“They set no goals. They require no discipline, adhere to no schedule. Fear of failure, regret, guilt for not practicing enough-these strategies play no part in their game plan or ultimate success.

Do you want a master class in motivation?

Watch babies. Using the strongest motivation known to human kind, they master the art of walking. How? Why? With what motivation? The answer to all 3 questions is the same. Desire-because they want to.

….Years ago, I visited a garden with a statue of a particularly jolly Buddha. Inscribed beneath it were the words, “Misunderstood desire is the cause of all suffering.”

Misunderstood desire, at last it made sense! We have all heard the familiar quote, “Desire is the cause of all suffering.” I had often wondered how someone as wise as Buddha could have thought that. How could desire ever cause suffering? Attachment and “misunderstood desire” do that.” – Mandy Evans

Reading this is like a deep exhale. Can you imagine the absence of fearing failure, regret, and guilt? I’d like to add “disappointing others” to that list. Fear of disappointing people is the prima donna of my fear landscape.

At dinner tonight, Steve and I were discussing want. What if I quit my job and business? I was musing, picturing myself as one of the black-clad servers at Pizzeria Bianco. What if I worked nights at a restaurant and spent my days leisurely reading, writing, taking walks, and doing whatever I fancy? 

What would I WANT to do? (After a while, enough leisure reading is enough.)

What would that most integral, nurturing, joyous, genuine thing, DESIRE, propel me to do?

And the things I think I desire right now – wealth, recognition, fame, strength, different clothes – are they misunderstood?

When I think about a baby, putting one starfish hand in front of the other, crawling and looking up with a plump face wide open in curiosity, I want to cry in awe. It’s not for the 30 Under 30 List, or the Likes and Comments. There’s no forcefulness, no you have to because you have to. 

It’s not for a prize but for its own satisfaction. The glow of yes, I did that. 

I want. I desire. Can you feel its power??

Image by Alexander Dummer.

The post 10: What Do Babies, Desire, and Fear Have in Common? appeared first on Medusa Media Group.

Hello businesswoman! Let’s talk about simple, strategic ways to repurpose your blog content. Reusing content is a great way to lighten your workload, connect with your audience, and build a clever, confident, and consistent brand voice and message.

As a content creator myself, I know how frustrating it is to put time, energy, and money into writing content, publishing it, and then… what? That’s it!?

Thankfully no, that is NOT it. There are numerous ways you can reuse blog content across the Internet, and social media is one of my favorites.

Today we’re going into detail about how to repurpose your blog posts for social media. If you write long-form emails to your email list, those can be repurposed on social media as well. Both are forms of “content,” and both are assets to your business that you’ll want to make the most of.

But how? The short answer: quote yourself.

How to repurpose content for social media

After spending hours creating long-form content marketing such as a blog article or email update, you want to get the most mileage out of that content across all your digital marketing platforms. One of the best ways to do that is by quoting yourself.

Using quotes in your digital marketing is great because they are short, shareable, and can be repurposed across multiple social media networks. They keep your language and messaging consistent, and besides: you’ve already written them!

Your blog articles and email content are full of short, quotable text that is ripe to be repurposed to boost your brand. Now it’s a matter of putting that text to work for you.

5 ways to repurpose your content with quotes on social media:

1. Create Quote Memes and Images

Using a template or an app like WordSwag, overlay quotable text you wrote onto a graphic or photo and publish it on Instagram, Facebook, or Twitter. Be sure to use relevant hashtags to improve engagement.

Productive tip: For the easiest version, create a square meme, publish it to Instagram, and set up IFTTT or Zapier to automatically post the meme to your other social networks. Be SURE to test the connection to make sure the actual image posts, not just a link to the image on Instagram.

You might be thinking, aren’t you supposed to use different-sized on every social media platform? It depends who you ask. Buffer publishes a fantastic guide (Here’s Your Go-To Social Media Image Size Cheat Sheet) to the best sizes for each social media platform, but in my experience, square Instagram images work just fine on other platforms. The best way to determine whether a horizontal image performs better on your Facebook Page is to test it. However, I suggest just going with square images.

It’s important to use a consistent template for these memes. It doesn’t have to be the same background, but be sure to use your brand colors and fonts so that all your quote memes look like they belong to your brand.

