5 March, 2010 | Written by Amber Naslund 12 Comments

The 5 Elements of Hard Work

In the wake of this post on working hard or just working lots, I had a few chats with people that basically asked “so, what is work that matters?” In other words, what does true hard work look like?

This, of course, will vary based on your situation. But here’s my take on it. I’ll be curious to hear what you think.

Work with Context

This is the obvious one: the work that matters is the stuff that lines up with what you’re hoping to achieve long term. If you want to write a book, time to write is time well spent. If you’re building a community, time spent cultivating and talking to the people you hope will be part of it is contextual, and likely well invested.

Yes, And…

I tend to think that it’s not enough to just check off the items on the list and call it a day. Work that matters – the stuff that really moves needles – is rarely accomplished by doing just enough to get by. To me, the hard, impactful work is the stuff where you do what’s needed to get the job done, and then always look at how you can push it one step further to make it better.

Detours, Not Obstacles

Hard work is often illustrated when you see someone diligently working their way around a challenge, rather than lamenting their circumstances. It’s the very act of doing instead of making excuses that can demonstrate work that makes a difference.

Accountability

The discipline to measure and evaluate your work and learn from that analysis is what often separates the workers from the Workers. Demonstrating results, being willing to own both successes and failures, and committing to adjust the work accordingly is the mark of quality work, not just volume of tasks.

Stuff That Yields

Chris Brogan talks about the web enabling relationships that yield. I think the hard work – the stuff that’s important – is, quite simply, the stuff that yields results. Whether that’s better relationships, more money, better brand awareness and affinity, whatever. The hard work is in dedicating yourself to the things that produce.

So those are my five. Do you have some of your own? How do you recognize hard work when you see it, aside from just the hours someone logs?

I’m curious about your take. Sound off in the comments.

image credit: Eneas

1 March, 2010 | Written by Amber Naslund 27 Comments

Working Hard Or Working Lots?

In the realm of phrases that are often used to talk about what we do every day, we toss around “working hard”. Everything from what it takes to succeed in life, to social media and business and writing and all the things in between.

But here’s something to consider.

Working long hours doesn’t, by default, mean you’re working hard. You can work for hours at something totally and utterly valueless, and that doesn’t get you to where you want to be.

There’s an adage about working smarter, and that’s part of it. But you can work smart for an hour and not get anywhere, either.

The trick is in the balance between the two. It’s putting in serious, significant effort toward the things that line up with your priorities, goals, and needs. See the difference?

A 16-hour day is not a badge of honor. An email inbox full of 300+ messages isn’t an indicator of how successful you are. Those things are absolutely empty – foolish, even – unless the work you put toward them has impact on the end game, whatever that may be.

So when you say to us “I’m working so hard but not getting results”, it’s really likely you’re putting your effort in the wrong place. Don’t work blindly. Work diligently, with a keen editing eye, and if it’s long hours you intend to point to as evidence of your accomplishments, let them be hours spent in the places that matter. Busy isn’t the same as working hard.

That’s a tough game, isn’t it? It’s not enough to just put in the hours. A lot of the game is just showing up, but it’s not ALL of the game, not anymore. There’s way too much competition, plenty of noise, and way too many people willing to do whatever it takes to get it done. They’re making hard choices about what NOT to do in favor of focusing relentlessly on their mission-critical stuff.

So are you truly working hard, or are you just putting in the long hours? Are you auditing your work to be sure those hours are well spent? I know I have to work at this every day.

You?

image credit: jronaldlee

8 February, 2010 | Written by Amber Naslund 51 Comments

Wanna Write? Read Voraciously.

A writing habit is cultivated by two things:

Writing a lot.
Reading even more.

The more you write, the more you get to practice flexing vocabulary and voice as well as how to put your ideas into clear thoughts. The more you read, the more you capture lessons about tone, sentence structure, cadence, and idea flow. And the more you do both, the more everything you touch, see, hear, and read becomes the seed of something else to write about.

There are some great posts out there about cultivating a writing habit, like these:

These practices apply whether you’re blogging or penning a novel. Writing is an active discipline. You have to do it. Often.

But absorbing the written word in lots of different forms makes you a better writer. Period. Read blogs, articles, business books, biographies, fiction, whatever suits your fancy right now.

Not sure what to read? I piled a bunch of recommendations for books in my Twitter favorites. Scroll through them and you’ll find lots that have been tossed to me by my Twitter friends. And I keep an Evernote file called “Book List” where I capture all the titles I haven’t read, but want to, so I’m always prepared at the bookstore or the library.

