The Magic of Structured Procrastination

The Magic of Structured Procrastination:
Are you a procrastinator? We've got some good news: The trick to being productive is to keep putting things off.
Mark Twain famously said, "Never put off till tomorrow what you can do the day after tomorrow just as well."
But often there's a price to pay for procrastinating. Suddenly, there's too much work to get done in too little time. Or the people you're depending on are unavailable. Or the internet connection you're taking for granted goes on the fritz.
Yet there's a way procrastination can work in your favor. John Perry, an emeritus professor of philosophy at Stanford University, calls it "structured procrastination." Here, in Perry's words, is how it works:
"Procrastinators seldom do absolutely nothing; they do marginally useful things, like gardening or sharpening pencils or making a diagram of how they will reorganize their files when they get around to it. Why does the procrastinator do these things? Because they are a way of not doing something more important. If all the procrastinator had left to do was to sharpen some pencils, no force on earth could get him do it. However, the procrastinator can be motivated to do difficult, timely and important tasks, as long as these tasks are a way of not doing something more important."
In other words, gentle procrastinator, you do not need to stop procrastinating. You just have to change what you are doing while you procrastinate. "Start a different task from your list that needs attention," suggests Walter Chen (@smalter), co-founder of iDoneThis, in a post on 99U.com. "You can take that feeling of 'I'd rather do anything than this particular thing'--which normally sends you to sort the sock drawer or go on a Netflix spree--and use it as a force for productivity."
You might think, "OK, but how does that solve the larger problem of delaying the important task?" This is where Perry's methodology takes hold. Chen explains: "Remember, you are still playing the procrastinator's game, in which the act of prioritizing something at the top saps the impetus to start working on it. So, the mental trick is to regard other tasks as more important in order to make the Very Important Task an easier choice.
"You're essentially tricking yourself into working while exercising doublethink regarding the priority level of any number of undertakings. That's not a problem, though, because it turns out that procrastinators are usually great self-deceivers. Our naturally skillful mind-bending is what gets us into trouble in the first place as we convince ourselves to mix up our short-term and long-term goals."
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Social Media vs. Having a Life: 3 Ways to Strike a Balance

Social Media vs. Having a Life: 3 Ways to Strike a Balance:
Yes, Virginia, it is possible to stay connected to social media without it taking over your life. Here's how.
"More than ever, we're now focused on documenting and building the history of our lives, not on living the life unfolding right in front of us," writes Damon Brown in his new TED e-book Our Virtual Shadow: Why We Are Obsessed With Documenting Our Lives Online. "It's all about the check-in, the status update, the captured moment, rather than being fully present day to day."
Not that there's anything wrong with social media, he hastens to add--as a technology writer he maintains an active social media presence himself. (In fact, he specially requested we include his Twitter handle, @BrownDamon, in this post.) But constant attention to social media comes at a cost, he says. "We lack focus because we're distracted by so many things, and studies have shown our brains are bad at multi-tasking. So in a sense when we're having experiences and documenting them at the same time, we're not experiencing any of it. This has crept up on most of us."
Like Brown, anyone active in business, and especially anyone running a small business, can't afford to ignore social media or even step away from it for too long. On the other hand, no one wants an experience like that of Cesar Kuriyama (a TED speaker now documenting one second each day of his life) who failed to enjoy a once-in-a-lifetime sunset because he was too busy trying to get a good picture of it for Facebook. Is there a way to maintain the social media presence we all need to succeed and stay connected, without missing out on those moments? Here's Brown's advice:
1. Pick your poison
"Don't go willy-nilly into all social networks, choose what your audience likes the most," he suggests. "If you're a music industry person, be on MySpace. In my business, a lot of people that are influential are on Twitter, and so are the people I want to influence."
Once you pick one or two social networks that matter to your audience, stay active only on those. You may want to create an account in others just to reserve your preferred name, but don't make them part of your daily life. "It only takes 10 minutes to set up an account," Brown says. "After that, just do something occasionally."
2. Set a time for social media
For Brown, it's the hour between 6 and 7 a.m. "It's like reading the morning paper," he says. "I'm sitting there with my coffee and my bagel or whatever." Brown uses that time to post links to any articles of his that were published the previous day, and send shout-outs to people who've retweeted his tweets or his work, as well as catch up on his favorite Twitter feeds and tweet interesting tidbits. At the end of the hour, he goes on to the rest of his day.
"Then it doesn't matter if I don't go on every five seconds," he says. "Since I started doing this, it's really changed how productive I am, both for that hour, and for the rest of the day."
3. Give yourself a time out
Take some time every day to disconnect from social media completely, Brown advises. He himself does this by deliberately letting his smartphone run out of power, knowing that once it does it won't turn on again for at least 15 minutes. "Personally, I know my level of focus increases dramatically," he says. "It's helpful during work, but it's also helpful for paying more attention to my wife or even going for a walk." With social media inaccessible, Brown finds he can really be in the moment.
He recommends a new game called "Phone Stacking," in which people eating a meal together pile their phones on the table, and the first one to pick up his or her phone must also pick up the tab. The game fulfills our new craving for "soundproof" space when we step away from the virtual world and engage with the people actually around us, he writes. But, he says, before you put your phone on the table, it's fine to pause long enough to check in with Foursquare first.