2. Highlight “Click-to-Tweet” Opportunities

Similar to the strategy above, consider embedding a “click to tweet” of your quotes in the body of your blog or email (click to tweet!). You can do this just once, or in multiple places if your content is long.

3. Repurpose Quotes into Unique Pins to Promote Your Content

While you’re identifying opportunities to add click-to-tweet, you can use the same quotes to create branded, pinnable images to share on your Pinterest board. After the quote in the body of your blog/email add a link with a CTA to “pin this quote”! (See what I did there?)

Make sure you use horizontally-oriented images for pinnable quotes. Images that are 1200 pixels tall by 800 pixels wide perform best on Pinterest. You’ll need to add the link to your blog post manually if it’s not published yet, or you can wait until your blog publishes to pin the quote.

You can also display these pins at the bottom of your post to encourage readers to Pin them on their Pinterest boards. I got this idea from Being Boss (scroll down to the bottom of this page to see my pinnable quote!).

4. Reuse Quotes in Image Captions and Post Content

Use short, quotable, snippets of your text as post content for images on Facebook, Instagram, emails, and even other blog articles.

There will be plenty of times when you want to share a meme featuring your favorite quote from Maya Angelou or Danielle LaPorte, but say something of your own in the the post itself. Keep a cache of your own content to share with quote memes, articles, videos, or other 3rd party content you publish on your social media and emails.

This is a strategy I’m using with my client Karen Schachter (see below for examples!)

5. Use Quotes as Inspiration

For deeper content for your own blog, email updates or guest posts, use your quotes to inspire new blog articles that go into more depth on the subject of the quote. Feel free to quote yourself in subsequent blog articles and link back to the blog article where the quote comes from!

You can use the same strategy in subsequent email marketing updates. Expand on a quote you wrote in an email, and feel free to use click to tweets, quote memes, and other forms of visual media that support your message.

Finally, consider using your quotes to write for other organizations, publications and blogs. It’s a great way to grow your audience and build inbound links to your website. Go ahead and quote yourself in these guest features. While you always want to pitch original content, there’s no need to completely reinvent the wheel.

Can you think of other ways to repurpose your own quotes across social media and other digital marketing? Let me know on social media! I’d love to hear your ideas.

Examples of repurposing content on social media

I posted this to Instagram in November, and it earned 5th place for most engagement that year (better than 93% of our content). My client Karen wrote the text that accompanies the image in an email to her list in 2014. Here we used Strategy 4 to repurpose it with an image we got from a 3rd party (giving them full credit, of course).

She Negotiates’ blog article The Ten Commandments for Negotiating Women is a perfect candidate for Strategy 1. We created quote memes for each of the 10 commandments, and trickled them out on LinkedIn and Twitter.

Over the past two moths since it was published, the blog post has generated 122% more traffic from LinkedIn and 130% more traffic from Twitter than four other blog posts published during the same time! Any time you write a list, consider creating a quote meme for each item on your list and using them to promote your content.

How to add repurposing blog content to your schedule

Make it part of your routine to pull quotable text from all your long-form content, whether a phrase, a sentence, or a few lines. Create a spreadsheet where you paste this content and note where it was first written, the category it belongs to, and how you plan to reuse it.

Then, designate time in your schedule to make those quote memes, design those pins, schedule those tweets, and plan more long-form content! I recommend setting aside time to “batch” this project so you can create all your repurposed content in one go. Once you have templates for these memes/pins/tweets it’ll be easy to create and schedule them.

To keep track, you’re welcome to use this spreadsheet:

It took 40 minutes to go through strategies 1-3 for this blog post. (I will implement strategies 4 and 5 later.)

It might help to try this with an accountability partner

Reach out to a fellow entrepreneur/friend and arrange a time when you both will review your latest blog article or email, pull out quotes, and create memes, tweets, pins, and more from them. Or you could do it for each other! It might be easier for you to pull content for your friend than for yourself, and vice versa.

Adding this much content creation to your schedule may be overwhelming. Even though you’re repurposing your own content, it still takes time and energy to create the images, schedule the tweets, build the links, and so on.

Frankly, it might not be worth your time to do all the legwork. You have clients to serve and a business to run! If you’re interested in hiring someone to design digital assets for your business based on your best quotes, give me a call.

