Talk It Up!

My awesometastic year: goals for rocking 2012

For the past eight years, I haven't made any New Year's resolutions. I don't believe in them. Instead, I have taken five hours during the year, usually in the summer or fall, to follow a 10-step goal-setting process.

And this year, I'm sharing more of the process with you. It's a bit personal and therefore a bit scary, mostly because it involves announcing my failings in public. But I have managed to achieve such consistently good results from this process that I thought, "Why not post it this year?"

First, none of this process was my idea. It's all derived from Your Best Year Yet, which is both a book and a seminar. Cheesy; I know, but it's been worth a little cheesiness to accomplish what I want each year. The process results in a printed summary I post on the bathroom mirror and see every day. The results have been consistent: every year I've done this, I've accomplished between eight and ten of the ten established goals.

You can't argue with success. Well, you can, but it's kind of silly.

So here we go. The summary of my 10-step goal-setting exercise for 2012.

What did you accomplish in 2011?

What I love about this process is that it begins with a list of your accomplishments. In my case, this year, I quickly had a list of 15 accomplishments--and those are OUTSIDE of the 10 goals I'd set and accomplished--including:

• took on new PM challenges at work
• came up with a new idea for a seminar and implemented it
• went to visit my mom in Texas on her birthday and made her really happy
• helped two friends through really tough divorces
• blogged more than I ever have before 
• added elliptical to my workout regimen

What were your disappointments in 2011?

The next step is listing disappointments. This is an interesting and sometimes painful exercise. In the past, I've actually broken in to tears when listing these. Writing your failings down in black and white can be uncomfortable and downright painful. In 2011, however, I'm happy to say that the list of disappointments was short; just five compared to 15 proud accomplishments. They included:

• Didn't find a place to do a social media project and improve my skills
• Still don't feel like I'm pulling my weight at work
• Didn't dance as much as I'd like

What lessons did you learn?

What's great about listing disappointments is the next step: listing the lessons learned from those disappointments and the limiting factors that caused them (we all have them, and this is an excellent change to drag them out into the open).The lessons learned are turned into two or three personal guidelines for 2012.

For example, one of my lessons learned was:

When I prioritize relationships, they improve.

I turned that into the personal guideline:

Focus brings rewards.

Likewise, I took "My friends are awesome, and my detractors are idiots" and "When I gather up my courage and take risks, fantastic things happen" into:

Be brave and be awesome.

The next section can be a bit challenging. You look at how you have limited yourself and what you tell yourself to explain that. In my case, my explanation of my failures tends to be:

• I'm too tired
• I'm too old
• I don't have the energy
• I don't have the time

Ouch. My closest confidants are undoubtedly tired of hearing about how I'm too tired to live the life I want to live! Those are definitely limiting my own attitude towards my life, work and success. Happily, the next step is to take the strongest of those limiting beliefs (in my case, "I'm too tired") and turn it into a new paradigm, one that will support my goals. This is the kind of statement that if were 100% true, you believe it would make the biggest change in your life. Mine for 2012 is:

I have abundant energy to work, play and give back.

Yes. Now THAT is what I need to see every morning in the bathroom mirror!

What are your values and what roles do you play?

OK, so much for the turning painful lessons into empowering statements. Next comes a list of your personal values and the roles you play in life. My personal values:

• Contributing to the community
• Supporting myself financially
• Being a supporting and compassionate friend
• Being honest and kind
• Giving back
• Thanking people
• Integrity
• Lifelong learning
• Personal growth

And the roles I play in life:

• Chief Conversation Officer/Spoken marketing whiz
• Social media producer and speaker
• Friend/confidant
• Advocate
• Romantic partner
• Heidi's cheerleader
• Organizer of the fun
• Good daughter

Choose a focus

Then and only then (usually about 2-4 hours in) do you start making decisions about focus for the next year. The next steps are to choose a focus, list three to five goals for each role you play (which results in about 20-30 goals), and then a narrowing down to 10 goals for the year.

I looked at the roles I play, and I chose the one role to focus on this year: Spoken marketing whiz. The reasoning for this is that, while I've excelled at work over the last few years, this year I really want to rock my position. I want to boldly own projects and and effectively and enthusiastically bring the team together. Last year I focused on "friend/confidant," and I ended up building AMAZING friendships with some stellar people here in Seattle. And a side benefit was that I found and built a relationship with a fantastic romantic partner as well! Two birds killed with one mighty stone.

Now, it's time for those friendships to support me as I throw my focus back on really making a difference as Chief Conversation Officer at Spoken. It's a title I'm proud to own, and this year, as the company continues to grow, I want to shine. Hell, I want to be leading the way!

 Making and narrowing the goals

The next step is the fun one: writing down two to five goals for each role you play. Of course, they should all be specific, measurable and attainable. So I end up with this big, honkin' list of nearly 50 goals--crazy unwieldy. So next, it's time to hone down to a list of 10 goals you can see and make progress on every day. Here is the final result that will be taped to the bathroom mirror:

Heidi's Awesometastic 2012

Major Focus: Chief Conversation Officer/marketing whiz

Personal guidelines:

Focus brings rewards.

