I’m my own worst critic. Lately, I’ve found myself in some situations where I realize that professional enhancement is less about “what you know” or “know how to do” and it’s more about the basics. It’s wonderful to have amassed a wide range of skills in your career, whether that’s an uncanny ability to develop great software, drive traffic to websites, design compelling interfaces or simply package and market products with the best of them. But in my case, I’m reminded that all of this is worthless knowledge when you stumble on the basics. It’s a humbling experience when it happens. It’s that misunderstanding due to poor listening habits. Or it’s a process of atrocious and lazy decision making technique. From personal experience (e.g. screwing this up), I’ll posit that bad decision making is less about the actual choice you make and more about the process you used to get there. I’ve reflected on big decisions lately. I’ve found myself thinking 5% about the actual paths I’d chosen and 95% about the absolute train-wreck-of-a-process I used to arrive at a conclusion. The process was the problem. The choice was just a choice. Only time will tell whether the choice was the best choice. But no time needs to go by at all to expose a bad process. It sticks out like a sore thumb.
Time to go back to elementary school. I started thinking “what do I know about the basics of decision making”? I further began to consider what other “basics” might I presume to be proficient when in fact I could brush up.
I found some interesting resources online about decision making and listening - basic things we’re forced to do each and every day to get our jobs done.
Effective decision making can be much more involved that simply relying on intuition. You can use tools to help map out the likely consequences of decisions, work out the importance of individual factors, and choose the best course of action to take. For example, there’s the Pareto Analysis, the Paired Comparison Analysis, Decision Trees, Force Field Analysis and more. Who knew there were so many considered methodologies for making choices? Want to know whether a change is worth making? There’s a better alternative to flipping a coin. Try a Cost/Benefit Analysis.
Continuing on this vein of self improvement I found this great brief on listening called: 10 Ways to Become a Better Listener and Change Your Life Forever
Listening is a combination of hearing and using your brain to promote the right outcome. It involves making a point of being extra vigilant about your reactions, and extra aware of your tendencies. Avoid most big misunderstandings by listening better.
Being a bad decision maker and a bad listener negatively impacts your career and relationships with other people. Being able to write a thorough and compelling PRD, marketing plan or even lines of great code is certainly valuable stuff but stumbling on the basics can be pretty humiliating. Believe me.
Marcelo Calbucci over at Sampa has updated the Alexa ranking for his Seattle start-up list. You can check it out here. I’m happy to see the high traffic levels for those that Curious Office is involved with to include Imagekind (20,334) and Shelfari (8,443). Not included is SEOmoz at 1,398. Wow, that’s a lot of traffic. Too bad Alexa is the only way for us to get an indication of this…
The hardcore out there already know about Blueprint - the CSS framework loving compiled by Google and posted in its Code repository. There are thousands of CSS tutorials out there but the best way to learn is to look at a variety of code snippets in action - all in one place. This particular repository is interesting if you are experimenting with CSS for grids or typography effects. There are lots of pretty advanced classes for manipulating text and the CSS files are extremely well commented. There is also a stylesheet for printing - something most people never get around to doing. All elements are designed to be modified if you want to but this provides a framework for resetting browser defaults, establish basic type defaults and a fantastic grid with which to start hacking your own layout. Honestly, why do the same basic things over and over and over when you can start with some baseline classes and go from there. The only real reason to do that is if you have some aversion to reading anyone else’s code. Still, I think this is a really good starting framework for a ton of projects. Oh, and it’s free. So, go download load the package and take a peak.
It seems that the concept of an extranet has been something I’ve had to tackle at almost every enterprise company I’ve worked at. Each company had a few different requirements to include sharing of sensitive corporate documents with remote employees. But in general, the common task was a solution to share documents with customers, vendors and resellers. Lately I’ve been thinking about this problem again. I’ve toyed with the idea of using Sharepoint to do this but Sharepoint can be incredibly complex if your needs are rather basic. At a previous company, I wrote a basic document management system in (bad) PHP that had some very basic rules: who can view your files, who has permission to edit your files and who else can share them. The problem is that once you attain your initial needs you realize that you need more. For example, once you’ve created your contacts and groups, you can apply access rights to folders and files but unless you’ve developed some kind of admin interface its not that easy for others to make changes. It all seems like such a simple thing but it always ends up being a pain in the butt. For this reason I’ve been pretty interested in some new start-ups who are working to develop easy solutions for the small - medium business market. Xythos in San Francisco took time to post a little video on Vimeo which was nice.
Business writing is apparently different than writing a novel. If you want to make a buck, don’t try to impress people with big words, technical words or unfamiliar words. I’m guilty of using words that are unnecessary because it makes a document or email sound nicer. For example, I’ve said “just recently” when “recently” would have sufficed.
Another interesting consideration is the type of choices that should be made before doing any business copy writing. Are you going to write from an intellectual perspective or an emotional perspective? If you’re writing from an intellectual perspective, do you have the facts and figures to make a convincing argument? When should you go with one versus the other? If you’re selling a technology solution is it best to always use the intellectual approach?
Persuasive writing is a difficult and sometimes subjective task but I thought that Online Copywriting 101: The Ultimate Cheat Sheet was worth a bookmark. The next time I’m writing web page copy or material for a new data sheet I’ll revisit and rethink my approach.