3 Ways to Spot a Liar

3 Ways to Spot a Liar:
A new study out of Harvard offers advice on spotting a liar and they're not what you see in the movies.
It would be nice if every job candidate, negotiating partner, and potential supplier told the truth. But here in the real world, being in business means separating spin from reality.
Police shows and folk wisdom offer suggestions, but these commonly held "tells" aren't useful for spotting deception. For starters, liars aren't always so fidgety. But just because Hollywood gets it wrong wrong doesn't mean that you should.
A new study from the Harvard Business School and University of Madison, Wisconsin, offers some insight on the practice. Researchers asked study participants to play a commonly-used game in economics research in which one person was given a sum of money and asked to decide how much to share with another player. The person on the receiving end could either accept or reject the money if they felt it was unfair, in which case both players got nothing.
For this study, the experimenters tweaked the game to create an opportunity wherein players could lie. The players receiving offers weren't told what their partner had, but were allowed to chat with that player before starting the game. During this time, the researchers determined, the moneyed player would have an opportunity to fib.
In the end, 30 percent of the players either flat-out lied about how much money they had or tried to avoid having the conversation. So could the researchers tell they were lying? Working Knowledge points out three examples:
They talked a lot. "Bald-faced liars tended to use many more words during the ultimatum game than did truth tellers, presumably in an attempt to win over suspicious receivers," Working Knowledge noted. "Just like Pinocchio's nose, the number of words grew along with the lie," Van Sol said. Liars also used more complex sentences than truth-tellers.
They sweared more. Deceptive players swore more frequently than truthful players, the researchers found, particularly when their opposite number voiced doubts about their honesty. "We think this may be due to the fact that it takes a lot of cognitive energy to lie," said one researcher. "Using so much of your brain to lie may make it hard to monitor yourself in other areas."
They avoided "I" statements. No one wants to admit they're behaving unethically, so they'll often shy away from "I" statements and use third-person pronouns like "he" and "she" instead. "This is a way of distancing themselves from and avoiding ownership of the lie," one researcher noted.
As it turns out, lying by ommission is not a good strategy. Bald-faced lies were far more convincing, though the researchers cautioned there are no definitive red flags for dealing with liars.
"It would be a mistake to take the findings as gospel and apply them too strictly," said research collaborator Deepak Malhotra. "Rather, the factors we find to be associated with lies and deception are perhaps most useful as warning signs that should simply prompt greater vigilance and further investigation ..."
Are you good at spotting liars, and if so, what tricks do you use?

Your Company is Great. Your Name Stinks. Now What?

Your Company is Great. Your Name Stinks. Now What?:
Your company name is less important than it's cracked up to be.
A great company name is a wonderful asset.

The word “Twitter” is memorable, fun to say, and conjures images of young birds chirping away to one another in their nest. It’s perfect for a start-up devoted to providing a platform for short 140-character updates to the world.

DropBox is easy to spell and says what it does. Perfect.

DreamWorks is inspiring.

But what if you have the perfect company name and can’t register (or can’t afford to buy) the URL? What if you’ve been in business for a while and you're stuck with a lousy name? Should you change it?

No.

A name, like a logo, is virtually worthless until you start making it mean something to your target audience.

Great names are made, not born.

No one likes being a Virgin, but Richard Branson has made us happy to buy from one.

An apple is a piece of fruit. You’re supposed to eat one a day but I don’t always remember. It happens to also be the name of one of the world’s most valuable companies, but it’s not the name that made it so. It’s what Apple did to define what the company would stand for in the mind of the customer that made it valuable.

Mother is the name of the U.K.’s largest independent advertising agency, and with 400 employees spread across offices in London, New York and Buenos Aires, they’re a big success. If you’ve downed a Stella Artois in the last few years, you may have been seduced by an ad created by Mother. You could argue that everyone has a soft spot for his or her mom, but beyond that, the company name Mother is worthless. It’s just a word that now happens to mean something special to Chief Marketing Officers.

IBM stands for International Business Machines, which is about as boring as you can get. IBM is a valuable company today because of the trust the IBM name instills in CEOs and CTOs who outsource their service contracts to Big Blue - nothing to do with a fancy name.

Wal-Mart, one of the world’s most valuable companies, is a mash-up of the plain vanilla surname Walton and the ugly, unimaginative “Mart” suffix.