Be brave and be awesome.

Give thanks and give back.

New paradigm: I have abundant energy to work, play and give back.

Goals:

1. CCO marketing whiz: Build team interaction by having a meaningful spoken interaction with two people in the company each day.
2. CCO marketing whiz: Write Big Weekly Goals on Mondays and What I Accomplished on Fridays, store in a Google doc and share with CEO once a week.
3. Social media producer: Find a new project to lead or participate in. Give back.
4. Advocate – Write up one opinion post a month.
5. Friend/confidante—Set aside one lunch and one evening per week for one-on-one friend/relationship building.
6. Romantic partner—Take a vacation with R.
7. Romantic partner/support—Have lunch/coffee with L or S to catch up once a month.
8. Heidi Cheerleader—Journal or publicly Tweet positive events and accomplishments. Take joy in them!
9. Organizer of the fun—Find a dance buddy to go dancing with (swing, ballroom or salsa) 24 times.
10. Good daughter—Visit Mom in Texas for her birthday.

This is what will be taped to my mirror and what will shape my good and bad days in 2012. It is a little tough to share my personal failings here in black and white, but it means that I also get to share all the excitement I have for what 2012 will bring. I'll admit that 2009 and 2010 were damn challenging for me; 2011 is where all the hard work started to pay off.

This year is gonna be awesome. Just you wait.

The great catfood experiment of 2011

What do you do in the face of an unmitigated disaster? Beat yourself up or consider it a learning experience?

Last weekend, in the midst of a flurry of last-minute activity in preparing to head out to Burning Man, I unwisely added another project to my to-do list. It was important but not urgent, and somehow, I upgraded it to urgent. (Tangent: there must be a psychological syndrome for this--adding a non-essential task just before a major deadline. Does anyone know what it is?)

Tweet

In my case, the case was making catfood. Yes, making. Catfood. In my vacation preparations, I was making arrangements for the house sitter and pet sitter, cleaning the litter box, etc. And I was reminded again that my vet is concerned that my cat has been losing weight. I supply him with a special dry food made for older cats, but he is still awfully skinny. So I had called my mother the day before to see if she could give me the recipe for the homemade liver cat food she'd made for my brother's cat after it had been in a car accident and had its jaw wired shut.

She did, and since my daily packing was mostly done, I decided to tackle the task. I boiled the liver, drained the pot, added a raw egg, and threw it all into the blender.

What I didn't do was make sure the bottom of the blender was intact. When I lifted the glass carafe off the base, the mixture splattered everywhere--including onto the three-month-old MacBook Pro I'd been using to make a Skype call.

I'd love to say that I handled the incident with grace and aplomb, but I didn't. I freaked out, desperately tried to clean the laptop and took an hour to clean the kitchen before racing to the Apple store to see if the laptop could be salvaged.

The kicker: I figured that at least I could get the cat to lick up some of the homemade food, right? Wrong. The little bugger wouldn't touch it. He wouldn't even eat one bite of the food that had just ruined my $1,500 laptop!

Total unmitigated disaster.

The moral of the story: throw it against the wall and see if it sticks

In marketing, we love metrics. We love analysis. We love our pie charts and graphs that show growth over time, more followers and engagement.

But what we won't admit is that, like doctors, we're making an educated guess. We're throwing stuff against the wall to see what sticks. And that means that sometime, the stuff doesn't stick. It just makes a big, sticky, pointless mess.

The Great Catfood Experiment of 2011 could have had great results. It could have saved trips to the vet, reduced concern for my aging kitty, made the pet sitter's job a bit easier and made me look like the greatest kitty mommy of all time. But it didn't. It made a big, sticky, pointless mess.

And sometimes, the best we can do is learn the lesson, refuse to beat ourselves up about it, clean up the mess and walk away a bit wiser with a kick-ass anecdote to inform the next educated guess.

Social applications boost productivity

Palo Alto Networks recently released a report with the rather dull title The Application Usage and Risk Report - Fall 2009 Edition.

Not the most riveting of names, but full of findings that serve as ammunition for the employee or social media consultant making the case for using social media tools in the workplace. In fact, consider the report a couple of clips of ammo, with backup weapons.

This report shows how employees in businesses actually use social media on an everyday basis, in real life. No speculation about what they might be doing--bandwidth (literal, not the figurative, mental kind) statistics are included for every social media tool measured.

Social media tools boost productivity

I'll give you the spoiler right up front:

Research from McKinsey & Company and the Association for Information and Image Management (AIIM) shows that companies are seeing measurable benefits from the use of Enterprise 2.0 applications and technologies. Specific benefits include an increased ability to share ideas, more rapid access to knowledge experts, and a reduction in travel, operations, and communications costs. 

So there. Can we put to bed the idea that engaging in social media at work is a waste of time and get on with the business of collaborating now?

