Standing in the coffee shop line the other day, I couldn’t help overhearing these cringeworthy conversations around me:

• “OMG. I literally died laughing!” (No, you’re very much alive, I thought to myself. That’s unfortunate for those of us around you).
• “I’m literally freezing.” (You’re probably just cold and under-dressed I thought).
• “The dude’s business literally exploded!” (Call the bomb squad? Nope, just hyperbole, I thought).
• “There are literally like a million people in this line!” (Ughhh. Listening to you sure makes it feel that way).

What do all these anecdotes have in common? Misuse of the word “literally.” Originally, “literally” was a straightforward term with a clear purpose. It meant “in a literal sense” or “exactly” – a way to emphasize that you were describing something precisely, without metaphor or exaggeration.

For instance, if the temperature on the outside patio was 30 degrees, you could say it was literally freezing. Or if a novel was translated from Russian to English, you could say it was literally translated from the original.

Today, “literally” has become the linguistic equivalent of a verbal exclamation point, used to add dramatic emphasis with zero regard for its actual meaning. People now use “literally” to mean “figuratively” or “metaphorically,” which are the opposite of literal. Why? Because in this social media age in which everyone’s clamoring for attention, we feel compelled to make everything sound more dramatic than it really is.

You’ve seen this linguistic laziness in social situations, but it’s especially problematic in business situations where you must be concise and precise.

• “They literally devoured the competition.” (Had they adopted cannibalism as a business practice?)
  
• “It literally took them forever to get to cash flow positive.” (No, it did not, because if that were the case you would never stop until you died).

Why you should care

When we strip words of their precise meanings, we reduce our capacity for clear communication. “Literally” used to be a powerful tool for emphasizing truth; now it’s become a meaningless filler word used for more drama. Linguists call these words “intensifiers,” but I suggest you avoid using them altogether.

For instance, instead of saying “I literally don’t care,” just say: “I don’t care.”
Instead of saying “I literally know the solution,” just say: “I know the solution.”

How to use “literally” correctly

Use “literally” only when something is actually true in the most precise sense: “After running a marathon, I was literally exhausted and could barely move my legs.”

Use “literally” when you’re referring to a specific number or fact: “I almost missed the online deadline. I was literally two minutes away from being assessed a late filing penalty.”

Conclusion

Abuse and disregard of “literally” isn’t just a minor grammatical quirk – it’s a symptom of our culture’s love for hyperbole and emotional inflation. Next time you’re tempted to say “literally,” just ask yourself: Did I really? If not and you’re over 16 years old, leave “literally” out of your vocabulary and make better word choices.

What are you and your colleagues doing to be more concise with your language? I’d love to hear from you.

#businesswriting,#thoughtleadership, #productivity

My last post (The Power of Writing Things Down) generated more comments than usual. Many of you were intrigued by research showing how writing things down by hand improves retention, clarity and commitment and also reduces stress.

There’s also the accountability factor. If we take the time to write down our goals or obligations rather than keep them in our head (or phones) we’re more likely to complete them. Taking it a step further, if we write those goals or obligations on a publicly viewable whiteboard, research shows we are up to 1.4 times more likely to achieve them.

The whiteboard (aka marker board, dry-erase board, dry-wipe board, or pen-board) has long been associated with corporate conference rooms. It’s sometimes maligned as an outdated tool in this digital age – like the fax machine and typewriter. But I’ve found whiteboards to be even more useful than ever in this era of 24/7 distraction.

Everyone uses whiteboards differently

I keep an oversize whiteboard in my office even though I rarely hold team meetings there. I like having a large, non-permanent white canvas to organize my thoughts, ideas and obligations. It’s posted right next to the front door and is always in direct line of my sight. I can’t avoid looking at my whiteboard and it has all of my immediate must-do items as well as my longer-term projects that can’t be completed in one sitting. Unlike apps and project management software, I can’t turn it off or swipe left. Those obligations are always staring at me and can’t be avoided.

I’m not big on to-do lists, task lists and punch lists, because they’re so binary. Either you got it done and checked off the list, or you didn’t. That doesn’t leave room for incremental progress, which is so crucial for knowledge workers like us. When you have a complex presentation due two months from now, or a book chapter due in six weeks, or a new client who wants to sign on next quarter, it can be extremely debilitating to see an empty box left unchecked day after day, month after month. It’s far more inspiring to see that you’ve made incremental progress on those long-term initiatives. If I’m roughly 50% complete, I like to shade in half the box next to the project. If I’m just getting started, I shade in a small amount, rather than leaving it blank. And if almost to the finish line, I shade in most of the box, but not all of it.

