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I am a small business Conversation Consultant and public speaker that uses the power of the internet to leverage your success. Productivity in Context is a web magazine focused on Productivity and tools for organizing. Make this your headquarters for improving your life and work through increased mindfulness, education, and workflow practices.

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Please contact me via e-mail: stephen @ hdbizblog dot com

I learned about the basics of meditation from a manager at one of my jobs, many years ago. He told me that in order to start the day in the proper frame of mind, you should always take one minute in the morning and just relax. Breathe deeply and clear your mind for at least one minute, up to five if you had time. “Even if you are running late, one minute won’t matter much, and has the potential to help you a great deal,” he said.

At the time I did not even know he was talking about meditation, my priorities were not very mature. The advice has stuck with me through the years, and has indeed been very helpful.
Thanks to the Personal Development List I have found a website that has some great resources on meditation, for the beginner to the experienced practitioner. A good introduction to meditation from Meditation Mastery is this remarkable guide:

Each chapter will provide one important guided meditation and will be written such that to practice that particular meditation technique you only need to read that chapter.

Whenever applicable, beginner, intermediate and advanced versions of the meditation technique will be provided. In addition, any meditation tools needed to practice the technique along with, the benefits, cautions, practice details, hints and tips will also be given. In some cases, I will also reveal the secrets about the meditation, which may not be commonly known. The first few chapters of this book will focus on the most prevalent and time tested meditation techniques. Later, we will move onto some of the more rare, but equally effective meditation techniques. The first meditation we will explore is the famous Zen Meditation Technique, also called Zazen or Breath Meditation.

Indeed there are also instructions for more advanced practitioners. I am looking forward to the rest of this project.

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/59vd2e. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

When I first started blogging about productivity and new media, I was lucky enough to come across a great website with links to the RSS feeds of a bunch of other productivity bloggers. Called The Ultimate GTD Index, this one page lists over 50 blogs and dozens of other resources for improving your productivity.

What does this mean to me?

16 of these blogs are updated regularly (once a week or more) and the posts that are listed on the Ultimate Index page are GTD-specific - that means no “cat-blogging”. This is where I go at least once a week to keep up on the happenings in the rest of the prod-o-sphere.

The proprietor of the Ultimate Index (who goes by the super-hero name of gtdfrk, in order to maintain his secret identity) also maintains a blog at the same site, with articles on productivity practices, applications, and more. Interesting quotes, like this one:

David Allen

Decide the outcome and the action step, put reminders of those somewhere your brain trusts you’ll see them at the right time, and listen to your brain breathe easier.

His first quote effectively summarizes his own GTD methodology. Always ask yourself: “What’s the successful outcome? And what’s the next action?”. Apply the GTD principles consistently to experience that feeling of relaxed control, a “mind like water”.

…can be found, along with gtdfrk’s analysis and insight to provide context and meaning. I have had several e-mail conversations with the author, who is a collaborator at the Knowledge Management forum that is just getting started. We have joined forces in order to explore the future of productivity and workflow in order to provide the best information to our readers.

How can I get involved?

You can subscribe to the RSS feed and never miss a post. You can also submit a question for gtdfrk in the Comments at this post, and he’ll post the answer for you. Or you can just peruse the archives and categories for interesting articles that will definitely help you with improving your productivity practice, no matter if you are all-digital or all-paper.

Do not miss out on this terrific resource, and check out this contest!

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/5lcpzp. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

You’re it, man, you’re it.

By Now many of you will have read about the new advertising system over at http; SquidOffers. If not, here is the scoop from The Mighty Godin (long may he reign):

So we invented SquidOffers, which I hope will work for us, and which I fully expect will show up in other places soon. The idea is to combine the voting mechanism of Reddit or Digg or Plexo with the text ad mindset of a Google ad. But instead of an ad, it’s an offer.

Make an offer. Pick a category. Pay a small fee ($100 a month). Then, our users vote on the offers. Get a lot of votes and you rank more highly, which means more clicks. And you don’t pay for the clicks.

Now there’s an incentive to write better and better offers (but they need to be genuine or we boot you). Offer a free sample or a free issue or a consult or an ebook. Be generous. Get permission to follow up.

It was intriguing enough that I set up an offer as soon as I read about it. The offer went live Monday. See it here. What do I think?

* It was easy enough to create and pay for my offer (paypal).
* Choosing a category is hard, and I made a mistake with the category my offer is displayed in but there is no mechanism to change it
* Initially our paid-for offers were competing against entrenched place-holders, they have been zeroed now
* Offers are not particularly visible, only the top 5 display at all, and the best screen real estate is given over to adsense. The bottom offer will be below the fold on many monitors.
* There is not much voting action. I am lucky my offer is (was?) among the most popular but I had to ask for votes on Darrens blog comments to get them.
* I can’t see any incentive for people to vote up offers. It might be an idea for a vote-down button for people to junk spam, of course this would create its own problems.
* You should be able to see who voted. Right now it is way open to abuse.
* The advertiser screen is hard to find and pretty much useless. It only shows your offer, run dates and a delete link. Where are the visitor, page view and click-through stats?