The report goes on to point out what most of us have been saying for months: that "the same applications used for social interaction are being used for work-related purposes." The lines between what is considered "professional work" and what is considered "personal interaction" are blurring. After all, most professional connections are personal. And client and customer relationships are based on engagement, both personal and professional. Wise enterprises will recognize the growing trend of work-life integration as well as the value of personal engagement and connections in the workplace and facilitate use of social media tools.

Lest you fear this entry will be a total social media love-fest, there was a word of caution in the report's findings. Many users of Enterprise 2.0 and collaborative tools aren't aware of the risks incurred in using them:

70% can transfer files, 28% are known to propagate malware, and 64% have known vulnerabilities

What are "enterprise 2.0" tools?

And if you're wondering, "Enterprise 2.0" in this case was encompassed a variety of applications and technologies, including everything from messaging to social networking to cloud-based productivity, collaboration, and conferencing. Here's a quick peek:

 
Did you notice that the most heavily-weighted applications weren't just social networking; they were collaborative. Of course IM, webmail and Twitter can be used to chat with your mom, but they are also valuable tools for collaborating with colleagues, consultants, specialists, experts and telecommuting coworkers with H1N1.

Most popular collaborative tools

What are the winning collaborative tools? Check out these stats on Sharepoint, Google Docs and Twitter:

• 91% of enterprise users reported using Sharepoint, up from 37% this spring
• 82% of enterprise users reported using Google Docs, up from 33% this spring
• 89% of enterprise users reported using Twitter as an IM application, up from 35% this spring

Bandwith for these apps grew 17-fold, 290% and 775%, respectively.

Additionally, engagement in all social networking sites shot up, with Facebook (not suprisingly) showing the most spectacular growth:

What does all this data mean?

Employees are shifting from being consumers of data to active contributors. Instead of waiting for management to adopt new tools and tell them which word processing software is the official tool for the company, employees are being proactive. They are adapting tools they use to get things done in their personal lives to work, from checking Wikipedia instead of going to a dictionary to Twittering a specialist instead of asking the boss.

The report points out that almost all of these applications that have become such valuable tools for Enterprise 2.0 began as tools for personal use. The message here is that enterprise needs to rid itself of the bias for tools not specifically created for enterprise. Google Docs can be a powerful collaboration tool if organizations can shed the preconceived idea that free apps used to share grocery lists can also be beneficial in the workplace and boost productivity.

This is what I took away from the plethora of statistics in this report:

• Personal and professional are one and the same. Get over it.
• Consider personal use of new tools a beta-test of professional application. 

What do you think?

Four best tools for organizing life and getting things done

Life gets busy. Scratch that. Life gets absolutely, crazy, cat-jugglingly insane. Tasks and projects pile up every day, and some great ideas simply slip through the cracks for lack of capture. If you're like me, you have about 14 projects going on right now, at least five of which are super-high priority for clients.

Sound familiar?

On a recent  Marketing over Coffee podcast, John Wall and Chris Penn asked about "swipe files"--that is, how do you keep track of ideas, tasks and projects so that nothing gets lost in the mix?

Great question, guys. Here's what I do:

Situation 1: at my desk
If I'm at my desk, my computer is nearby, which makes this super easy. For new tasks (pick up mascara at Walgreen's, have navy pants altered, post Seesmic video for client, research Facebook for upcoming class), I use TOOL #1: OmniFocus' Inbox.

You guys know I'm a huge OmniFocus fan (full disclosure: I did work with the OmniGroup earlier this year), and this is one reason why: you can easily dump every task into the Inbox, and then sort them into their respective projects later.

So eventually, "pick up mascara at Walgreen's" and "have navy pants altered" will go into the Errands context; "post Seesmic video for client" will go into that client's Project, and "research Facebook" will go into the Social Media Boot Camp Project.

Also, TOOL #2, Zenbe lists iPhone app, is great for keeping running lists. So "pick up mascara at Walgreen's" would be translated into "mascara" on the Walgreen's list--at which point, I'd see that I have three other things to pick up there, so I should stop by today. Zenbe also has online synching and sharing, so you can sync the list and call your sweetie to pick up the four things you need from Walgreen's today.

What if it's more informational or idea-oriented?

Use TOOL #3: a Google doc for ongoing brain dumps. When I was putting together my latest Twitter class, I kept running across ideas and articles I wanted to include, so I created a Google doc to harness all the links, ideas and "oh, you have to remember to include THIS"'s. Google docs also work great for dumping content and potential content for upcoming podcasts: for each podcast, I keep a Google doc and drop in links, listener emails, reminders to play promos, etc. in the doc. Then, when I'm ready to podcast, I simply pick and choose the content, arrange it in a logical way, open up any links in tabs on Firefox, and voila! An organized podcast.

Situation 2: on the road
For all those great ideas that only seem to come when in the car listening to a podcast, try TOOL #4: iTalk for the iPhone. Use it to verbally record to-do items, new project ideas, and books to download/order and read. Then, once at destination, listen to the brief recordings and throw each item either into OmniFocus, Zenbe lists or a Google doc.

What about you? How to you keep the juggling to a minimum; what are your best tools for juggling cats?