Spend time with the people who mean the most to you. I used to visit my best friend from high school just before Christmas every year, even though she lived clear across the country, and I’m so glad we had those visits. She died three years ago today of multiple myeloma, which is a cancer of the plasma cells. It took about two years from the diagnosis, brought on by sudden kidney failure. That’s about all I can bear to say.
One of the best reminders I’ve seen lately related to keeping e-mails brief and to the point comes from Matthew Stibbe’s “Ten laws for better email”:
“Imagine your email was a telegram and that you were paying by the word.”
Yesterday (Jan. 27) was Family Literacy Day, “a national initiative that promotes the importance of reading and learning together as a family.” I celebrated by reading while Son #2 studied for exams today.
I’m a big reader so it’s especially important to me that our two sons are readers, too. When they were small, I loved to have one or both on my lap reading a treasured book. They delighted in finding the gold bug hidden on pages of a Richard Scarry book, or tracking the little mouse in Goodnight Moon. We read together until they were past being able to read themselves; Son #2 could have read the early Harry Potter books himself but we read them together for the pure enjoyment of it. Plus I do dramatic voices and accents. And when we came across big or unusual words, they could check the meaning. Their teachers always told me they could tell which parents read to their children, and one of the clues was a well-developed vocabulary.
The funny thing is that my husband is not a reader. He reads work-related stuff of course, but you will seldom see him with his nose in a book just for pleasure. The rest of us just don’t get it!
Those who spend large amounts of time online will totally understand when T.J. Larkin, in his weekly Larkin Pages research summary (sign up), says that we’re the ones responsible for half of our own interruptions. Think of all those blogs you follow, keeping up your own blog, checking email, visiting social networks, checking out what’s new, Twitter etc.; some days it’s a wonder we get much done at all!
In Dr. Larkin’s Page #78 mailing, Multitasking Lowers Performance, he says we can reduce interruptions by a whopping 92% if, during certain times of the day, we stop interrupting ourselves:
I dunno; sounds like quite a bit of discipline is required! Now excuse me while I go check my email.
It seemed an incredible cosmic coincidence that I would start blogging on the very same day as the informative, insightful and strategic Les Potter, but as I found out when Les posted his one-year commentary on Tuesday, it was merely close. Well, two days apart is still pretty cosmic, so congratulations to both of us for starting and sticking to it! I’m especially glad to know that my dismal record of journal-keeping did not in fact turn out to be a good predictor of my posting habits, although I admit that blogging drops to the bottom of my priorities when work is busy.
I mentioned yesterday being a positive person; are you? Over at Brazen Careerist, Penelope Trunk offers some interesting checkup tests to see how you’re doing in the happiness department. Answering just a few short questions will help you figure out if you’re an optimistic thinker, if you’re on the road to burnout and if your job is the reason you are unhappy. Penelope points out, though, that “A job does not make you happy, it only makes you unhappy.” She notes that too many of us get hung up on money, and I have to agree. Money isn’t everything, although no doubt you have to be making enough to live a decent life to be able to say that.
One interesting stat she shared: “You can make a 40% impact on your optimism level by changing your daily routine in relatively small ways – like doing a bunch of random acts of kindness.” I wonder who measured that impact, and how?
When the blogs I follow reached 57, I went through the list to see what could be pruned out to make a more manageable group. Oh sure, 57 is nothing – colleague Rob Clark said at one time he was following 390! But following them all seemed to be taking up way too much time, so one of the blogs I regretfully pruned from my list was the Dilbert Blog. Scott Adams makes me laugh, but he just posts too darn often and writes too much!
Today I revisited Dilbert, and he’s probably back on. In one of his recent posts (filed under “General Nonsense”), Scott had asked readers to describe themselves in one word, and reported that people said things like curious, determined and skeptical. He remarked that these didn’t line up well with a list of positive personality adjectives he had found, which, he added, “if you read it actually makes you feel slightly upbeat.” Some time ago, a friend had sent around an e-mail asking for the same one-word description; I can’t recall what I said at the time, but probably “cheerful” or “positive” would cover me most days. How would YOU describe yourself?
“Unchurched” is a term that was new to me (no doubt because I am unchurched) but there it is in the Canadian Oxford Dictionary: “Not associated with a church; not churchgoing.” I ran across it in an article in the Toronto Star this weekend called “Starting a church from scratch.”
The article talks about “church planting,” or opening new churches to reach potential new members. “You’ve got a whole generation of people who have never been in the habit of setting the alarm on Sunday morning,” it quotes a church official, noting that church planting is the number one way to reach people who are unchurched.
Looking at the unchurched Millennials in my own family, I’d have to say they (church officials) had better have a plan B that makes church somehow relevant to their lives. Or maybe that point will come when/if the boys want to get married and the intended wants it to take place in a church.
Sorry, it’s a Friday afternoon vent! The good news is that my ISP, Bell Sympatico, has added a “service status” page to their web site, so you can check it before calling (shudder) to talk to their tech support. If you are lucky, the status is correct and a yellow or red light on the E-mail section when you are having e-mail difficulties indicates they know there is a problem and are working on it.
The bad news is that more likely, you’ll get happy green lights indicating everything is fine, fine, fine, even if it’s not, not, not. One day, a red light showed that network service had some problems in the Toronto area, although they thought e-mail service was “available.” From my end, it wasn’t very available. I could sometimes log in and fetch my mail; sometimes when I tried to open or delete a message, it threw me to a screen that said “ERROR. Due to an internal error your request cannot be processed. We apologize for the inconvenience. Please try again later.” So for most of the week, I wasn’t entirely confident the mail was getting through either way.
You’re wondering why am I telling YOU this instead of Bell. Well, I did try to tell Bell using an online form that I had to fill out twice, and which forced me to include “other comments” even though I wasn’t going to add any.
I later received an e-mail from Siva, telling me he/she understood my concern and suggesting things that involved deleting, recreating or disabling — in typical fashion, assuming the problem is on MY end. This is exactly what all their tech support people do over the telephone, and I refuse to call them any more. Come to think of it, maybe that is their sinister plan; if tech support calls drop in dramatic fashion, fewer people are needed to answer.
I feel better now! Plus, as far as I know, there are green lights all around.
It’s only marginally related to communications (let’s put it under word play) but if you’re a fan of occasional silly fun, here’s a quiz I found through the Mental Floss trivia newsletter. Can you guess which phrase describes a discontinued Ben & Jerry’s ice cream flavour and which is the name of a band? I managed to get 8 out of 10, the same score as founder Jerry himself. Where I tripped up: “Coconut Fever” and “Apple Butter Supreme,” which are actually the names of bands. Surprisingly, “Sweet Potato Pie” is both a flavour and a band.
Humour columnist Dave Barry is famous for pointing out wild phrases that he thought would make great names for rock bands. His web site lists many of them, including Weasel Nostrils, Gaseous Worms and Flaming Squirrels.
One of my clients is challenging those of us (employees and freelancers) who write for the employee newsletter to come up with ever more interesting and clever headlines. There’s a weekly conference call discussing the newsletter and usually the editor will mention headlines she found particularly striking. Of course I’m always pleased when one of mine gets mentioned, such as:
Now we are all working extra hard to come up with “mention worthy” headlines, which we hope in the long run will lead to better readership. Some of the ways I try to create a good headline:
Doing an online search pulls up all kinds of inspiration:
And don’t forget to check your local newspaper. The Toronto Star recently had these gems: “No time but the present” (about a fellow who has near total amnesia); “A farewell to farms” (about the sad demise of farmland in Ontario).
If you run across a great headline, please share! I’m keeping a file where I can browse when in need of inspiration.
