Vacation, as the Europeans have discovered, is critical to ones ability to contribute effectively in the workplace. As I’m in Sweden this week and our project time lines are surely impacted by month long (or more) vacation schedules, I figured there would be no more appropriate time to write about vacations and the value of them.
Note: This trip is for business and not a vacation, however, I am spending a free weekend in Stockholm. A mini vacation I guess.
Although the “American way” seems to criticize the European vacation mentality, I think that it may be important to consider the value of extended breaks for multiple reasons.
Taking a break allows one to recollect their focus and return to work with a laser focus on their work.
A vacation allows one to recharge their batteries, release the pressures that can build at work, and return energized and excited.
Taking a vacation, perhaps a luxurious one, gives you a sense of reward and helps you to feel really good about giving 110% to your work.
When using social media for branding I would make 2 points.
1) Use the tools, don’t be the tools. Keep in mind that the value of social media comes through communication. You’ll need to leverage the communication but more importantly you’ll need to back up that communication. It is unlikely that you’ll be valuable to a company for social media’s sake. You need to use the social media tools to communicate your expertise or value in other areas of business/life.
2) Don’t drowned. A while back I fell into the trap of losing the productivity battle solely because I wanted to stay informed on what was going on in the social web world. Staying in tune with every update from my Twitter friends and trying to consume tons of data, I was becoming very unproductive. I spent so much time staying “informed” that I was accomplishing much less. I wrote on my blog (http://bit.ly/o07w8) about how I reduced the noise and increase the value of tools like Twitter. If you don’t appear productive, employers will not be attracted to you.
The tools can kill opportunities if used incorrectly.
I’ve recently started reading and employing the tips and tricks of “I Will Teach You to be Rich” by Ramit Sethi. His blog iwillteachyoutoberich.com is one of the most popular personal finance blogs on the web and his book promises to be very valuable.
The reason that I chose Ramit’s book over the thousands of other personal finance books is that he has many of the same beliefs or philosophies that I do. He argues that being actively involved in your finances on a daily basis and worrying about them is not the way to success. He argues simplification and automation, many of the same principles from “The 4 Hour Work Week“. I’ve worked hard in the last few months to really improve my productivity and effectiveness of my work days.
Over the past 2 months I’ve made some drastic changes to how I use Twitter (which I will share below). When I was in China, as I was reading The 4 Hour Work Week, I realized that my control over my own productivity was slipping from my hands. I spent so much time on non-productive tasks and it was time for a drastic change. I realized that my Twitter habits were guilty of productivity theft and I needed to put an end to it. Here’s the experiment…
Before
At one point, I was following 1001 people on Twitter. At home on my Mac I used Tweetdeck and REACH to manage my twitter followers. The constant flow of Tweets was entertaining for sure but because of my desire to see as much as I could from the “Twittersphere” I dropped other important tasks. At work I limited Twitter but used iGoogle’s Betwittered to follow the streams. It got to the point that I couldn’t even see the Tweets from people I knew personally because of the huge number of people I followed that I didn’t know but were just interesting to me.
I have always been a huge fan of taking Twitter relationships offline. Late last year I met Ross Kimbarovsky, founder of crowdSPRING via Twitter. We had dinner one night and now have a solid, offline friendship. Same goes for Steffan Antonas, a Wordpress & Twitter guru out in San Diego. When I was home I met Steffan for drinks and we now stay in touch, sometimes via Twitter and sometimes via email. Another example is Fraser Kelton, VP of BizDev for AdaptiveBlue (maker of GLUE), who I’ll be meeting up with in two weeks on my trip to NYC. These are just a few examples of many more!
There are some incredibly valuable relationships to be had out there and I’ll always love Twitter for making those relationships easier to develop and find. But it got to the point that I couldn’t separate the social networking from the social noise making. I didn’t want to lose the ability to develop those relationships into valuable ones only because I was trying to keep up with so many other people I’d never met.
Realization
As I realized that I had to make this change I first had to decide how. Another relationship that I’ve begun to nurture through Twitter is the founder of Seesmic, Loic Lemeur. I follow his blog closely and saw him post on his drastic change in Twitter usage. He had the Twitter folks write a script that would “unfollow all”. He did this because his direct messages got out of control. He was following 23,o00 people and understandably it was overbearing.
I realized that I wanted to take a similar action. My goal was to get back to my close friends and people I’d met in person. I wanted to see the random actions, “I fed my dog ice cream and he loved it”, from my friends (so I could later make fun of them) but I didn’t need to see these posts from everyone. So how would I do that? What would the affects be and how could I test before making the jump?
Change
In China I basically didn’t use Twitter. This was my test. I think I had a total of 10-15 posts the entire month and it was relaxing. It freed me to focus on what I was learning from my training courses and it freed me to explore China. I reduced my blog posting to ‘travel only’, and I focused on the experiences I was having. I felt freed, I felt focused, and much more productive. I knew that when I got back I needed to apply some of the Tim Ferriss (4HWW) principles to really change my productivity and focus. I would employ the low(er) information diet.
So, when I got back, I promptly got in touch with Loic and asked if he could share the script with me. He couldn’t give me the script but I got in touch with Zac Bowling (@zbowling) and he ran it for me. In a total of about 20 minutes I was following O people. I had completely started from scratch with Twitter and it was scary. I started re-adding people like my parents (yes, they’re on Twitter), my sisters, my college friends, the people who I stated above, and other people that I knew in person. It was easy to find who I communicated with most often using saved Twitter searches in REACH (coming to beta soon!).