Reading more helps you identify good writing AND bad writing, and how to tell the difference between the two. You’ll start learning to spot words that are smooth to read versus overly dense, the pace of delivering ideas and organizing them in a flow, length of sentences that are easy or hard to read, vocabulary that’s too high brow or not nuanced enough.

Julien Smith tells you how to read a book a week in 2010. I probably average that if not more, in addition to all the blogs I read and online articles, news, whitepapers, etc. I read a ton, and I write every day. If you hate to read, that’s going to be harder for you, but it’s important nonetheless.

If delivering content on the web in written form is something you seriously aspire to – for the sake of contribution of ideas or to make money or both – you’ d better learn what it takes to write well, and reading is an important step to doing just that.

There is no shortcut.

Are you a writer? Reader? Both? Do you agree? What are you reading right now?

image by moriza

6 February, 2010 | Written by Amber Naslund 27 Comments

8 Apps I Use and Love

I always feel a little silly writing these posts, as I’m not remotely an early adopter or a tech authority by any stretch. But I have lots of conversations with folks who are curious about what I use and why or how, and every time I think I’ve answered the questions, someone else asks. So what the heck? If it’s helpful, here you go.

I’ll share a few of the apps I’m using lately and what I’m using them for, in hopes that you’ll find something new, or revisit something and find a new, helpful use for you. Oh and PC folks, fair warning: I’m a Mac, and some of these are specific to that OS. If PC folks will share their alternatives in the comments, you might find some gems.

Click on the application names to head over and check them out.

Evernote

Oh, how I love Evernote. It’s the online version of my Moleskine notebook (which I use more for journaling and working through ideas). I use Evernote to take meeting and conference call notes. I keep project lists for my team members in there so I know what to chat with them about during our updates. I draft blog posts there and keep fleeting post ideas as they come to me, because they’re easy to copy and paste right into the blog platform.

I use the desktop and the iPhone app, and sometimes the web version (because right now that’s the only way I can share a notebook with another person). They all sync seamlessly, and it’s free. Great app that knows what it’s for and doesn’t try to be anything else.

Things

This is my task management application. Sorry PC folks, but it’s a Mac-only thing (and I’ve yet to hear about a good alternative for PC folks…maybe someone can share some ideas in the comments). It costs $50 for the desktop app and another $10 for the iPhone app, but it’s worth it for me, because I have a big to-do list.

I love that I can tag items different ways from the main task or project buckets, and I can look at my tasks through different lenses: priority, due date, sequence, tag, project, etc. It’s flexible but really simple, and I love it more than any other task management application I’ve tried (and that’s several, including Remember The Milk and OmniFocus).

The only downside right now is that you have to have your phone and laptop on and on the same wifi network in order to sync right now, but they’re working on that as we speak, and I can’t wait.

Google Wave

I’ve found this really useful for collaboration with colleagues and project partners. The real benefit is that I don’t have to be on IM or the phone with someone at the same moment, yet it has the fluidity of that kind of conversation (vs. a more stilted and fractured email stream). I use it for discussion and conversation with small groups of people, project notes and updates, and brainstorming/knocking around ideas with folks. I’m also playing around with Waveboard, which is a desktop and iPhone Wave client that has push notifications and more.

Go read Chris Brogan’s post about how he’s using it. Mine is similar, though I can’t stand to use it for task management, and there are times when I want a more concrete doc for things. But I went through a similar adoption curve, and he said it better anyway.

If you don’t yet have an invite, either leave a comment or email me and I’ll get you one.

Picnik

Photo editing the easy way. It’s so straightforward and easy to use, and it makes editing a photo for a post so simple it’s silly. And because it’s web based, I don’t have to wait for a desktop app to load every time. Those photo editing ones can be cumbersome memory hogs. You can pull photos from your machine, or from your Flickr, Facebook, and more. The basic app is free, and you can get more and fancier features with premium account if you want.

Delicious.com

I capture so much stuff here. Case studies. Social media resources and reference. Statistics. Supporting research and articles on topics that interest me, like social media measurement or internal social networks. I use it to keep a vanity file of people kind enough to interview or write about me. It’s a great way to build a reference file for myself, and to be able to share it with tons of other people who might find it useful, too.

