monday

10 Pearls of Wisdom - Personal Time Management

Tue, 31 Jul 2012 19:44:31 +0100

BY: Lisa Ann Landry

2) Work is Like Water

In my career at IBM I made a habit of going to work early, working through breaks and lunch and working late trying to accomplish all my tasks. This led to chronic fatigue and frustration because I was never able to get everything done. I learned from a friend that work is like water. Here’s what that means, imagine you’re sitting at a table where you grab the water pitcher that’s in the center and you pour all the water from the pitcher onto the table. What will the water do? The water will spread out and fill the table. It fills the space that it’s been give, so does work! This is why it’s important to have a blue print of what you want to accomplish.

According to research conducted by professionals in behavioral sciences and mental health 90% of the U.S. population alone fails to effectively set goals and follow through on them. Your blueprint for your life includes a series of goals. Just as in a blueprint for building a house everything isn’t done at once, neither are all of your goals. To successful accomplish your goals they should be broken down into SMART goals. When setting SMART goals make them:

Specific
Measurable
Attainable
Realistic
Time Bound

The next step is to prioritize your goals so you focus on the most important things first. So many people get frustrated because they are not able to accomplish all their goals by forgetting it’s the high priority goals that need attention first. What’s your favorite prioritizing method or tool?

10 Pearls of Wisdom - Personal Time Management

Mon, 16 Jul 2012 22:22:54 +0100

BY: Lisa Ann Landry

1. Have a Blue Print

Have you ever built or thought about having a house built? If you were to do such a thing what steps would you take to get your luxury dream home? How would you go about it? Chances are one of the first things you’d do is get a contractor. Yes? Of course the contractor will want to know your requirements …. Would you say to the contractor, “Short of 3 bedrooms and 2 bathrooms and a 2 car garage just surprise me?” No way! Right? Exactly, you’d have very specific directions for the contractor, “I want a 2 story desert modern style home with 4 bedrooms, 3 car garage, a huge backyard with a swimming pool, covered patio….I’ve drawn everything out right here in this blue print.”

Once the construction starts ADMIT IT you would be at that site every single day checking to make sure that everything is going according to your blue print. As if you knew anything about concrete and electrical wiring. Many people wake up everyday look in the mirror at the contractor of their life and say “Short of making enough money to pay the bills and have a little extra fun money just surprise me!” Here’s were I’m going, most people would put a lot of work and dedication into building their dream home but very few people have a blue print or plan for their life. This is commonly known as a mission statement. It’s essential to improving your personal time management and is used much like a blue print to guide the decisions you make about your life. Do you have a personal or family mission statement? What tools did you use to create your mission statement?

4 Tools for Monitoring the Social Media Conversation

Mon, 28 Feb 2011 03:05:35 +0100

Image by fredcavazza via Flickr

In Social Marketing elementary school this week I told the story about tweeting my irritation with National Rental Car and how they responded. Anthony (a participant) was astounded. “How did they know about that tweet?’ That’s a great question, how would they know given all the chatter that goes on in twitter sphere? Did you know there are over 55 million tweets per day chances are some of those tweets might have something to do with you business, service, product, brand, etc. Can you imagine how time consuming it would be trying to hunt down every place you brand has been mentioned? Yet wouldn’t you want to be involved in the conversation and be able to engage with your customer as National Rental Car did with me?

There are lots of fee & free time savings tools for monitoring the conversation. I took a 10 week Social Networking boot camp where I learned of some of these tools, if your not yet at the place where your ready to pay for your social media monitoring here are some free tools you may want to checkout:

Twilert is a free Twitter application that lets you receive regular email updates of tweets containing your brand, product, service, well any keyword you like really.

Tweetalarm Is like Google alerts for twitter - get an alert anytime someone tweets about your product, company, name, interest or any keywords.

Google Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant Google results (web, news, etc.) based on your choice of query or topic. Enter the topic you wish to monitor, then click preview to see the type of results you'll receive.

Social Mention Alerts are email updates of the latest relevant social media results (blog, microblog, etc.) based on your choice of search phrase.

There are 12 other unusual tool for monitoring Twitter searches not list here. Back to Anthony, National Car Rental definitely had an alert set very likely using one of these tools. I use Google Alerts, Social Mention and others what are you using? Are you familiar with the tools mentioned in this post?

Lisa Ann Landry
I’m an exuberant force of light… Come light up your life
http://www.imagedevelopmentgroup.com/speakers.html