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Friday 30 August 2013

How to Increase Your Productivity

Reading a blog post the other day, I found a link to a site called RescueTime which advertises itself as "A personal-analytics service that shows you how you spend your time & provides tools to help you be more productive".  Now, I spend a LOT of time at the computer and, yes, for a large proportion of that time, I'm working. But I also catch up on TV and radio programmes online and . . . (confession coming up) . . . I play solitaire and Mahjong.

And I have to admit that, from time to time, I worry about how much time I spend playing games.  I'll only play for ten minutes or so at a time . . . but it can mount up over a day.  So I signed up for  RescueTime, intending to give myself a short sharp shock that will (perhaps) stop me playing games . . . or, at least, stop me from playing games quite as much.

But, actually, it wasn't as bad as I thought.  Overall I spend something over four hours a week on games but, considering that most of that is in coffee breaks or after I've finished work, I'm not displeased.  And I'm a lot more productive than I thought!

Like most of us, I suppose, I can get distracted by an interesting (but irrelevant) website, when I should be working.  And RescueTime shows you exactly how you divide your time between productive and distracting activities.  To begin with, however, I didn't think this would be useful because the charts were showing all the time I spent working (on social media) as 'very distracting'.  However, I then found the link which enabled me to grade all the sites I visit and activities I engage in, so now Twitter and Facebook and writing my blog all appear as 'very productive'.

I do wonder, though, how the default was set up.  During this week, I visited some 20 internet marketing blogs.  RescueTime graded five of them as 'very productive', ten as 'neutral' and the remaining five as 'very distracting'.  Admittedly, this is balanced but I'm intrigued to know what it is that separated the supposed 'very productive' from the 'very distracting'.  Now I've regraded them, they're all showing as 'very productive'.

I was amused, however, to find that a certain fashion site, where I'd spent twenty minutes or so browsing through the end of season sale, was graded on the default as 'very productive'.  I was tempted not to change it!

All the results on RescueTime are charted out very clearly


and are then broken down into lists so that you can see exactly how much time you've spent doing what, and on which days.

For me, RescueTime offers the great benefits of reassuring me when I'm working well (currently it tells me that I'm more productive than 61% of people) and of alerting me if I start to be less efficient.  Although, in the back of my mind, I can't help wondering whether it could, in itself, become a distraction because the charts and the details are so good!  However, it does record how much time you spend on its own site (which, naturally, the default shows as 'very productive'), so time will tell!

I should add that the link I've given for the site at the head of this post is an affiliate link, because I believe it's a good site and worth promoting.  There's a free version, but the pro version (at $6 a month) offers a lot more data.

Sunday 11 August 2013

Content Curation - or Cloning? What Price Originality?

Content curation is all the rage.  Just recently the process was described by Carrie Morgan in an article on Business2Community.com:

You provide value by identifying a specific target audience, filtering through relevant online content, then sharing only what you find most interesting, trendy or applicable to that audience. Nothing else, just what you feel is most meaningful to that particular audience, then adding in your own expertise and opinions as you share what you’ve curated.
Read more at http://www.business2community.com/social-media/understanding-content-curation-how-it-applies-to-social-media-0575832#0KD3K43cC8wrd43H.99
"You provide value by identifying a specific target audience, filtering through relevant online content, then sharing only what you find most interesting, trendy or applicable to that audience . . . then adding in your own expertise and opinions as you share what you’ve curated."

And, put like that, it does seem to have a purpose and a value.  And, certainly, I use my weekly newsletter to tell people on my list about the best articles on aspects of internet marketing that I've come across in the previous week.

But, in trawling through numerous blogs to find those articles, I am all too frequently coming across what I can only describe as clones.  Someone will bring out an infographic - and suddenly there are six or eight articles by different authors, using the infographic as the core, with an added paragraph or two of comment.