Reusing your blog content with quotes gives your audience a seamless experience

Finding creative ways to get more mileage out of your long-form content is a brilliant way to create an identifiable brand voice and consistent messaging. A fancy word for this is “integrated marketing,” which means:

“A strategic approach to integrating communications and interactive experiences targeting defined audiences and individuals which coordinates all aspects of marketing of a brand including Paid media… Earned media …and Owned media in order achieve consistent messaging customised where possible by channel which presents a unified and seamless experience to consumers across the customer lifecycle or path to purchase”.

By using short quotes of text from your long-form content across all your marketing platforms, you ensure that your brand voice is consistent. Prospects who interact with you by visiting your blog, reading your emails, or following you on social networks will all receive a similar experience of your brand voice, design, and subject matter.

Now you have many compelling reasons to give this strategy a try! Not only does repurposing your content for social media give you more from your hard work, thus expanding your reach and driving traffic to your website, it also ensures that your prospects are experiencing your brand seamlessly across media. Using your own quotes will help you spread your brand message and connect with your audience in consistent, appealing way.

Care to share?

You have to overcome a lot of inertia to share on social media! I’ve made it easy:

• Facebook: After working on a blog post for hours, the LAST thing you want is to just publish it and move on. Use these 5 strategies to get MORE mileage  out of long form content. This way your hard work pays off all over the Internet and #socialmedia! http://bit.ly/reuse-blog-content-social-media 
  • OR share this post!
• Twitter: After spending on a blog post, the LAST thing you want is to “just” publish it. Check out these 5 resourceful ways to reuse #blog #content lest it die in Internet anonymity! http://bit.ly/how-to-repurpose-content #contentmarketing #socialmediamarketing #digitalmarketing by @evajannotta
  • OR retweet this!
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/p/BgzHP0ZgtJ6/
• Pin this post! 

The post 5 Resourceful Ways to Repurpose Blog Content Lest it Die in Internet Anonymity! appeared first on Medusa Media Group.

This is a story about how planning and tracking your time will give you more control and power. Simple though it is, planning and tracking gives you insight into this grand adventure we’re all doing: L I F E. Knowing how you spend time gives you an honest view of what your life is actually like in the units by which we measure each day: minutes and hours. Time tracking and its best friend, time planning, let you know yourself and your life more intimately.

They give you the dose of realism you might need to make big changes. They give you the cumulative data you might need to advocate for yourself.

They say time is our most precious commodity. And unlike money, it’s nonrenewable. Too often we find ourselves wondering where time went. How did it get to be five o’clock with so many tasks left to do? Time tracking will tell you if it’s because you overestimated how many tasks fit in eight hours, or spent two hours puttering around on Facebook (perhaps a combination of both!). Time tracking gives you knowledge. And knowledge is power.

It only takes 30 minutes to plan

Last Friday I finally did something I’d meant to do for ages: I spent thirty minutes planning the following week.

If your eyes just glazed over in boredom, bear with me. You know you’re supposed to plan in advance. You’ve read the science about decision fatigue. You know that you will feel better and get more done if you hit your desk on Monday morning with the day already planned. You don’t have to spend any time deciding where to start. You did that last Friday.

In addition to this efficient and feel-good-hack practice, week planning gives the benefit of a much needed reality check. Let’s say you have the idea that next week you’ll write two articles, serve seven clients, keep up with emails, listen to a podcast, and read up on your industry. Think again. Planning forced me to *actually* select times when I would get to all my tasks, which quickly led me to the realization that there weren’t enough hours to write those articles AND listen to the podcast AND read industry news. I had to prioritize. What happened as a result? I felt less behind! Instead of being overly ambitious about what I’d achieve in a day, I was realistically ambitious. Instead of constantly feeling behind, I felt like I was doing enough.

Meet the guru of time tracking

However, as that first planned week wore on, I learned that I was still overly ambitious. What made that obvious? One of my favorite time tricks in the book: time tracking.

I started time tracking in 2013, after meeting Laura Vanderkam at a conference. Laura is the empress of time tracking. She’s written the books and done the studies and offers tremendous insight into the lies we tell ourselves about time – and how we can transform our relationship with time into an honest, if not loving, partnership. How we remember or feel about time is notoriously unreliable, but numbers can’t lie. When the amount of time you spend sleeping or exercising is neatly tallied on a spreadsheet, you have to reckon with reality.