I use various colors for certain kinds of projects, but my favorite tactic is using directional arrows. As knowledge workers, so much of our day is spent either waiting for someone to make a decision about something we’ve sent them, or they’re waiting for us to act on something they’ve sent us. It’s kind of like a mental tennis match. So, I use left-facing arrows next to items for which the ball is in my court and I use right facing arrows to designate items for which the ball is in a client’s or colleague’s court. Even on days when nothing gets checked off the list, if I leave my office with more right-facing arrows than left-facing ones, I go home in a good frame of mind. By contrast, most notetaking and to-do list apps are linear. They don’t seem to accommodate the unique, free-form way that humans process thoughts, ideas, and workflow.

But a whiteboard isn’t just for brainstorming or keeping track of tasks. It can save you from cranial overload because it gives you a convenient place to dump all the stuff that clutters up your brain. Your tasks, initiatives and projects are captured in a convenient location where you don’t have to think about them until you are ready to address them. That frees up lots of bandwidth for higher and more productive thinking. Even better, you don’t have to set up an account, a log-in, or download an app to use your whiteboard. And you don’t have to sift through endless paper files or cabinet drawers to find an idea or project outline you tucked away for safekeeping many months ago.

*** Our free resources section has more about this topic.

But here’s the other benefit of a physical, tactile whiteboard. It’s a finite space. When you start to run out of room, you can’t keep adding expansion slots or writing in a smaller font. You have to start prioritizing and deleting.

I probably re-sort the items on my whiteboard three or four times a day. When something has to be erased from the board because it’s not a high enough priority, I find it tremendously liberating not to have to keep thinking about it.

As Winston Churchill liked to say: “Don’t let perfection be the enemy of progress.”

Conclusion

What are you and your colleagues doing to capture tasks and make incremental progress? I’d love to hear from you.

#businesswriting,#thoughtleadership, #productivity

Two thirds of advisors (68%) who responded to our weekly Insta-poll believe this Holiday season has been more stressful than usual from both a business and personal perspective. So, after another difficult and stressful year, don’t beat yourself up for overeating, overspending, over-pouring and oversleeping a little during the Holiday season. Same goes for your clients. You deserve it.

Just know that your ambitious plans to get back into fitness, financial and emotional shape after January 1^st are not likely to stick. Research shows four out of five New Year’s resolutions (81%) will be abandoned by mid-January unless you started test-driving them around Thanksgiving time. The idea is to start making realistic tweaks and adjustments to your resolutions before you post them on your bulletin board and social media accounts for all to see. But in today’s A.D.D. instant gratification society, most people don’t have the patience for that.

Go real with your resolutions

Again, resolutions don’t fail because we lack willpower or discipline; it’s more about bad timing. When we launch resolutions on January 1st, we are making a change based on a calendar date when we think we are prepared to change our lives dramatically. It’s even more difficult to hit the ground running when you’ve gone a month or more without being on our A-Game.

Yet, this mindset has been around for over 4,000 years, ever since the ancient Babylonians used the start of the new calendar year to crown a new king, or to proclaim their loyalty to an existing king. It’s also when they swore to their gods they would pay off debts and promised to return borrowed goods to their neighbor. The penalty for breaking one’s resolutions back then were a lot harsher than they are today. But even then, the “stick rate” wasn’t as a high as you would think.

Harvard Business School professor, Amy Cuddy believes resolutions don’t last because too often we’re setting ourselves up for failure and self-loathing. “We tend to set unreasonable aims for ourselves and then experience negative emotions and a lack of motivation when we don’t reach them,” she observed. “Failing to meet the unreasonable goals we set for ourselves can in turn take a negative toll on our self-worth,” added Cuddy.

Sound familiar?

Researcher and author Richard Wiseman, agrees with Cuddy that we set goals that are too high or too audacious and that we also tend to be too impatient. He believes another big cause of resolution failure is that we tend to sprint out of the gate in search of immediate “returns” rather than taking “baby steps” that will take some time before they move the needle.

If you’ve been a coach potato your entire adult life, don’t resolve to run a marathon within six months. It may work in the movies, but in real life, you’re just setting yourself up for disappointment, injury and an unhealthy relapse. However, if you start with 20 minutes of walking a day with a goal of completing a 5K run in six months, your odds of success go up exponentially. And from there, you can talk about completing a 10K or half-marathon before year end with even more ambitious goals in 2023.

Beating the odds

Trying to get your clients to modify their financial behavior in the new year can be quite challenging, too. But it can be highly rewarding if true changes result, Glenn Freed, Ph. D told me. Freed, chief investment strategist of New York City-based Syntax Advisors told me you’ll further cement your status as a client’s most trusted advisor if you can “frame” your legal, charitable or financial planning discussions around New Year’s resolutions. “You can have discussions in person or through a client newsletter. The key is to use these resolutions as a way to check in with clients throughout the year,” added Freed.

