Ask yourself...

Take a moment to find some quiet place, breathe, relax, and ask yourself a few questions. The answers might surprise you. And actually Doing something about it can only be a Good Thing.

1.  Are you happy?

2.  Do you like your daily routine?

3.  How much time do you spend doing something you enjoy?

4.  Who are the good people in your life -- and do you spend enough time with them?

5.  What do you need to change?

6.  Do you need to make any big decisions?

7.  What are you doing for others?

8.  What comes next?

source: http://chrisguillebeau.com/

Write Emails That Get Results

Analysis of Effective emails, by Boomerang:

One of the most significant factors in determining response rates is how positive (words like great) or negative (words like bad) the words in the message are. Emails that were slightly to moderately positive OR slightly to moderately negative elicited between 5-15% more responses than emails that were completely neutral. We would advise against both excessive flattery and writing hostile, day-ruining screeds. Poisonously negative emails were less likely than even neutral emails to get a response, and extremely positive emails did little better.

The sweet spot for email length is between 50-125 words, yielding response rates above 50%. While average emails from Jeb and Hillary clock in at 10 and 9 words respectively, unless you're running for President, sending emails that short mean you'll sacrifice about 30% of your responses. Response rates slowly declined from 125 word messages to 500 word messages, then fell faster after that. So if you need to send War and Peace, you might want to send it as an attachment!

Email marketing veterans know that testing subject lines is a critical step in designing an email campaign that will have a high open rate. Likewise, the length of your subject line impacts response rates, and the optimal length is shorter than we expected. Subject lines with only 3-4 words (excluding email conventions like Re: and Fwd:) received the most responses. Including some sort of subject line is critical: only 14% of messages without any subject line at all received a response.

Our most surprising finding was that the reading grade level of your emails has a dramatic impact on response rates. Emails written at a 3rd grade reading level were optimal, providing a 36% lift over emails written at a college reading level and a 17% higher response rate than emails written at a high school reading level. The main components of reading grade level scores are the number of syllables in your words and the number of words in your sentences. So try using shorter sentences and simpler words than you normally would. You can check your content's reading grade level in the Word Count tool in most word processors, or search for “Flesch Kincaid grade level" to find a multitude of online tools.

The number of questions you ask in an email has a sweet spot, just like the number of words you write. We found that emails that asked 1-3 questions are 50% more likely to get a response than emails asking no questions. But a bombardment of questions won't help you either - an email with 3 questions is 20% more likely to get a response than an email with 8 or more!

If your natural writing style has a “just the facts, ma'am" bias, you should consider including more opinions and more subjectivity into your messages! The more opinionated the content of the email, the higher the response rate climbed. One caveat - we have no idea if those subjective emails generated positive responses or declarations of war, so caveat writer!

Getting Things Done

Your ability to generate power is 

directly proportional to your ability to relax.

David Allen

author of Getting Things Done

also from David Allen:

Much of the stress that people feel doesn't come from having too much to do. 

It comes from not finishing what they've started

Why Follow up

The Gift of Attention

Winners have coaches

Think you could use a coach? Well, if you think about the fact that there are no medal winners without coaches, and if you want to be a winner in the game of business, then you almost certainly want one. But not just any one, you probably want the best you can get.

Harvard Business review did a survey/study of executive coaches and found some pretty interesting responses.  Check out the article here.

The Harvard study focused mainly on big business and hiring coaches for their higher level executive development.  I work with CEOs of young, growing businesses. Big difference in fees, and big difference in speed of results.  I charge a lot less because I just don't need the money to eat and pay bills and pay for advertising (I don't advertise).  And I get faster results because I don't like to waste time and drag things out to pad the bill.  I like quick action.  

I really like the graphic, don't you?  I've had it on my desktop for a while, waiting for me to get around to writing a post where it would be appropriate.  So here it is.

Wishing you all the very best of success in this New Year.

What is your Business Philosophy?