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, Ethics-International Tagged with , , , ,

Early this month, I got an e-mail from a Professor Robert Brain, inviting me to speak at my full fee plus expenses for a rapidly upcoming conference in England. The topic he proposed was a bit off my usual topic, but one that I could handle.

Follow-up mails from a Professor Woodman Walker included a letter of agreement to sign and requested more information from me. I wanted to find out more about the parameters of the speech, so I asked for some phone time. Our interview was scheduled for 8 a.m. my time this morning.

In the meantime, I had asked my good friend Google to tell me what it new about these two “gentlemen.”

The results were not encouraging:

One of the links on that page led me to a full account of how the scam works. I also checked the Middlesex University staff directory. Oddly enough, the phrase “Robert Brain” brought back a listing of the staff directory, as you can see in the screen shot–but when I clicked through the directory itself, neither Robert Brain nor Woodman Walker showed up.

Now, I’ve had a few speaking requests that seemed pretty flaky at first, and turned out to be real. So I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. Here’s an approximation of how the conversation went:

Me: “Good morning, this is Shel. How may I make your day special?”

Him: “This is professor Woodman Walker of Middlesex University, UK.”

Me (big, hearty): “Good morning, Professor. The first thing I need from you is the names, off the top of your head and you can give me contact information later, of three people who’ve spoken for you in the last year. There are some rumors about you on Google.”

Him: hangs up.

Speakers—be suspicious of any e-mail that asks for banking information in order to get a work permit (I didn’t get that far with him)—and don’t be surprised if a similar scheme shows up allegedly from a different school and different professors.

You’ve been warned!

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By Posted on Posted in censorship, Protests and Crackdowns, Transparency vs. Secrecy Tagged with , ,

TorrentFreak reports that the US Department of Homeland Security did a little sting on child pornography websites–but in addition to the 10 actual perpetrators they shut down, they managed to shut down 84,000 sites that were completely innocent! They all happened to use the same free webhost.

I have never been an advocate of free webhosts, and one of the many reasons I’ve often cited is that spammers, etc. can contaminate a server and bring you down on a blacklist. But even I never imagined that sites would greet visitors witha very official-looking graphic bearing this text:

Advertisement, distribution, transportation, receipt, and possession of child pornography constitute federal crimes that carry penalties for first time offenders of up to 30 years in federal prison, a $250,000 fine, forfeiture and restitution.

I’m also a long-time advocate of open Internet. We’ve seen in countries from Egypt to Iran to China what happens when governments interfere with Internet access, and how shutting the Internet has been used to protect totalitarianism.

Mind you, I’m not saying the US government is totalitarian, but it certainly overreached this time (and not the first time, by a long shot). If you haven’t yet signed Free Press’s petition against the “Internet kill switch,” I suggest you go there right now and add your name.

(Thanks to Michelle Shaeffer for alerting me to this.)

Shel Horowitz’s latest book is Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green: Winning Strategies to Improve Your Profits and Your Planet (co-authored with Jay Conrad Levinson)

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, Ethics-International, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Two stories in today’s paper about high consequences for corporate greed—and both of them have significant environmental as well as business ethics interest.

First, a local company here in Massachusetts, Stevens Urethane, faces a five-year ban on manufacturing a technology used in making solar panels, as well as more than $8.6 million in assorted fines, penalties, and other costs. The company was found guilty of stealing the secrets of a competitor, and the judge’s ruing not only impounded more than a million dollars worth of revenue, but forbade the company from using a $2 million assembly line it had built to make the product. Punitive damages, attorneys’ fees, and reimbursement of the other side’s legal and expert witness fees combined to create the $8.6 million total.

But the cost of this business ethics failure is only 1/1000th of the costs slapped onto oil giant Chevron by the government of Ecuador. While the $8.6 billion amount was less than 1/3 of the court-appointed expert’s recommendation, it is still the largest damage award ere in an environmental damage lawsuit (and probably the first of many more around the world against oil companies, which have been sued for habitat destruction in Nigeria and elsewhere).

Ironically, this suit had originally been filed in US courts against Texaco (now owned by Chevron), and the company’s attorneys successfully argued that the case should be heard in Ecuador.

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By Posted on Posted in Business-general, Publishing Tagged with , , ,

Amazon has a new program of interest to bloggers; you can have your feed available on the Kindle store, and Amazon will share revenues.

Sounds great—until you read the fine print. I read the entire contract, all seven pages of 10-point type, and I thought it was one of the most author-unfriendly documents I’ve seen in quite some time. I don’t think I really want Amazon to be able to just swoop in and repurpose my content into books or whatever, without not only consulting me but giving me the right to say no if I object to a particular use. And of course, all the liabilities rest with the blogger.

Yes, there’s a revenue share. If I understand this particularly confusing section correctly, it’s 15 cents per downloaded kilobyte. So if a typical text-only blog post of mine weighs in at 10K, I’d get $1.50 when someone downloads it—or is that what the total revenue would me, and my portion a share of that? The contract is quite ambiguous on this. If the former, the pay rate is not bad, in the great scheme of things—it compares with a typical book royalty—but not really enough to get me to give them the rights they want. How many would I realistically sell in the course of a year? A dozen? A hundred? Ten thousand? My guess is one of the lower numbers. And meanwhile Amazon gets the right to anthologize and package me, whether I like it or not.

