Friday RoundUp #1 - Useful Articles, Books, and Apps
In this week's email announcement, I mentioned that I'd be doing weekly roundups as one of this month's experiments because I wanted to share other people's work and helpful stuff. As with most of my monthly experiments, I'm just going to start and fix the plane while flying it - let's see where this goes.
Articles
The end of Jon Stewart's Daily Show is the end of an era. Aside from just being funny, Jon Stewart has been a great example of someone effectively leveraging his platform. Sure, he's Jon Stewart, but 6 Times Something Jon Stewart Said or Did Actually Made a Difference is a magnified example of what happens when people really use the mic they have. (And we all own a mic.)
How do you habitually get people to be with or against you? Michael Bungay-Stanier's 3 Habits to Have Your People With You Not Against You discusses three of habits under the lens of their TERA (Tribes-Expectations-Rank-Authority) influence factors. The habits: 1) check in with your fellow humans, 2) Embrace the power of touch, and 3) Manage your orientation. #3 is overlooked all the time.
While the "writing is really hard frame" didn't resonate with me - perhaps because I don't have ADHD - Ryan McRae's The ADHD Guide to Writing has some tips worth practicing. I especially like #7 (Celebration) and #3 (Small Goals. Small Steps. Big Results), which has the same premise as the 300 Words Trick for beating procrastination on a writing project.
Tom Peters, on leadership: I'd like to ban words like "charismatic" and "vision." And further on: "Excellence is about what you do in the next FIVE minutes. Or not." I do love some Tom. Brett Steenberger's The Foresight of Leadership Without Vision expands on Tom's riff.
A longer quote from How to separate learning myths from reality: "Everybody knows, all too well, about the habit of quickly checking e-mails or planning for the next meeting in the middle of a training session. The problem is that such multitasking engages large parts of the brain’s working memory. Without freeing that up, we cannot successfully memorize and learn new information. In short, multitasking and learning cannot occur effectively at the same time." Much to think about with that one, especially when we consider that the next generation of workers are multitasking by default. In the meantime, it may be worth putting your smartphone away when you're trying to learn something.
Great conversations sometimes end awkwardly. Vanessa gives some tips for minimizing the awkwardness in How to Make A Graceful Exit. Grab a few lines from 7 for your toolkit. And I'll be watching for your toes next time. :)
For those of you who use Wordpress: I was working on this site's tag sprawl and was considering how I wanted to fix it. Many Wordpress users get categories and tags all sorts of mixed up or don't use tags at all. Tom Ewer's Wordpress Tags: Everything You Need to Know is a great read on this. Two things to remember about categories and tags: 1) less is more and 2) just because you can, doesn't mean you should.
I hesitate to share writing apps with you because it's such a handy excuse to keep us all from writing. That said, Zapier's Unsung Apps That Help You Write Better, Organize Work and Track Progress introduced me to Gingko (a cross-platform alternative to Scrivener?) and LittleLogs (to share progress on your project). I'm excited about both of those. (These should probably go into apps, but they came from a link that explains them well.
Books
I did my first pass of Ryan McGee's S.U.M.O. (Shut Up, Move On): The Straight-Talking Guide to Succeeding in Life. It's an interesting read that focuses on our personal responsibility to shift from what happened to what we'll do about it. It's not as harsh as it sounds.
The audiobook version of Amanda Palmer's The Art of Asking has rocked my world for the last few weeks. If you've read it, it deserves a listen. And if you haven't read or listened, go get it now. It's on my must-listen list.
App of the Week
AirTable is a cloud-based, build-on-the-fly database app that I'm giving a shot as a replacement for the horde of Google-Spreadsheets-that-Are-Gimp-Databases that have accrued over the years. Most people - myself included - are using spreadsheets to keep data that should be kept in databases, but databases are hard to build and maintain for all but the most geeky of us who are willing for it to be a hobby. I'm not to the point of recommending it yet, but it could be a killer app. I'll build a few databases for myself and clients and let you know how it's going.
Over to you!
What articles, books, or apps have you found this week? Sharing means caring. :)