Or there will be a sudden glut of articles on one subject.  This may occur when there has been a recent change that affects internet marketing - for example, the recent introduction of 'tabs' by gmail.  A lot of people have been writing about whether it will affect email marketing (some say yes, others say no) and, if it does, what marketers can do about it.  And a few days ago, after changes to the Facebook news feed were announced, one multi-contributor blog carried four articles on the subject, by different authors, in quick succession.  Sometimes, though, a clutch of articles seems unrelated to any changes and, here, I suspect that one good article has led to a load of copycats.

When I left school, and before I went to medical school, I trained as a journalist.  This was in the pre-internet era when news was provided in large part by newspapers.  And the thing that every journalist wanted was a scoop.  Because if you were writing about something completely different from your competitors, you were likely to sell more copies.  But if your stories were just a variation on those of everyone else, then readers had no incentive to buy one paper rather than another.

And, of course, newspapers (unlike blogs and the internet itself) have finite space.  They can't afford to fill that space up with run of the mill articles.  As a journalist, you can't keep writing about the same thing or copying the rest.  You've got to be original.  And originality is something we seem to be seeing less and less of online.  Unfortunately, this is inevitable if we follow the frequently-given advice that we should blog every day in order to keep our audience.

As you will have realised, I don't blog every day.  I write only when there's something I want to write about and something that I think may interest you, my reader.  I don't want to be a bore!

So, to anyone who is thinking of starting a blog, I would say:

  • write only about those things that interest you
  • write only about those things that will interest the audience that you are aiming for
  • don't worry if your opinions differ from those of other people writing online - your opinions are what people will come to your blog for
  • keep up to date with what is going on in your niche but don't write about a subject just because everyone else seems to be writing about it
  • be original - express your own thoughts, not thoughts regurgitated from other people
  • and don't try to write every day if you haven't any original thoughts to write about.  Of  course, you don't want to leave it too long between posts but I believe that you are far less likely to lose readers because you only post once a week or once a fortnight than because you're constantly writing about the same thing as everyone else.
You provide value by identifying a specific target audience, filtering through relevant online content, then sharing only what you find most interesting, trendy or applicable to that audience. Nothing else, just what you feel is most meaningful to that particular audience, then adding in your own expertise and opinions as you share what you’ve curated.
Read more at http://www.business2community.com/social-media/understanding-content-curation-how-it-applies-to-social-media-0575832#0KD3K43cC8wrd43H.99
You provide value by identifying a specific target audience, filtering through relevant online content, then sharing only what you find most interesting, trendy or applicable to that audience. Nothing else, just what you feel is most meaningful to that particular audience, then adding in your own expertise and opinions as you share what you’ve curated.
Read more at http://www.business2community.com/social-media/understanding-content-curation-how-it-applies-to-social-media-0575832#0KD3K43cC8wrd43H.99
You provide value by identifying a specific target audience, filtering through relevant online content, then sharing only what you find most interesting, trendy or applicable to that audience. Nothing else, just what you feel is most meaningful to that particular audience, then adding in your own expertise and opinions as you share what you’ve curated.
Read more at http://www.business2community.com/social-media/understanding-content-curation-how-it-applies-to-social-media-0575832#0KD3K43cC8wrd43H.99
You provide value by identifying a specific target audience, filtering through relevant online content, then sharing only what you find most interesting, trendy or applicable to that audience. Nothing else, just what you feel is most meaningful to that particular audience, then adding in your own expertise and opinions as you share what you’ve curated.
Read more at http://www.business2community.com/social-media/understanding-content-curation-how-it-applies-to-social-media-0575832#0KD3K43cC8wrd43H.99
You provide value by identifying a specific target audience, filtering through relevant online content, then sharing only what you find most interesting, trendy or applicable to that audience. Nothing else, just what you feel is most meaningful to that particular audience, then adding in your own expertise and opinions as you share what you’ve curated.
Read more at http://www.business2community.com/social-media/understanding-content-curation-how-it-applies-to-social-media-0575832#0KD3K43cC8wrd43H.99