Laura’s system is simple: she recommends using a spreadsheet to track how you spend your time, with each cell counting for thirty minutes. I use this system to plan AND track. When I was allotting time for my Monday tasks on that Friday afternoon, I was filling out cells on my spreadsheet. That’s the planning part. When the day came and things don’t go according to plan, I refilled the cells to reflect how I actually spent my time. I use color coding for planning and tracking, for a quick visual overview of what I’m doing and when. The colors also make me happy:

How does this help?

Why would you track your time? If you work for a salary, start noting how long each of your responsibilities takes you. You may be surprised to find that some low-impact tasks take a lot of time, whereas tasks with high ROI go quickly. You may find that unnecessary meetings take up a quarter of your working hours each week. This information gives you the knowledge and data you need to go to your boss and suggest some changes. Companies don’t want to waste your time. If time tracking shows that you could be a great contribution by replacing X task with Y task, that’s good for you and the company! I would be impressed if an employee said, “I’ve been tracking how long it takes me to find, comment on, and save Pins. I think it would be more effective to use half of that time pinning unique content to community boards.” Hell yes! That is valuable feedback and insight, and shows how much my employee wants to move my company forward.

If you work for yourself, the benefits are equally compelling. If you sell your time by the hour, time tracking is an obvious way to monitor how much you’re working for each client and how much you’re working for yourself. Even if you sell products or packaged services, time tracking gives you insight into how effective those packages are products are. Your spreadsheet tells you if you’re spending twice as many hours on one client as another, for the same package price. It tells you how long it took to develop and write the sales page for that product, compared to your other products. I also track how long each type of task takes for my clients. This data lets me estimate how long different marketing efforts take, which helps my clients budget. It also lets me measure the ROI of different tasks. If it takes three hours a month to write a marketing email, and the open rate is only six percent, well, something needs to change.

Knowledge is power

We are ambitious people. We have Big Audacious Goals and many things we want to do. Yet the daily grind can distract us from making progress on those goals. Weeks pass in a blur of working, relaxing, and socializing, and unless we intentionally make time for our goals, they don’t happen. This is where planning and tracking are especially powerful: holding you accountable for the things YOU want to do. Laura Vanderkam often emphasizes the importance of planning your priorities first. If it’s important to you to get more cardio or write a book, plan that for Monday morning – not for Friday night. Then track how long it takes you, and watch those numbers grow over time. There’s nothing like seeing the tangible evidence of progress toward your goals in little numbers on a spreadsheet.

Planning and tracking are most gratifying when they show me that I’m doing what I need to do and what I want to do. One of the greatest benefits of being an entrepreneur is having flexibility to decide where I spend time. The knowledge that comes from planning and tracking gives me power: power to make changes if the way I’m spending time doesn’t align with my goals or values (business-related or otherwise). For example, this winter I knew I wanted to get as much sunshine as possible. So I schedule daily walks on my spreadsheet around noon, and I treat them with the same respect I treat a client meeting. If I didn’t plan those walks, they wouldn’t always happen. If I didn’t track them, I wouldn’t get the satisfaction of seeing how many hours I spent outside each week or feel the radiant energy of that burning ball of gas in our sky.  

(Image by Glen Carstens-Peters)

What’s one of your goals? How could time planning and tracking help you achieve it? Share in the comments!

The post Planning and Time Tracking For More Power and More Sunshine appeared first on Medusa Media Group.

This article was originally posted on December 21st, 2016, by One Woman Shop

Working from home, how I love thee! Let me count the ways: I can wear pajamas, I can work at the table, in bed, or on the couch, I can take breaks to walk or shower, I can sing along to music, I can even drink a glass of wine while writing a blog post!

The list goes on, and make no mistake, there are many great things about working from home. But the appeal of wearing what you want and working from your bedroom hides the fact that working from home presents unique challenges.

It’s incredibly easy to get distracted. It can feel lonely and isolating. But what’s especially tricky is this: Without coworkers beside you, it’s hard to tell when the work day starts and when it ends.

The personal is professional

When you are your business, the personal and professional are almost the same thing. When you spend so much time thinking, daydreaming, talking, and planning your business(es), being “off the clock” becomes a foreign concept.