I definitely do need to apologize to some people because I haven’t yet added everyone back that I should. I’m doing this gradually. If I know you in person I’m probably following you (again). However, for those who I don’t know in person I’ve limited my consumption of your tweets to regain my personal productivity. Please don’t take it personally. If we have had conversations, please @reply me and get back in touch, I’d love it. I should say that there is no goal here of having a ridiculous follower/following ratio. I could careless. I only care about the value that I get out of the tool and I’ll take almost any action that will increase that value measure.
After
The results of my experiment have been pretty interesting. Right away I lost about 150 followers. It dropped from 1500 followers to about 1340. Losing those followers didn’t bother me at all. If people are following me only/just because I’m following them then peace. Then, people started following me at a much faster rate and even though I’d lose about 10 followers a day, I’d add about 11. Now my follower number is about 1360 and I sincerely hope to interact with many of those people in the future.
Twitter is very much a two way street. Those who interact with my question type tweets I’ll follow and interact with them, those who don’t, well I guess they’ll continue to just follow my tweets. I definitely engaged in the question tweets of anyone who @replies me or that I’m already following. I’m a huge supporter of the platform and now that my Tweets go directly and quickly into Facebook it’s engaging even more friends!
My productivity has sky-rocketed due to my low information diet and reduction of Tweets to consume. Now I rarely consume Tweets and send Tweets at the same time. By doing this it’s easy to spiral into a Twitter session that lasts much longer than it needs to. I can’ t say I’d recommend this experiment to everyone, but I would recommend identifying what and who are important to you and making sure that the tool enables better communication instead of the tool becoming a barrier to solid communication.
Below is a hilarious video about the “Twittershere” shared by my sis @taylorgraves
I’m pretty hard core on Google services, however, I am forced to use Outlook at work, fortunately am able to sync it with my GCal using the brilliant Google Calendar Sync.
When I bought my iPod Touch in preparation for my trip to China I had been hoping to double it as a PDA and was shocked to see that my calendar syncing options on a PC consisted of either syncing with outlook via iTunes, or – wait for it – syncing with outlook via iTunes (you’ve gotta be kidding me). And on a Mac, I’d have to go through iCal which also requires a manual sync, not interested.
On the surface this might seem reasonable, except that:
I’m not going to sync through iTunes on my work laptop because my Mac, at home, holds all my tunes. I did not want any manual sync’ing to have to be done and getting Outlook at home was absolutely not an option. I like the web interface for Gmail and wasn’t interested in trying an option like Thunderbird.
I found the solution to my problems with NuevaSync, which allows direct over-the-air, native synchronisation between Google Calendar and my iPod – which basically means that my appointments are synced both ways without manual intervention or iTunes. You’ll need to sign up here for an account, but it’s free and pretty straight forward to set up – just a matter of configuring your NuevaSync account to look at your GCal, and then configuring your iPod to point at NeuvaSync. The interface is awesomely simple with no frills, just functionality. In addition to the iPod touch, NuevaSync also supports the various flavours of iPhone and Windows Mobile based PDAs and smartphones.
No I have both my Gcal and my Gcontacts completely sync in real time with no manual effort. Glorious!
This week my sister was asking me about Friendfeed and how to find value in it for her PR company. This is an extract from our conversation…
Taylor: what’s Friendfeed exactly, what you’ve done online? what you’ve posted, commented, etc? Taylor: what’s the purpose of it, i’m trying to understand Me: it aggregates all of your online activity from twitter to flickr to blog posts…it brings everything to one platform. Taylor: alright, i can’t see that being that useful for a company, maybe just individuals Me: try and change your thinking… don’t think, “would this be helpful or not”, instead think, “this would be helpful, how?” You almost have to force yourself to find how a tool would be helpful first…then test it with that attitude. Then if it really isn’t helpful, then dump it…but a lot of times people aren’t able to find the value in their first glance at a tool. Me: make sense? Taylor: yeah it does!
This notion of forcing yourself to find value in new tools comes from the fact that people have a very difficult time thinking outside the box. The reason that people have to think outside of the box to find the value of many of these new social softwares, or web tools is because these tools force people to create entirely new workflows for getting things done. These tools cause people to change habits and change pre-conditioned understandings of how things are done. That’s never easy, at first! At first the re-tweaking of “how” may seem unproductive but often that re-tweaking allows for greater productivity once that new workflow becomes the “norm”.
Example: If I normally open my browser and open my top 3 sports sites, top 2 political commentaries, and my 2 family members blogs it is not going to make any sense to me when somebody tells me that I can just open Google Reader to read all of that. Without the knowledge of how an RSS reader works opening up one tool to read all 7 of those sites won’t make any sense. At first it may seem weird to just open Google Reader to read my sites but when I dive into the tool and actually use it I find that it is significantly more productive to centralize that consumption of information.
This is just one simple example of how not understanding a new technology might hide the value of it. Just as I encouraged my sister to use a technology, in this case Friendfeed, before she says, “I can’t see that being that useful…”, I would encourage you to test out a tool before deciding if its useful! I’m asked all the time how I think a growing business can take advantage of the web and the interaction it enables, and many times my response is, “try it out and you tell me”. So much of the time the value will be totally different for one person or company than it will be for others.
It is similar to the notion of ‘innocent before proven guilty’. You have to give new technologies or tools a chance before judging them
Hi. I'm Ryan Graves and this is my personal blog. I'm an entrepreneur living in Chicago, working in San Francisco, but from San Diego. My wife blogs too, and I <3 my family.
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