Archive for the Personal Category
Posted on January 17, 2012 by Eric
I started my career working the corporate 9-5 drag. It was all I knew so I wasn’t really bummed out by it.
I had been taught that it was important to work hard at what you do. Be the best you can be in any position that you’re in, and to be respectful and ‘professional’.
Respect is one thing.
But what I’ve learned over the years is that being professional isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
It’s kinda like being a politician at work. Constantly trying to sell yourself as this person who is trust worthy and reliable.
Who wants to be limited to those two words? Sounds pretty boring to me.
Sure, trust worthiness and reliability are great things, and I’m not telling anyone to back out of things they’ve promised they would do.
But why not let your personality come out in your work?
Take a chance.
Be the same reliable worker that your boss expects. Respect your boss, but if he’s done something that you think is wrong then tell him.
Don’t turn every one of your work emails into some boring professional mess. Add some flare. Add your personality. Tell a joke. Anything!
Just don’t be dull.
At the same time deliver.
At the end of the day if you deliver on your promises, do great work, are timely and respectful of everyone (not just your boss) then you’ll get noticed.
Even if you’re not as ‘professional’ as the guy who writes all of his emails in corporate speak.
People will be drawn to you. You will succeed. And you won’t have to be worrying so much about what political correctness.
Ways you can be less professional and still get respect:
- Wear more colour and push your wardrobe just past your comfort level.
- Send emails that are more conversational. Write a bit more like you would speak to someone.
- Send links to your coworkers with great information but comment on them using your personality.
- Decorate your office or cubicle with some ‘eccentric’ items that display who you are.
- Add a nickname to your email signature (Eric “the hammer” Sloan).
- Get over yourself – I think this is the most important one… don’t take yourself so seriously!
Open up a bit and everyone you deal with will thank me.
Have an opinion? Let it out in the comments below.
Posted on December 30, 2011 by Eric
A bad morning can completely mess up your entire day. Every time I get a slow start in the morning my day ends up finishing around the 10pm mark instead of a more reasonable 4-6pm.
There’s lots of talks about 30 day “tests” to build habits in your life so I won’t get into it here (click here for an article if you haven’t heard about it).
So for the next 30 days I’m going to be trying out a new morning routine. It involves a few steps that I often neglect in my day and I think I will have more productive days and be a healthier person as a result.
Creating a new routine
My first new morning routine will be to eat/drink before I do ANYTHING else.
Sometimes I don’t eat or even have a coffee until 2 in the afternoon. I just plain forget. I get in “work mode” as soon as I wake up and everything else takes a back seat.
This has to change. It’s unhealthy and I’m sure that I’m getting a harder afternoon crash as a result.
So after a coffee, some almonds and yoghurt and a huge glass of water the next thing I want to do is be outside for 5 minutes.
Before my computer even comes on.
Why? Well hell, why not? I’m lucky enough to have a gorgeous deck looking out over a gorgeous city but instead of appreciating it I usually hit my RSS reader and my emails before anything else.
No more. 5 minutes of fresh air will wake me up, give me more perspective and not rush my morning so much… Awesome. I can even combine the first step with the second so this is perfect.
Next up is to do business development for 30 minutes before I even read my morning emails.
This is important to me. I try to get 30 minutes of biz dev into my day every day, but sometimes it gets pushed to the end of the day when I’m out of energy and enthusiasm.
By pushing this task to the beginning of the day (even before I check email GASP) I’ll make sure it gets done, and by the end of 2012 my business will be miles ahead of where it is today.
That’s it! I think that these small changes will make a huge impact on my day to day efficiency.
I’ll push hard to not miss a day this entire month and by then it should be a habit.
Do you have a morning routine? Let me know in the comments below.
Posted on May 10, 2010 by Eric
Back towards the end of December 2009 I wrote an article on how to get paid by google.
Basically, it was an article about how to quickly get the extra cash out of your Google Adsense account and I wanted to give an update on how everything went.
I ended up not putting in as much effort as I would have liked, but I built out one of my domains to the point of getting no. 1 in Yahoo for a specific keyword.
This keyword doesn’t bring in a ton of traffic, but it does net the site somewhere around 20 bucks per month through adsense revenue now.
The site that I used was not this one, nor have I made any significant adsense revenue from this site.
What was my goal?
The original goal was to hit the 100 mark (I was about 40 bucks short) by the end of January 2010. That gave me 44 days and it ended up being a bit too ambitious for how much effort I was willing to put in.
How did I do?
Well, at the end of January 2010 I had somewhere around $79 in my account.
At the end of February I almost hit the mark at around 96 bucks, and in March I finally hit the mark in adsense revenue giving me my first Google cheque!
How much work was it?
Well, to be honest it was a breeze. I grabbed a 6 pack of beer and dumped a ton of content onto the website in about 4 hours and that was it. In about 2 weeks I had ranked for some keywords and started getting the traffic.
I used wordpress to post the articles over a period of time. So in other words the site posts a new article every day without me having to do anything! In fact, from those 4 hours of work I STILL have articles being posted once a day on that site.
I think that the revenue will continue to grow slowly. This site will definitely not be a money maker, but it’s good enough to bring in around 240 bucks a year… and that’s like 12 cases of beer that I can drink to make 12 more sites!
Posted on May 5, 2010 by Eric
Drink up my friends!
Grab a beer or a margarita and toast Cinco De Mayo!
I don’t want to write a long post because I have to go drink beer, but check out more info here.
Be safe, and party hard!
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