Hey all,
Hope you've had a great week! Here's a few things I've been reading and pondering lately. Enjoy and if you're feeling inspired, pass it on.
1. Good Work Habits Are the Key to Less Stress
Here's a short article I wrote on easy ways to reduce stress at work. Busyness is the default, but it doesn't have to be.
Technology is stressing you out. But don't worry, it's not just you. The tools we use at work are engineered to keep us engaged. Our phones keep work just a few feet away 24 hours a day. All of us are susceptible to the tractor beam that is the modern workplace.
As a result, most of us are extremely inefficient workers.
2. What Does the Future of Content Marketing Look Like?
A great article from HubSpot's Janessa Lantz on how content strategy will be forced to change to meet readers' needs. Lots of excellent insight here.
I anticipate the most successful content marketers of the future will look a lot more like product managers.
Product managers spend their time figuring out the highest-impact feature to build. They use data to understand the impact of a feature. They project manage. They coordinate a variety of roles to get the job done. They understand how the product, and the exact feature they are building, fits into the competitive landscape.
Product managers are highly skilled at prioritization, they have to be — engineering time is too valuable to risk spending it on low-impact work. Content marketers will also build muscle in these areas, we have to — attention is too scarce to risk it on low-impact content.
3. Management in 10 Tweets
Simple, actionable advice on running a team from Marc Hedlund.
4. Scary vs. Dangerous
Jim Koch left his comfortable consulting job to start a craft brewery long before it was the thing to do. The founder of Sam Adams explained on NPR's How I Built This that staying in that job was too risky:
There are plenty of things that are scary, but not dangerous. And there are things that dangerous, but not scary—those are the things that get you.
5. The Powder Philosophy
98-year-old skier George Jedenoff has some thoughts on skiing and life that we can all learn from. If you ski, you'll appreciate this immediately. And if you don't, it's not to late to learn. (Learning to ski is one of the best and most fun things I've done in my adult life. In fact, I'm heading to Vail next week to spend the winter on the slopes. There's just nothing like it.)
Life is so complicated, there's so many problems, and we tend to dwell on those problems. This is an opportunity to reflect on the wonderful things you can do.
6. Random Links
- Instapaper Premium is now free for everyone
- Guy dresses up as dog's favorite toy, dog experiences joy few of us will ever know
- "Dollars for donuts, Dunkin' is a more profitable company than Google, LinkedIn, eBay or even Facebook." — CircleUp on Why Early-Stage Consumer Entrepreneurs Are Having More Success Fundraising
- The Science of Trust in the Workplace
- Visualizing a day in the life of Americans
- Great advice on mastering the basics
- Clearbit's Playbook for Growth in the API Economy
- Here's a very nifty retention curve calculator
- Stop Measuring Everything! - A great post from Wistia CEO Chris Savage on some of the problems with data-driven marketing.
Have a great week!
Jimmy