This is especially true when you work from home (this may resonate with students as well as entrepreneurs). When your home is your office, you know that you could always be working. This can create the toxic habit of feeling like you’re never not working…and that treadmill always leads to exhaustion and burnout.

The separation of home and work

If you have trouble getting “off the clock”, I feel you. I spent months this past summer feeling the constant, low-level anxiety that I wasn’t done. Five o’clock would come and I’d go from typing an email on my bed to typing an email in my kitchen, while I tab-switched to a recipe and cooked dinner. There was no physical difference between being at work and being at home, and that made it hard for me to switch gears from professional time to personal time. As a result, all my time felt like a confusing and exhausting combination of both.

Read the rest at One Woman Shop!

(Image by Andrew Branch)

The post How to Transition Your Entrepreneurial Brain “Off The Clock” When You Work From Home appeared first on Medusa Media Group.

“I have a question about your post-grad experience: Did you ever feel frustrated and worried you’d never achieve your future goals? How did you deal with that while you were trying to establish yourself as an adult out of school?

Do you ever feel frustrated or worried you’ll never achieve your future goals?

Yes. It would be too much to say that I’m frustrated and worried all the time, but I worry a lot.

Although I have a lot of friends doing wildly different things with their lives, one common thread I notice in our conversations is the persistent weight of anxiety. What are we so worried about? Or is anxiety just part of being an adult? I recently talked about this with a friend: why don’t we feel like we’re doing enough? Why do we feel like there should be… more? Is there such thing as being content? Is it okay to be “good enough” at something, instead of super amazing at it?

You’re not the only millennial worrying

It turns out that high levels of anxiety are common among millennials. The combination of our propped up self-esteem + an increasingly competitive economy + the ability to compare ourselves to every other millennial on the Internet has led to dauntingly high expectations of life. “Experts agree that the high hopes and heightened ambition of the millennial generation have led many of us to despair, depression, high anxiety, and a wide gulf of meaning in our personal lives,” notes Katherine Schreiber in Expectation Hangover: The Real Reason Millennials Are Disappointed With Life. “Failing to land your dream job, getting rejected from your top choice school, or approaching your 30th birthday with no prospect of knot tying in sight can lead to these let-downs… [b]ut so can checking off all of the above only to feel meh—like something’s still missing.” Does this resonate with you? We’re damned if we do and damned if we don’t. Yikes.

As Molly Sprayregen puts it in The Brain on 23, “we zone out in grad school classrooms or type away in junior offices or teach English in Rwanda, all the while wondering if we are supposed to be somewhere else…. We have few obligations, yet we are always stressed, wondering if life will ever be more certain.” Things were more clear in school, when the next step was fed to us (high school! college!) and we received grades for completed assignments. Learning to run a career is very different. There’s no external structure and no syllabus, and there seem to be a lot of people our age doing much better at it than we are.

Molly again: “when a friend does something as simple as cooking a food more complex than pasta, we applaud her, yet we berate ourselves for not yet having a corner office or a bestselling memoir or a thriving startup.” We have very high expectations of ourselves and our futures. Yet when it comes to doing those things, we realize how much time, energy, and money they take. It’s easy to worry that we’ll never write that novel, start that company, or travel to that country because we have to work our jobs and cook quinoa and get enough sleep. It’s easy to worry that we’re not doing the right things, and that we’re squandering our precious youth working long hours instead of building the next Pokemon Go. Double yikes.

Are you suggesting I lower my expectations?

No. I don’t think having “high hopes and heightened ambitions” is the problem. It’s exhilarating to create lofty goals and work towards achieving them! We have unprecedented access to knowledge, people, and resources – it is an exciting time to be alive. But these endless possibilities can lead to option paralysis. So what do we do? We learn and practice how to manage our expectations better.

Ways to deal with worry and woe

Thankfully, there are many things we can do besides Netflixing and drinking to manage our anxiety.