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/5o384u. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen

The urban legends of the kidney thieves, the gang members who cruise with no headlights, and the flesh-eating bacteria have something in common with age-old fables, nursery rhymes, and modern-day ad campaigns. What could it be? That these ideas seem to have a life of their own, a “Sticky” factor that makes people remember them, and pass them on. But where does that come from?And can it be duplicated intentionally?

Using a word coined by Malcolm Gladwell in his book The Tipping Point, Chip and Dan Heath have done exhaustive research and come up with a theory that explains why some ideas catch on, and some just wither away. They use anecdotes and stories, some familiar, some new, to describe the phenomenon of stickiness and its ancient roots in every culture.

Made to Stick unpacks the essence of very effective communication, messages that stand the test of time and pass from one person to another like the flu. One of the core ideas of the book is that effective communication is based on “Gap Theory” - pointing out things that people may be unaware that they do not know. Exploiting this gap with six very specific conditions can make your communication sticky, therefore effective. Rather than asking yourself,”What information do I need to convey?“, you must shift your thinking to the viewpoint of your audience, “What questions do I want my audience to ask?” Once you know that, then you can work on getting your audience to care by providing context and appealing to their emotions. An emotional idea makes people care, and when they care, they remember.

What makes ideas sticky, and just how do you get people to care? Even more, how do you get people to take action? The Heaths use an acronym for describing the components of a sticky idea: SUCCESs.

1. Simplicity - it contains only the most rudimentary, core idea
2. Unexpectedness - what you don’t know gets and keeps your interest
3. Concreteness - an example that the audience can relate to, nothing abstract
4. Credibility - vivid details that enhance the image
5. Emotions - as opposed to analytical or statistical information
6. Stories - instead of lists

These components, used in combination, can take an idea and make it viral. A sticky concept does not have to use all of the components, but stickiness increases and communication is enhanced by using more.

This book will teach you how to transform your ideas to beat the Curse of Knowledge. The six principles presented earlier are your best weapons. They can be used as a kind of checklist. Let’s take the CEO who announces to her staff that they must strive to “maximize shareholder value.”

Is this idea simple? Yes, in the sense that it’s short, but it lacks the useful simplicity of a proverb. Is it unexpected? No. Concrete? Not at all. Credible? Only in the sense that it’s coming from the mouth of the CEO. Emotional? Um, no. A story? No.

Contrast the “maximize shareholder value” idea with John F. Kennedy’s famous 1961 call to “put a man on the moon and return him safely by the end of the decade.” Simple? Yes. Unexpected? Yes. Concrete? Amazingly so. Credible? The goal seemed like science fiction, but the source was credible. Emotional? Yes. Story? In miniature.

The Heaths write with wit and humor, explaining the power of some of today’s urban legends and successful ad campaigns, dissecting them to expose the stickiness components that made them successful. Much of the research turned up some very counter-intuitive results (see pages 211-212 on Positive Mental Attitude!), but the lesson is that a simple message with some very specific qualities can make your audience do the things that you need them to do, in order to make your message successful:

• Pay attention,
• understand and remember,
• agree or believe,
• care,
• and be able to act on it.

Whether you are chairing a meeting to explain the new TPS reports, or creating a new corporate culture, creating a message with basic, core information that appeals to emotions and can be conveyed in a credible story will be remembered, long after the last PowerPoint slide has faded from memory.

We will give you suggestions for tailoring your ideas in a way that makes them more creative and more effective with your audience. We’ve created our checklist of six principles for precisely this purpose.

But isn’t the use of a template or a checklist confining? Surely we’re not arguing that a “color by numbers” approach will yield more creative work than a blank-canvas approach?

Actually, yes, that’s exactly what we’re saying. If you want to spread your ideas to other people, you should work within the confines of the rules that have allowed other ideas to succeed over time. You want to invent new ideas, not new rules.

This book can’t offer a foolproof recipe. We’ll admit it up front: We won’t be able to show you how to get twelve-year-olds to gossip about mitosis around the campfire. And in all likelihood your process-improvement memo will not circulate decades from now as a proverb in another culture.

But we can promise you this: Regardless of your level of “natural creativity,” we will show you how a little focused effort can make almost any idea stickier, and a sticky idea is an idea that is more likely to make a difference. All you need to do is understand the six principles of powerful ideas.

Rating: 5 of 5

Related:
Time Magazine Article
Malcolm Gladwell’s Blog
And just for fun,
The Secret of Stickiness

If you found this post useful, please share it with your friends on Twitter using the tinylink http://tinyurl.com/5hxr3m. Thanks, I appreciate it! Feel free to comment below, I enjoy discussing these ideas. ~@Stephen