Another five fab articles
Written by Julia Bickerstaff // August 5, 2013 // scrapbook // 5 Comments
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1. Got time to watch a video? Then you MUST watch this. It’s about keeping a diary and it’s totally fabulous. A while ago I wrote about keeping a business journal over on the Daily Juice and, oh happy days, it totally works for me. Fancy trying it?!
2. Do you find it hard to keep tidy? Well the good news is that being a little bit messy may be a good thing. I certainly took comfort in this comment by the author. “In one study we found that people with more orderly desks actually spend more time looking for things”
3. Are you making/ selling stuff that people really want? You’d be surprised how often we don’t. Not on purpose of course but in our quest to be different. Here’s a story about one little business and four big ones that kinda got it wrong.
4. This week’s productivity tip is about when you, ahem, slip out of your new routine and into your old unproductive ways. Oh I can so relate to that. You too?!
5. Finally, I do love a story about how someone else has done it. Here’s a goodie from Anthea Leonard who founded Sweet Art. I like how she worked around the problem of not being able to do more than 10 cakes a week. Do you?
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5 Comments on "Another five fab articles"
Re the article on being too messy or tidy:
Being too orderly can definitely take too much time (and, in turn, waste it!). I certainly find that I’m over-invested in it and am constantly trying to scale it back! I agree with the notion here that being too orderly comes from the need to be aesthetically satisfied with the end result of that order in your environment. I also agree that having that order gives the impression that ambiguity is taken out of the equation and that control is achieved, which shows that it’s really all a state of mind. I personally do believe that having an orderly environment helps achieve an orderly mind but the question is: to what extent? At which point does it stop serving this valid and healthy purpose and become a state of obsessive compulsiveness which is actually destructive in every sense? I reckon it’s this fine line that one needs to define for oneself to ensure one remains healthy with the concept of order.
Such a good question Vivian. I think being totally ordered in the sense of aiming for perfection is in a way a form of procrastination. “I can’t do the ‘thinking’ bit until everything else that there is to do is done”. When I’m doing something hard I find I’m much tidier and organised. The ‘tidy desk tidy mind’ does help a bit but mostly I think *I* use it as a distraction. But then I’m not naturally the world’s neatest person!
I agree, Julia! trying to achieve order to that unhealthy extent is indeed a form of/ leads to procrastination…nothing to be achieved out of it! And again this procrastination comes from the unfortunate belief that the ‘thinking’ part has to be nailed from the start when you get to it so the harder the ‘thinking’ part the longer one takes to get to it. So, yeah, again it’s all about finding that balanced ground for oneself and ditching the notion of perfectionism which leads to nothing but wasted time and delusion.
Re the article: Marketing’s Best Kept Secret
So Julia, if I understand correctly, this is not exactly discouraging businesses from offering something new and fresh as their product, rather to:
1) tweak it (i.e. half the normal amount of sugar in the lemonade instead of only a quarter) so as to appeal to the common tastes of the customer base, and…
2) to be more strategic/flexible with the marketing part of it (i.e. instead of saying people are consuming too much sugar so we’re putting much less in our lemonade, market the already tweaked product as something that tastes great AND has half the amount of sugar in it)
We’ve experience this first hand with our initial product offering at MOUSH, which is why we’ve tweaked it now to be more of what customers would agree with/ recognize/ understand. Let’s see where round two takes us!!!
Yes Vivian, I totally agree with that. I guess it’s giving people what they want or/and helping them to understand that they might want it! Good luck with Moush 🙂