• Talk to people. Whether peers (solidarity and commiseration) or parents (perspective and comfort), it helps to talk. Sometimes conversations with peers become an echo chamber (aaaahhh we’re all freaking out!) but it helps to know you’re not alone.
• Write. If you have a billion awesome ideas but not a billion hours, write down your ideas. Get them out of your head. Put them on a physical or digital “someday, maybe” list so your brain knows you’re keeping track of them. I use 2Do to keep track of my ideas.
• Plan. If it’s important to achieve goals methodically, plan them. I love the way my friend Lauren does it.
• Therapy. Seeing a therapist has really helped me manage anxiety. There are professionals out there who are anxiety management experts.
• Meditation. I KNOW I KNOW I KNOW will everyone please shut up about meditation? That was my attitude until about a month ago, when I downloaded the app Insight Timer and started listening to guided meditations. They’ve really helped me be less anxious, more compassionate, and more grateful for the things that are going well in my life.
• Help others. The science is in that shows why helping others makes us feel good. A dose of altruism can go a long way to giving us perspective and meaning.

Do you want to do all the things?

My dad once asked, “why do you want to do all these things? Do you think they will make you happy?” It’s a good question. A lot of times humans think, “I’ll be happy once I achieve X,” and that’s a backwards way to go about it. But your answer might be, “I want to do these things because they sound awesome!” Our ideas are precious. They are our unique contribution to the world. How can we choose some and forsake others when we love them all?

Our resources are limited. Time and energy must be budgeted. We do ourselves a service when we view our ideas with curiosity rather than attachment. Not all of our ideas are good ideas, and we must decide which ones deserve our attention and energy, right now. The others can wait. As noted above, keep them in a notebook or spreadsheet so that your brain knows they’ve been captured, then put them on the back burner. We won’t do all of them, and that’s not failure: in fact, saying no is an important part of success.

You have your whole life to do stuff

When I graduated from university, I thought I had to do everything interesting before turning 30/becoming a parent. That meant moving to Latin America (an idea I have since let go), traveling to multiple countries, starting a business, making six figures, writing books, living alone, living with roommates, getting married, and more. It was stressful.

Thankfully, my friend Julie set me straight. She had her first child in high school, and went on to complete college, graduate school, and law school while parenting her daughter. It wasn’t until many years later that her husband joined the Foreign Service and they started living internationally. While visiting Julie and co. in Armenia, Julie pointed to an elderly couple at the U.S. base where we were celebrating the 4th of July. “See that couple?” she said. “They waited until they retired to join the Peace Corps. You don’t have to stop doing cool things just because you’re old, or because you have kids, and you don’t have to do everything cool before then, either!” What a relief to hear.

Jennifer, thank you for reaching out and asking if I feel frustrated or worried about achieving future goals. The answer is yes. A lot of us struggle with frustration and worry, and are learning to manage our expectations. You’re not alone on this bus.

(Image by William Iven)

The post The Millennial’s Future: Managing Worry and Woe appeared first on Medusa Media Group.

This post was originally published on Mindful Decluttering & Organizing’s blog on August 23rd, 2016.

Once upon a time, I had no idea where my hours went. I knew I spent eight+ hours working, and eight+ hours doing other things besides work, and the remainder sleeping. But I couldn’t tell where the time went. I’d tell you I was busy, but with what? I had a full schedule, but what was I doing? I didn’t know. I wasn’t tracking my time, and as a result, my time awareness was low, and it made me feel bad.

Then I was introduced to Laura Vanderkam, an author and time management expert, whose simple time log can be used by business owners and stay-at-home parents alike. Her time tracking system uses a spreadsheet, divided into thirty minute increments, to show precisely what you spend your time doing. Simply fill out the spreadsheet with what you are doing each half hour of the day. It takes some discipline and mindfulness (setting a timer to go off every half hour can help you get in the habit!), but the rewards are great. The spreadsheet cells show, in a more accurate way than our imperfect minds ever can, exactly where we spend our time, and on what.

Read the rest of the post on Mindful Decluttering and Organizing’s blog!

(image by Luke Chesser)

The post How to Feel Less Busy and Increase Time Awareness appeared first on Medusa Media Group.

Create Systems:
It’s likely that your work involves doing similar tasks. Use checklists and templates to catch your mistakes and deliver consistent, high-quality work. Attention to detail, thoroughness, and consistency are important at work, but everyone makes human errors: catch yourself. (I discovered a day late that my original image for Part 1 had a typo. I am creating a system to catch myself.)

Figure It Out On Your Own:
There’s a line between asking how to do something, and figuring it out yourself. A professional tries to find the answers on her own – it shows that she’s diligent about learning as much as she can before asking for help. However, don’t waste time and money by spending hours on something that another professional could do in five minutes.

