah, it’s only ten bucks, but it’s absolutely inexcusable. It’s one thing to raise the price if I come back a day or even an hour later, but I had initiated the transaction at the offered price and you didn’t honor it. Your computers should simply not be allowed to do that (and airline sites in general should not be allowed to present ticket options that are no longer available).

    9. Thou earnest back a few karma points for ease of seat selection. Thank you.

    10. But thou losest them again for not telling me whether any of the flights serve meals, and if so, allowing me to state my dietary requirements. It would be easy enough to indicate meals, snacks, or no food, and if meals, to indicate needs.

    OK, there you have my personal 10—not commandments but suggestions—that would improve your customers’ attitude toward you, deliver a much more positive experience, and create fans instead of reluctant buyers. If you want more, I recommend my award-winning eighth book, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green. I’ll even give you (or anyone else who registers a purchase a the site) $2000 in extra bonuses for buying a $21.95 book. See, creating a good customer experience isn’t that hard.

    In addition to his award-winning books, Shel Horowitz also writes the Green And Profitable (for business) and Green And Practical (for consumers) monthly columns.

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    By Posted on Posted in Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , ,

    When setting up my time goals as of the first of the year, I also committed to paying attention to whether they were realistic, and how close I was coming. I knew going in that I wasn’t going to be exactly on the mark, and that I wasn’t going to beat myself up for failure when the dominant trend was “this is so much better than you did last year.”

    And I won’t be tracking on weeks I’m away. This is an at-home schedule.

    So far, I’m actually fairly pleased.

    My goals were:

    • Work for paying clients: 2 hours (120 minutes)
    • My own writing, research, and marketing: 1 hour (60 minutes)
    • Processing e-mail: 2 hours (120 minutes)
    • Participating in social media: 15-30 minutes
    • Dealing with finances, bills, recordkeeping, etc.: 30 minutes
    • Office and household organizing and cleaning: 30 minutes
    • Professional reading: 1 hour (60 minutes)
    • Physical exercise: 1 hour (60 minutes)

    And my averages for Monday through Friday:

    • Work for paying clients: 77 minutes (13 minutes below goal)
    • My own writing, research, and marketing: 82 minutes) (22 above goal, this is good!)
    • Processing e-mail: 158 minutes (Uh-oh! Still wrestling that demon!). That does not include the significant time I spend answering queries from reporters—which I’m trying to keep below an hour a day, but really depends on who’s looking for what
    • Participating in social media: 25 minutes (right in the target zone, because I could measure and track and not let it over-consume my time)
    • Dealing with finances, bills, recordkeeping, etc.: 45 minutes (and that will be disproportionate this week too, because I’m getting my taxes done Wednesday)
    • Office and household organizing and cleaning: 33 minutes (pretty good, but more was on household than on office)
    • Professional reading: 38 minutes (a bit low, 22 minutes under)
    • Physical exercise: 63 minutes (that’s fine)

    So what have I learned so far?

    • There ARE enough hours of the day, although I understandably came up short the day I had three hours out of the house for meetings and errands (and that threw off the average for financial and organizing, both of which took a zero that day)
    • E-mail is a monster. Even going well over my quota, and even exempting the time I spend answering queries from reporters  I ended the week with 300 more messages in my inbox than I’d started, and spent a bunch of untracked time yesterday fighting it back down below 1000. I get an average of 300 messages every weekday. Some of those take three seconds to scan and delete, some require 15 or 20 minutes to answer, and most are somewhere in between. I’ve always felt that 100 inbound messages a day is a reasonable number to deal with, and I’m now taking active steps to reach that goal. I’ve unsubbed from dozens of newsletters and LinkedIn groups, and will continue to reduce the flow. If I don’t get direct and significant value from nearly every issue, out it goes. I’m also thinking seriously about ways to outsource more of my mail.
    • Finding the time to focus doesn’t necessarily mean productivity. Some of my writing shifts were terrific, with words just pouring into my keyboard. Other days were frustrating, spending 20 minutes in one case to track down just three contacts.
    • Overall, this regime is a very good thing. It is forcing me to stay much more closely on track, I’m feeling very productive, and I’m getting more of my goals accomplished. And I’m working on ways to get more value out of the time I spend, so that’s a secondary goal for me.

    I’ll report back next maybe at the end of February, where I’ll have had some time to really work with this and fine-tune it.

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    By Posted on Posted in Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , ,

    Over the weekend, rather than a new year’s resolution, I came up with a formula to break my day into pieces, by task, and hopefully boost my efficiency. My goals for this year are to spend my weekday workdays (starting at 7 a.m. and continuing through 10 pm, with lots of breaks for meetings, eating, outdoor time, cooking, relaxing, spending time with family members, etc.) approximately like this:

    • Work for paying clients: 2 hours (120 minutes)
    • My own writing, research, and marketing: 1 hour (60 minutes)
    • Processing e-mail: 2 hours (120 minutes)
    • Participating in social media: 15-30 minutes
    • Dealing with finances, bills, recordkeeping, etc.: 30 minutes
    • Office and household organizing and cleaning: 30 minutes
    • Professional reading: 1 hour (60 minutes)
    • Physical exercise: 1 hour (60 minutes)

    Well, this is pretty cool for day #1: my actual breakdown, with an hour and a half left to go looks like this:

    • Work for paying clients: 63 minutes (need to improve tomorrow)
    • My own writing, research, and marketing: 62 minutes including writing this post
    • Processing e-mail: 124 minutes
    • Participating in social media: 42 minutes (need to cut back a bit until the other work is done)
    • Dealing with finances, bills, recordkeeping, etc.: 65 minutes, partly because I have a very early tax appointment this year, so for the next couple of weeks this is going to get more attention, and partly because it took me 20 minutes to track down an error in the spreadsheet I was working on
    • Office and household organizing and cleaning: 75 minutes, mostly organizing three weeks of trash for a dump run—tomorrow I hope to spend the quota on my office
    • Professional reading: 31 minutes
    • Physical exercise: 45 minutes with the dog walk, and 20 minutes on my exercycle coming later

    I am realistic. I know that life happens, and I won’t be exact. But I’m pretty pleased—and I know that I’m going to spend the next half hour on professional reading, and come in very close on everything except client work. I don’t generally do client work at night, because my clients should get my best thinking, and that’s in daylight.

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