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 [...]
Monthly Archives: January 2008
KISS for e-mails
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.”
Read on!
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 [...]
You knew this: Interruptions lower performance
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 [...]
One year on
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 [...]
One-word description
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, [...]
A new gen of the unchurched
“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 [...]
Customer disservice, Bell style
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 [...]
Ice cream or indie band? Hard to say
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 [...]
Making headline magic
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 [...]