I think I’ll wait for a more author-friendly contract, thank you very much.

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By Posted on Posted in language, Marketing Techniques and Philosophies

In an attempt to regain control over e-mail, I’ve been unsubscribing from dozens of publications.

And I notice—a LOT of them thank me for this!

As a marketer, I find this puzzling. It makes a lot more sense to me to thank an unsubscriber for having been a subscriber, not for leaving. Still, I’d rather be thanked inappropriately then to get a gruff, cold “you have been unsubscribed.”

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability Tagged with , , , ,

Sure has been one cold and snowy winter here in Massachusetts. One morning last week was minus 19 F, and that is the coldest day I can remember experiencing, ever. And January set snow records all over the place.

The cold snap has seized much of the country, including places like Georgia that are decidedly UNused to real winter.

The climate deniers, of course, are latching on to this news with great glee, and kind of a “ha, ha, we told you there was no global warming problem.”

However…what I’ve heard is that this weather pattern actually has a tremendous amount to do with global warming. In fact, the arctic air has become so warm that it’s no longer trapped by low pressure. The pressure is high enough, and the air rises enough that it pushes down into the south, and makes us shiver around here.

So don’t go out and buy a Hummer any time soon. The problem is real, and this is more evidence, not less.

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By Posted on Posted in Green Marketing, Web 2.0/Social Media Tagged with , ,

Guest post by Daniel Cawrey

What are some of the green trends making their way through the web?

It seems like almost everyone today is trying to leverage social media in order to captivate audiences that may be interested in their product, service or information. This can also be used to for green organizations to help them with their marketing efforts as well, and it surely has a much softer impact than some traditional marketing methods. Sure, the web and social media as a whole requires energy to run itself, but at least it’s not as wasteful as some of the other alternatives to get people’s attention such as direct marketing.

But how does the social media sphere reflect on the green movement as a whole? Let’s take a look at some social media sites as well as an initiative by one organization that take the environment into account as their complete focus.

UNEP

The United Nations Environment Programme has the @UNEPandYou Twitter account that has over 22,000 followers. It is an insightful stream of Tweets that discusses climate change, tree planting campaigns and sustainable tourism information.

A great resource to get timely eco-friendly information.

In 2009, UNEP celebrated World Environment day by planting a tree for every follower that it gained during the campaign. They ended up planting 10,000 trees. As you can see, the organization has embraced a number of social media sites, and is a great example of a strategy for others to follow and be successful with.

Quora

One of the best ways to follow some of the most interesting developments and green initiatives is to follow “Green” or “Green Technology” on Quora. IF you haven’t used Quora, reserve yourself some time because it can be a bit addicting.

Quora is like a mash-up between Twitter, Facebook and Yahoo Answers. Many people use it to learn about interesting things that they are curious about. Although some information can be redundant, you can really learn some great answers that come from experts such as “What is an environmentally friendly way to remove outdoors ice without using salt?” or “How much oil is used to produce a calorie of food in the developed world?”

Greenwala

Everyone knows about Facebook, but the problem with being the most popular social networking site is that it is really too broad to cover people’s interests. That’s where Greenwala comes in. It’s a place for people to learn about and share their particular causes. Information is available about all sorts of green topics, all in one place.

You can connect with Greenwala via your Facebook account.

Users can set up communities, share articles and sign petitions. In Quora-like form, the site has even started a question and answer section as well. Some popular groups include “What Can I Turn This Into” recycling group, and the “Green Technology, Architecture & Innovation” group.

Daniel Cawrey is a freelance writer. In addition to running his own blog about Google Chrome and Chrome OS, he also writes on consumer topics such as credit cards.

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By Posted on Posted in Arts & Entertainment, Peace and War, propaganda Tagged with , , , ,

Ever see a 76-year-old-man up on stilts—and not just ordinary stilts but giant ones that elevated him 15 or 20 feet above everyone else?

I saw Peter Schumann, the tireless founder of Bread & Puppet Theater, do just that yesterday, at a performance in Boston.

Bread & Puppet Theater founder Peter Schumann, age 76, walking high above other performers on giant stilts.
76-year-old Peter Schumann, on giant stilts

Schumann founded the well-known political theater troupe back in 1963. Known for its giant puppets and unflinching anarchist-socialist politics (not to mention Schumann’s visual art and breadbaking, the collective nature of its living and working, and incorporating audience members including kids into its performance), Bread & Puppet has been fighting the good fight for decades.

Puppet-headed actors on stage: Bread & Puppet Theater
Puppet-headed actors on stage: Bread & Puppet Theater

I first encountered them in the early 1970s, when I used to attend demonstrations against the Vietnam war as a teenager. Walking the line between art and propaganda, the large troupe, based on a  beautiful farm in Glover, Vermont, is always entertaining, and always committed to the arts as tools of personal empowerment, affordable to all.

Peter Schumann talks with the cast just before the show
Not yet in costume, Peter Schumann huddles with the cast at the end of the dress rehearsal

I’m glad they’re still out there pushing the envelope, and was particularly glad to see a large number of kids, both in the audience and among the volunteers who got there early to rehears and join the cast for the day.

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