Work Less and Do More

I wrote an article today on my main blog about Hillary’s speech last night and whether we know the reasons for our own success. (And by the way, I’m not commenting on whether I think Hillary understands her own success. I don’t know enough about her life to say one way or the other. I’m commenting on the issue in general.)

Someone—not me—is coming out with a book called “Work Less, Do More” in just a few weeks. Rats rats rats rats rats. I so loved that title. Any suggestions? I’m at a loss. Grumble. Grumble. Grumble.

The way I’m thinking about it, the book is me writing to my 5-year-old nephew, giving him lots of tips about life. (Though it’s being written for adults.) Roughly speaking, the book flow is:

• A discussion of productivity and why we should focus on happiness and success, not just productivity.
• The idea that to master happiness and success, we must develop skills about ourselves, people, organizations, and a few other areas.
• Then each major section of the book is a collection of tips for dealing with those areas. One area will be lots of tips about managing relationships and people. Another wil be about dealing with organizations. etc.

Most chapters will be very brief, 2-3 pages. This is very much a book of tips that will improve your life in ways to increase your happiness and your success. And occasionally…help you get organized. Like my podcast, however, many of the tips will cover how to deal with people, effectively lead organizations, say “No” to your kids, stuff like that…

I’m stumped. We’ve had 500 visitors to YouAreNotYourInbox.com, from a variety of sources, and under 1% purchase from people who find the product via that page.

This is what we call a “learning opportunity.”

If you have visited and decided not to buy, would you be willing to share your reasons? (If you would like to share them privately, mention that in your comment and when I moderate, I won’t make the comment public.)

Thank you!

I’m collecting the final list of tips for the book. I’m noticing there are two categories of tips and am not sure they would work together in a book. Here are samples:

Will these work in the same book? Would someone looking for “happiness and success” tips be that interested in the “file folders” category? And vice versa…

Conventional wisdom has it that you should sandwich negative feedback between two pieces of positive feedback. You can read about “the hamburger method” here.

Shelle Rose Charvet points out that most people already know the method. Now, when they hear positive feedback, they simply bypass it and wait fo the shoe to drop (then they ignore the final piece of positive feedback, which is obviously just there to soften the negative feedback). She advocates giving feedback in a way that avoids direct negative statements yet still accomplishes the goal, to stimulate behavior change. You can read Shelle Rose Charvet’s “The Feedback Sandwich is Out to Lunch.”

What do you think? If I were to include a “giving feedback” method in the Get-it-Done Guy book, which do you think would be best to include?

I just put the finishing touches on an audio product called You Are Not Your Inbox: Overcoming Email Overload. It is a 3-CD set plus web page with relevant links and resources.

I’ve never marketed an information product before. Any and all ideas you might have that could help would be greatly appreciated! The price point ($47) is such that it makes no sense to hire a firm to do the marketing; I’d have to sell hundreds of units just to pay for the firm.

Here are some thoughts I’ve had so far:

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I’m overloaded! Yes, it happens to me, too

The problem happens when I take on a new project, here’s a delay in the project (e.g. I’m waiting for someone to get me a document), and during that delay, I start something new. Once the delay is over, I now have two projects on my plate that together take up more time than I have.

So I’m in the midst of re-examining how I use my time and space. When you are examining your own life, how do you decide what to drop and what to keep? If everything on your plate is related to one of your goals, how do you choose which stays and which goes?

Do you have some priorities that are constant (”Family always comes first”)? Do your priorities change? Why and how?

I’ve noticed that each year, I choose new constant priorities. For example, this year health is a huge theme. My workouts and health commitments have consciously dominated everything. But other priorities change according to my projects.

Insights appreciated!

Thank you to everyone who came to my Podcamp 3 presentation on how to make your message compelling! Here is the handout from the presentation. Enjoy!

Link: make-your-message-compelling-handouts-v1

Quick question… In my podcast, I use a lot of humor. The humor is almost always tangential to the actual point. After all, how funny are file folders? Not very. But file folders being used as emergency underwear? Er, hilarious.

Work Less and Do More is shaping up to be a book of a great many chapters or sections, each of which has a concrete tip. As I write, I’m having doubts about the humor-to-content ratio. In the podcast, about half the content is humor and attitude, and half is content. In a book, this seems too high on the humor for me.

Do people want more humor or more time spent on the content? Content seems pretty dry to me, but then, humor can feel overbearing if it’s hundreds of pages.

What do you think? You’re (hopefully) going to be my readers. Your thoughts appreciated!

Tim Sanders wrote a blog entry that references a Business Week article on information overload I commented on last week. The writer suggests that information overload might be good. There might be some valuable information, and besides, young people can handle it just fine.

Sure. In what universe?

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