Note When You’re Afraid:
Sometimes I put off tasks that scare me. If it’s something I’ve never done before or don’t understand, I’ll sit on the task for weeks, mulling it over until I have the courage to take action or get so close to the deadline that I have no choice. In one of my jobs, this gave the impression that I was lazy. Pay attention when a task intimidates you. Is there someone you can ask for guidance? Can you research it before forging ahead? Put time on your schedule to get it done, and tell a friend or colleague to hold you accountable.

Dress Appropriately: 
A friend had a boss who wore threadbare shorts to the office. They didn’t have an office dress code, but it makes everyone uncomfortable to see a coworker’s thong underwear. Even if your company’s dress policy is relaxed, clothes give an impression and influence the way you conduct yourself. I usually get more business-y things done in a pencil skirt than cut-off shorts. Also, my posture is better. Neat, put-together clothes convey I am here to work, rather than see you at the gym.

Arrive On Time:
Another friend confessed that once she’s comfortable in a job, she doesn’t always arrive on time. She reasons that if she works hard and makes few mistakes, it’s no big deal to show up a little after 9:00. If your workplace has a flexible schedule, that’s fine. If not, it gives a certain impression to be chronically tardy – and not a professional one.

Be Polite:
Some people are rude. Be courteous because you’re a professional, while taking appropriate measures (HR) to handle people who are inappropriate. Be kind, as a policy. Be careful what you say to coworkers, especially while in the workplace (maybe the rules are different during happy hour). For great advice on how to communicate at work, see “A Case Against ‘I’ Statements.”

How To Ask For Feedback:
This is one merits its own post. Stay tuned!

For more on how to be professional, see Part 1. What have you learned about being professional? Add to the list!

(photo by Amanuel Awoke)

The post How To Be Professional, Part 2 appeared first on Medusa Media Group.

Not sure where to start? Consider the following:

Daily Check-in:*
Touch base with yourself (or a colleague, or your supervisor) on these three points: What did you accomplish today? What’s your biggest priority tomorrow? Do you have any roadblocks to getting things done? These questions provide a structure for monitoring your work and priorities, assessing your progress, and indicating if you need guidance or support to accomplish a task.

Tailor Your Communication:
People communicate differently, and it’s important to have a feel for how your supervisor or clients like to communicate. Do they want regular, detailed updates on your projects?  Do they prefer biweekly meetings? Ask how they like it, rather than waiting to be given instructions. And if you’re only checking in every other week, make sure to keep a list of ongoing projects so you can provide status updates at any time. Which brings us to….

Capture Tasks:
There are a million things coming at you from all sides. Try to have one place (hello, David Allen) for all tasks to be captured and organized. For years I kept track of my work in a notebook, using a system of columns, colors, and symbols for organization. Eventually I replaced paper with a digital system so I could keyword search and schedule tasks in advance. Sometimes things slip, but a professional has a system to capture all tasks so that when asked, she can report on the status of everything from big projects to small to-do’s.

Distinguish Between Urgency and Importance:
At any given time you have a lot to do, but not everything is important and urgent. It’s easy to get overwhelmed by the quantity of work and forget to prioritize time-sensitive tasks or plan out long, multi-step ones. Rather than doing small things so you can cross them off, or working long hours on a project that isn’t due for a month, a professional has a hierarchy of important and urgent tasks and does those first. If she’s unsure, she finds out.

Take Notes:*
Use a notebook, Google doc, or similar to record any questions, suggestions, or concerns you have about work. Ideally, this is something you can review with your supervisor or a colleague. Not only does this show that you are engaged in the workplace, it also shows that you’re looking for ways to improve yourself and and the company.

Structure Your Time:
Some workdays I dive in with no plan, haphazardly doing various tasks, checking email, and distracting myself by texting. No bueno. My most productive days come from planning: dividing my time into 1-2 hour chunks for specific tasks; batching tasks like phone calls, emails, or social media scheduling; structuring breaks to refresh my mind and body. When are you most productive – is it morning? Use that time to work on creative projects and reserve email and phone meetings for after lunch. Do rote tasks while listening to TED Talks or music so your mind can take a break.

What have you learned about being professional? Add to the list!

*A fellow Bullicorn had the opportunity to mentor an intern in her company, and asked the community how to be helpful. Some of these suggestions come from that conversation. 