The experts seem to agree on one thing: to make any resolution stick, it has to become an ingrained habit. For example: 

• Resolution: Quit smoking vs. Habit: Stop smoking that one cigarette you have every morning after breakfast.
• Resolution: Eat healthy food vs. Habit: Start substituting that one daily morning pastry for a banana.
• Resolution: Lose weight vs. Habit: Every evening after work, go for a two to three-minute run or walk around the block.
• Resolution: Manage stress vs. Habit: Meditate for two to three minutes every morning after you wake up.
• Resolution: Improve finances vs. Habit: Save an extra 2 percent of each paycheck and put half into my 401(k)s low-cost index fund and the other half into a high-yield savings account at my bank.

By immediately breaking down each resolution and seeing what the smallest habit could be, experts say your chances of succeeding will be 50 percent higher. And if even these incremental habits are hard to stick to, don’t give up. Tweak them so they’re manageable.

Conclusion

High performing advisors help their clients follow up on resolutions not only in December, but throughout the year. Framing the financial planning discussion in this way at the start of the year and then following up consistently can be an effective way to help clients stay on the path to financial resolution success. Make 2022 a great year no matter what COVID, the markets, the economy and geopolitical factors throw at us.

This new year, there’s only one resolution I guarantee you that I’ll keep: It’s to getting better at making resolutions.

Tell me what you think.

#productivity, #resolutions, #accountability

The problem with Coach K’s “Next Play” philosophy

I’ve never been the type to slow down and smell the roses. But after 30+ years of triathlons, marathons, tennis, kayaking, open-water swimming and coaching baseball, the wear and tear on my body finally caught up. Step 1: Shoulder surgery to repair a torn rotator, labrum and biceps tendon.

The physical therapy is going pretty well, but wearing a bulky sling 24/7, especially while sleeping, is pretty uncomfortable. Worse, it’s a constant reminder that I’m sitting on the sidelines, not in the game. Not only is there a big hole in my calendar, but with no scheduled workouts or competitions to prep for, goal setting has to be reconfigured—big time—and I have to find a new outlet for all the extra energy.

At first it took four times as long to shower, shave, get dressed and eat, let alone type a simple email or blog post. I’ve gotten that down to 3x normal and am shooting for 2x normal within next two weeks. Range of motion and the number of reps improves with each physical therapy session, so I jot that incremental progress down in my training log. At least it fills in the blanks where workouts and race results normally go and fools my brain into thinking I’m still training.

More on fooling your brain in a minute.

My wife’s been incredibly patient during this time. She’s always better at handling adversity than I am, and she’s certainly not doting on me. Her philosophy is basically: Suck it up, take your meds, do your PT and get on with your life. “At times like these, you can’t worry about what you can’t do. Just be thankful for what you can do,” she reminds me before going out for a run or hitting the tennis court.

Most of you on this distribution list are competitive Type A achievers. When life forces you to slow down, it can be a shock to the system. It makes you realize the lengths we go to every day to try to squeeze in one more assignment, one more Zoom call, one more client meeting or one more hour of work into an already overstuffed schedule.

I can’t tell you how many of you highly compensated professionals complain to me about “time famine” more than any other work issue. Being overscheduled may make you feel productive and valuable, but does it make you happy?

The problem with Coach K’s “Next Play” philosophy|

Legendary Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski, is a highly sought-after motivational speaker and business advisor. If you’ve ever watched a Duke game, you’ll hear him shouting “Next Play!” to his players throughout the game.

By that Coach K means you can’t spend your time dwelling on mistakes that you or a teammate just made. You have to shake them off and be 100% focused for the next play as your opponent brings the ball up the court.

“Next Play!” is a popular rallying cry in the business, sports and military worlds. I should know. I drank the (Gatorade-flavored) Kool-Aid for most of my adult life. But in the inevitable chase for NEXT PLAY, do we forget to celebrate our successes? Worse, do we forget to notice how much we’ve improved from earlier in the season? It’s hard to measure progress when you’re constantly obsessed about looking ahead.

Next time you read an obituary or visit a cemetery, tell me how many times you see the dearly departed eulogized as follows: “A wonderful and caring husband and father, who was always in the top 2% for billable hours”? Or “A generous and caring soul who always checked every item off his to-do list” or “A loving wife and grandmother who always answered every email in her inbox”? That’s right, never!

I don’t think I’ll ever adapt to a sedentary lifestyle, but I notice my concentration’s been a little sharper since the surgery since I’m no longer shoehorning workouts, meetings and competitions into an already packed work and family schedule.

In many ways the surgery has forced me to forget about multitasking since it’s so much more challenging to complete even the simplest tasks of daily life. And for those of you still slaves to the billable hour business model I encourage you to read our client Kyle Walters’ recent columns in Accounting Today: The 64/4 Rule and Can You Earn $10K Per Hour? I also recommend Robb Zbierski’s book: Master Your Mind, which will teach you how to slow down your runaway brain, so you can accomplish a lot more in less time.