Spanning Sync

I’m a Mac, and I have an iPhone. The iPhone syncs with Address Book and iCal for Mac, but I don’t use those. I use Google Calendar and Gmail, which means lots of my contacts are housed in there. Spanning Sync lets the two pairs of apps talk to each other, syncing my contacts and calendar back and forth. It costs $25 for a year or $65 for a lifetime buy.

For the bonus round, I use MobileMe ($99) to sync my phone and laptop wirelessly over the air, instead of having to plug in and sync to my laptop.

Morning Coffee (Firefox Add-On)

This is so ridiculously simple, and not really an app, but really helpful for me. I start my day with most of the same tabs open in Firefox: Gmail, my Radian6 login, Google Calendar, Google Docs, Google Wave, Facebook. Morning Coffee remembers them and pulls them all up with a single click. Call me lazy, but it helps me remember to check all my relevant stuff at the start of the day.

1Password

Have waaaay too many passwords to remember? Yep, me too. And I suck at generating really strong, unique ones for different accounts because I don’t want to remember them all. Enter 1Password, and now I’m a much better little password student.

It keeps them all for me behind a master account, generates random ones for new accounts if I ask it to, remembers them, and fills them in with a single click. You can also have it remember your identity profiles and even purchase or e-commerce wallets and payment info if you want and are comfortable with that.

So, let’s collaborate here, shall we? What applications are YOU using that you can’t live without these days? If you’re a PC, share your alternatives to the above, or different ones entirely? Fun and productive welcome. Let’s find some new stuff to monkey with.

image by John-Morgan

4 February, 2010 | Written by Amber Naslund 19 Comments

Picking Your Battles: 6 Questions to Ask

You’re in a meeting with a boss or your client, and it happens.

They present an idea or a plan, and your inner monologue says “WHAT? No way. No, no, no. We can’t do it that way.”

Disagreements and debates are inevitable, even healthy and progressive. But you can’t always be fighting upstream, so it’s important to choose your battles and focus your energy where it matters most. Here are six questions to ask yourself and help determine if today’s battle is one worth waging.

1. Is the investment required to make this argument worth the outcome?

Negotiating, making a case, and taking an alternative stance can require a significant time investment. Especially if your point of view or proposal requires many other people to change their way of thinking, you can be looking at several discussions over a significant period of time in order to make progress. And progress might come slowly, in small steps, even backwards ones along the way.

And never forget that debate is an intensely human thing. If you’re not careful about your approach, you can alienate people, hurt feelings, or cast yourself as the perpetual contrarian with a negative attitude. Learn to disagree constructively.

2. Is my disagreement fundamental or superficial?

Sometimes when we’re passionate about something, we can get swept up in the details and semantics, and argue against those instead of what’s really at issue. Take a moment to breathe, and decide whether you’re resisting a subtlety of approach or detail, or whether you’re really looking for an alternative to the root issue for a significant reason. The latter might be worth your time. The former probably isn’t.

3. Can I back up my argument with a solution?

If you’re disagreeing with how something is being approached, you need to to be able to offer a viable alternative. It’s not useful or helpful to just dislike or point out all the reasons why something won’t work. Instead, you need to be able to articulate and illustrate how a different approach might be more effective or efficient or simply more attractive for whatever reason. If you can’t offer an alternative, or aren’t willing to work to find one, you’re just stirring up trouble.

4. Is the opposite outcome detrimental to my work, or just an inconvenience or irritation?

Stop for a moment and honestly consider what might happen if you’re overruled. Will this get squarely in the way of progress for you? Does it go against the law, your morals or your ethics? Or is it something you can work around, even if it’s a bit of a bitter pill? Framing things in terms of the unattractive option will sometimes help you understand whether or not you really need to fight, or whether you can just let it go.

5. Is there a middle ground I can live with?

Compromise matters a lot. Few issues are truly black and white, so think about where the grey areas are for you. Take your ideal scenario, and move toward the opposite a step or two. Is that livable? Which elements and ideals are negotiable, and which ones are core to your beliefs, goals, or ability to meet expectations.

6. Will I care about this six months from now?

Resist getting swept up in the moment and losing perspective about how this issue fits into the proverbial big picture. Is this a temporary annoyance or obstacle? Will you care in a month? Six months? A year? What’s the residual impact of either approach or middle-of-the-road alternatives, and can you live with that?

Sometimes, resistance is Borgishly futile. Sometimes it’s just plain unnecessary. Other times, presenting alternatives, pushing for change or compromise is a good thing, or even an essential one.

But perpetual contrarians rarely retain credibility over time. Pick your battles carefully, and you might just win the next one that really, truly matters to you.