(photo by Eva Jannotta)

The post How To Be Professional, Part 1 appeared first on Medusa Media Group.

Lesson 2 of the course is choose a focus – one of the great hurdles in creating a good blog. Rather than writing about everything under the sun, finding a niche develops your expertise, clarifies themes that readers can identify, and determines what to write. The homework for Lesson 2 was straightforward: “narrow your list of topics to 10 items or less and feature your new list of categories in your sidebar.”

But what if you’re passionate about many disparate topics?  I posed this and other questions to the badass Babes community.

When You’re Passionate about 164,743,765 things: 

Sarah’s lesson asks us to consider which topics we enjoy writing most, our readers enjoy reading most, we have the most ideas for, and are shared most on social media. These are great questions to ask and ask again. But if you don’t have many readers or social shares, or if you have lots of ideas on lots of topics, you may need more help.

The Badass Babes recommended “What to Do When You Have ‘Too Many’ Topics to Blog About or Teach” by Regina. It’s an excellent video. Regina says, “sometimes we’re only passionate about our ideas in theory–it’s like that guy/gal you have a crush on that you don’t even know.” Her advice on how to niche down is practical and effective.

Categories vs. Tags: 

I’ve been using categories for organization and navigation (with categories such as “Me,” “I’m Reading,” and “Videos”) even though I don’t write often on these topics. As a result I have 19 (YIKES) categories to pare down. Should I switch some categories to tags? Combine categories? Take some out all together?

The Badass Babes community suggested switching to tags as second-tier organization for topics I don’t blog about often but still want to group. WP Site Care agrees: WordPress categories are used to create groups of content that fit the primary topics of your site…. tags are best used to create groups of content that apply to multiple categories.”

Back-end Category Organization:

I’m hesitant to eliminate categories and lose the organized post groups I’ve created. I asked the Babes: is there a way to hide categories so they don’t display on my sidebar, but I can still access them on the backend for archive/organization purposes?

The Babes said, “yes!” and recommend using a text box in my sidebar to manually link the categories I want to display (rather than use the “Categories” widget which draws on all categories).

Next steps:  Tackle those categories and think hard about what to keep writing. Lesson 3 is in my inbox!

Do you struggle to narrow your focus?

(photo by Eva Jannotta)

The post Choose a Focus (For Your Blog) appeared first on Medusa Media Group.

Definition of SHOULD (past of shall) – used in auxiliary function to express obligation, propriety, or expediency: “’tis commanded I should do so” — Shakespeare, “this is as it should be” — H. L. Savage, “you should brush your teeth after each meal.”

Should is a weird word. The way I hear it used most means you are doing the wrong thing, and it would be better/smarter/more worth your time to do a different thing. But how does anyone know what the right thing to do is? Right according to whom?

I first thought critically about should with my aunt. She pointed out that, “whenever you think or say should, it’s someone else’s voice.” That is, should comes from what you were taught is correct to do. It comes from your socialization and upbringing, sense of responsibility, of justice, manners, culture, and trying to please people. It’s the voice of your parents, boss, partner, or God. It’s the lessons you learned about punctuality, debt, obligation, social rules and expectations, and appropriate reactions. At its best, it encourages you to do things that are important. At its worst, it gives the sense that you could always be doing something more than you are, which leads to feelings of inadequacy and guilt.

But when you speak and think in your own voice, there is nothing to should. In a universe without should, aren’t you always doing fine? If you can tune out the voice in your head yammering about obligations and ideas on the right and wrong ways to be, you’re just doing you on your own time. Maybe you shouldn’t be doing anything else.

It can be extremely frustrating when things don’t go the way they should – the way we expect, or the way we were taught is right (the door should be unlocked). But reality bends to no will or expectation.

Many shoulds come down to time. Time is a nonrenewable resource, and we want to do a lot in our lives. Many things compete for our time, and as we grew up we learned that some things are expected: “I should go out more. I should be meeting more people. I should make more money while I’m young. I should perform better at work.” They’re not bad things, per se, but they may not be you things, either. Next time you hear a should, think about whose voice is speaking. It probably isn’t yours.

(photo from Hyperbole and a Half by Allie Brosh)

The post Should You? No, You Shouldn’t appeared first on Medusa Media Group.