Phil Knight changed his company name from “Blue Ribbon Sports” to Nike back in 1971. Blue Ribbon Sports is a truly awful name, but unless you’re into Greek mythology and happen to know your goddesses by heart, Nike is not much better. It’s four little nothing letters that Knight & Co. have made to mean something -- along with the swoosh logo they had created for $35.

Google used to be called “BackRub” because the platform used backlinks to verify the influence of a site. Larry Page and Sergey Brin then changed the name to Google, which originated from misspelling the word “googol.” Only geeks know googol is math speak for the digit one followed by one hundred zeros. So stop obsessing over your moniker. The name of one of the world’s most valuable companies is a typo.

Tiny deposits on the brain

Every time you google something and find what you’re after, Google makes a tiny subconscious deposit on your brain that says, “Hey, I found what I was looking for. I like those guys over at Google.” The Nike brand wasn’t built on a $35 logo and a four-letter word. It was the advertising campaign “Just Do It” that inspired the competitor in all of us and made us fall in love with the company behind the name.

A great company name might add value to your business, but having a crappy moniker is not a death knell. What drives your value are customers who seek out your brand -- not because of your name, but because of what it means to them.

5 Ways To Get the Most From Your Ad Agency

5 Ways To Get the Most From Your Ad Agency:
Hiring an ad agency is a big investment for a company. An ad agency insider explains how to get the most out of that investment.
There’s a cynical saying in the advertising business that clients get the work that they deserve. Derisive? Absolutely. Accurate? Unfortunately, sometimes…yes.

Let’s put our cards on the table. Overused though it its, the word “partnership” gets at the core of what makes a successful client-agency relationship. It takes two parties, collaborating and conspiring together to create bold, smart work that makes the cash register ring.

As an agency owner who has worked with dozens of clients and as a brand steward who has hired more than a handful of agencies on behalf of clients over the years, I’ve seen more than my fair of client-agency relationships, at every point along the affinity spectrum. As such, here are five ways that you can get the most from your advertising, digital, public-relations or marketing agency.

1. Be thoughtful.
Whether you’re thinking about a major new campaign or talking about a minor tactical execution, before you pick up the phone or send out an email, ask yourself: What do we really want? And need?
Don’t focus just on “what you seek to make." Rather, spend time truly contemplating what you’re seeking to accomplish, with what funding, with what audience, in what timeframe. Find different ways to define the problem that you’re seeking to solve (or opportunity to exploit) in terms of how you frame it overall as well as how it will be measured. Without a doubt, these are hard questions. But bear in mind that you're fundamentally defining the box in which all future conversations will be held, so take the time to consider the ideal way to start the conversation to get the richest thinking in the areas that can lead to the biggest wins for you and your brand.

2. Be patient.
Great advertising takes time. To the extent that you are able, plan the work well in advance so that both parties can comfortably work the plan. Remember that you are making art--art that fuels commerce, yes--but art, nonetheless. And great art is best served by time, imagination and plenty of room for possibilities.

3. Be open.
So yes, we’re making art. Which can be hard. And scary, as it is filled with a myriad of uncertainties and things that don’t fit tidily into a spreadsheet. Even with the most rigorous and thorough planning process, there comes a time when we enter into a world where objectivity leaves the room and subjectivity plops itself comfortably into the recliner.

Our best work happens with clients who were comfortable staying open in these spaces. Who are not afraid to spend time listening to, playing with, and trying on truly big ideas. So ask your agency to dig deep. To spend time with you. To explain, to persuade, to give a strong point of view. You’re paying them for their opinion. And when you do, work hard to stay open. No one ever talked about the “safe option” around the proverbial water cooler, did they?

4. Be consistent.
It goes without saying, but it’s hard to hit a target when it’s constantly moving. (And if it is moving, it’s always helpful for everyone to mutually acknowledge the aforementioned movement.) We get it. Things change. Every organization has its own dynamics that are constantly swirling and shifting. No one tries to be inconsistent. That said, prepare your agency for what lies ahead. If you keep them outside of the “circle of trust,” it’s hard for them to give you good counsel. And keeping everyone on the same page means you will spend less, get more, and both parties will feel better about the deliverables and results alike.

5. Never underestimate the power of cheesecake.
Yes, you read that right. At the risk of being inelegant: Say “thank you.” Appreciate good and hard work when you receive it. Yes, we are being paid a fair and honest wage for our work. But people are people, you know the drill. After the launch of a major campaign years ago, a client sent cheesecake as a thank you to our team. The campaign? Most successful in company history. The relationship? One of our best ever, to this day.

If we’re doing our job right, both clients and their agency partners want the same things: Dynamic, breakthrough work that fuels brand equity and sparks short-term sales alike and a process that is efficient, effective and enjoyable, if not downright fun. It's a commonsense approach that, frankly, isn’t all that common any more.