Conclusion

The big takeaway from Walters and Zbierski: It’s not about how many hours you put in; it’s about what you put into those hours.

What’s your take? I’d like to hear from you.

#productivity, #resilience, #CoachK, #timefamine

There’s no magic formula or pill to take, but these (mostly) old-school techniques still work

As the famous line from Alice in Wonderland goes: “If you don’t know where you are going, any road will take you there.”

Not to be your high school English teacher, but trying to write something without an outline is like trying to build a house without blueprints. You might be able to throw up a wall or two, but sooner or later you’ll get painted into a corner or the whole structure will come tumbling down on itself. That only leads to wasted time, money and frustration.

Outlines for real-world business people

With all due respect to my superb high school English teach Mr. Hallowell (see Stop Clearing Your Throat When You Write) I hated the academic outline protocol: Roman numeral I., subtheme A. and supporting point 1. That doesn’t work for many people who aren’t in academia and I won’t subject you to it. Instead think about how you’re going to “sell” your content to your target audience. I know you know how to sell!

1. Identifying the problem. Start out be clearly stating the problem you’re trying to solve for the reader. Even better, assure them they’re not the only one facing this problem. Sharing stats from a reliable source, quotes from a recent article/broadcast clip or a client example are great ways to draw readers in and convince them why they need to read your words right now! 
2. Explain what happens to the reader if they continue to ignore the problem. Life gets worse, they lose money, the leave big opportunities on the table, they have a less than satisfying life. Maybe explain why skeptics don’t want you to address this problem. You get the picture.
3. Briefly explain the solution, i.e. “there’s got to be a better way.” 
4. Show the reader how much better their life will be by following you the solution. Include compelling stats or anonymous examples of clients who followed the advice and are much happier for it.

VERY IMPORTANT! Don’t give away the whole solution here. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing a short post or a feature-length book. Just give them a taste….not the whole meal. Show readers you know what you’re talking about, but if they want the full solution, they must book a discovery meeting with you to learn more. Make sure your Contact Me link is working on all of your digital points of presence and make sure it’s not too salesy.

5. Conclusion. Summarize the argument you just made and inviting them to contact you for a more detailed conversation about the topic. Share links to related resources on your website if possible.

Your finished outline should look something like this:
1. Intro: Identify the problem
2. Find common ground. Show readers they are not alone with this problem.
3. Explain dangers of ignoring the problem.
4. Introduce the solution.
5. Show reader how much better life is with solution in place.
6. Conclusion (with calls to action).

Outline complete: Now sell the Content
Now that you’ve completed the outline, don’t start fleshing out your piece yet. First think about how you’re going to sell it. You need to think about your headline (or book title) and Key Takeaways.

Headline
Start noodling around with some catchy headlines to hook in your busy readers. I’m not suggesting you engage in click bait or search engine optimization. Just ask yourself what will make a super-busy person you’re targeting take time out of their busy day to read what you have to say.

TIP: See what the headlines you’re considering look like in the subject line of an email. Do a few test-emails to yourself or better yet, send to unsuspecting colleagues and see which one gets the most (or quickest) reaction.

Key Takeaways
What are the three key things that you’d like the reader to take away from your article, post, white paper or e-book? Many of you follow our Key Takeaways protocol at the top of your writing. Trust me, in this attention-starved mobile age, there’s no better way to make your content skim-able and worth reading (and saving).

Now that you’ve got the outline and sales pitch for your content, you’re almost ready to start fleshing it out. But first, think about how this content will fit into your overall content schedule for the weeks and months ahead. Will it be duplicative or overkill? Should it be standalone or part of a series? Should it be the intro 101 version of your expertise, or is it more of your “advanced course”?

Map out your content schedule

Just as we never recommend writing anything without an outline, we don’t recommend writing anything in a vacuum, i.e. without thinking about how it fits into your overall content cycle. Think of yourself as sharing a body of work—not a series of random one-off takes about a subject. We recommend laying out your planned topics 12 to 24 weeks in advance. You don’t have to stick to the schedule as real-world conditions make certain topics more urgent than others. But following these tips will ensure you have solid “blueprints” in place and you’ll never be up late at night staring at a blank screen wondering: “What should do I have to write about next?”

Even better, once you have your content calendar laid out in advance, it’s amazing how many nuggets of great information you’ll start accumulating weeks, if not months, before you have to write your piece. It’s like having a “rainy day fund” for your content ideas.

Conclusion

You wouldn’t have clients invest their money without a plan. You wouldn’t hire an architect to build your dream house if he or she didn’t use blue prints. So, why would you start pushing out content to your universe of followers without a plan? Familiarize yourself with the 1-7-30-4-2-1 principle. My post The Power of Content Calendars has more.

#betterwriting, #outline, #writersblock, #productivity