How to Pass Down Time At Work
Having very little to do at work might seem like some employees dream, but for those of us with a little thing called Work Ethic, it’s hard to just sit around and surf the web aimlessly on company time. So here’s some things to do that aren’t so much like goofing off.
- Filing: If you’re anything like me, you have a big basket on your desk of completed forms or papers that need to be filed. If you’re experiencing an awkwardly slow day (like I am), now is the time to kill an hour by sorting and filing all those papers overflowing from your done box.
- Spring Cleaning: Pay no attention that Spring is long gone. Most people don’t keep their work area spit spot, so take the slow time as an opportunity to introduce some much needed organization into your workspace. Wipe off counters and shelves, throw away that tootsie roll you’ve been staring at since June, and make your area presentable.
- Catch Up: It seems that everyone has some low priority project or task at work that they keep in a drawer for a day like this. Knock those little menial projects out of the way now that you don’t have something more important to focus on.
- Office Gardening: If you have plants in your office, take the time to groom them. All plants need their dead branches, buds, or leaves trimmed periodically. Grab your sheers (I’m the only person who keeps garden sheers in her desk? Okay fine, your scissors then) and trim the bad spots off your lovely plant. Throw some fertilizer in there or change those spikes. Your plant will love you for it.
- Refills: Have enough paper clips? Is there a full row of staples in that stapler? Now is the time to raid the supply cabinet and make sure you’re stocked up on all the supplies you need to function smoothly. That way you’re not stopping in the middle of a huge project later on to grab another pad of paper or a pen that works.
- Read Blogs: There’s probably some blogs out there that pertain to your industry, so now is the chance to seek them out and read them. You’ll gain some good insight and it’s not really procrastinating since you don’t have much else to do. In fact, you might just read something that inspires a project idea and then you don’t have this boredom problem anymore!
- Blog: Heh… it’s obvious I’m really slow right now, isn’t it? Craft a really good blog with some good content. Or, if you have writer’s block, seek out tools that can assist your blog in getting noticed. BlogRush seems to be a good one that I just added here yesterday and I can already see some traffic. If nothing else it’s a nifty little widget to throw on your blog.
So get out there and make yourself useful!
Read MoreTop 10 Things That Improve Work Ethic
10. Have a ridiculously comfortable desk chair: The nicer your chair is, the longer you can stand to sit in it before your desk without having to get up because you’re antsy. And of course if you’re antsy and walking around the office with a general aimlessness, you’re not working.
9. Make a To-Do List: Lists are great because the simple act of making the list gives you something to do in those moments of lost energy when you don’t actually want to be working. By making a list you’ll find yourself doing something remotely work related, and you may simply motivate yourself by looking at the sheer length of a list of things you have to get accomplished! (The Tasks feature in Microsoft Outlook works great for this.)
8. Be Better Than Someone: You don’t have a lot of control over this, so pick your target wisely. Nothing makes people feel better about themselves than feeling like they’re better than someone else. Choose your target- it could be a parent, sibling, friend, or even a lackluster coworker. The smug sense of satisfaction you get from besting this person will be enough to keep you driven every day to never lose your edge.
7. Set up Google Reader or Technorati: You can tell yourself that you’re just taking time out of your busy day to keep up to date with the latest industry news, but what you’re really doing is reading a few industry blogs intertwined with Popsugar or Best Week Ever. If having your own personal interest blogs mixed in with the industry ones make it easier to remember to read blogs, do it. You may not be enriching your working knowledge as much as you’d like to think, but the industry stuff will stick and you’ll be able to bust out interesting relevant factoids in meetings and the latest celebrity gossip at the water cooler.
6. Piss off your Friends and Family: This is a surefire way to free up your time for more work at the office. If everyone you know outside of work is mad at you, that removes the temptation (or option?) to go out after work for drinks or spend your weekends poolside with the family. Who needs weekends anyway? Just lost opportunities for more work!
5. Supplies: Make sure you have the supplies you need to do your job. If you’re running out of staples, get some. If a certain program would increase your productivity 10%, ask for it and make your case. It’s much easier to do the job when you have everything necessary. Once you get into the niche where there’s not much else for you to ask for you’ll be able to apply all these tools to hone your skills and do a better job. You have to prove to the company that you’re worth investing in.
4. Money: Of course, that’s what we’re all in this game for, right? Get the jobs that get you the khakis that get you the chicks. I believe it’s probably a fact that your work ethic and dedication to the company goes up exponentially as your salary goes up. Don’t be afraid to ask for a raise every year if you’ve seriously been rockin’ at work. Be sure to do something that makes the bigwigs take note and want to give you more money and you’ll find it’s much easier to get out of bed in the morning!
3. Befriend your Coworkers: If you have a vested interest in the people around you, inherently that comes with a vested interest in how work goes for them. A job well done on your friendly coworkers’ part will often help make your job easier, and vice versa. As long as you have a mutual respect for what your coworkers are trying to accomplish and how that fits in with your goal, you will be more willing to go the extra mile on your end. Eventually your coworkers will reciprocate by making something easier for you and it will become a productive cycle.
2. OCD: OCD, or Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder, really helps in those tedious projects that just need doing. Spend hours late into the night working at something as boring as updating a database for formatting for the simple reason that everything HAS to be right. Not only with this give you a false motivation to get a project done, but your supervisors will gladly take advantage of this affliction of yours and praise the results!
1. Care: It’s as simple, really, as caring about doing a good job. Have some pride in what it is you produce or how it is you help the company overall to succeed. If you genuinely care about doing your job well, that’s really all you’ll need to motivate yourself and have a great work ethic.
Read MoreYet Another Blog Experiment
I’ve signed up with BlogRush to try to drive some traffic over here. I read about it on MarketingPilgrim.com, Andy Beal’s blog. He doesn’t seem all that impressed with it, but I’m going to give it a go for myself. As long as it’s free, why not?
So check out my BlogShelf (over on the right down there) and take a look.
Read MoreOne Fish, Two Fish…
Brickfish! This is a nifty little website that Anne stumbled upon. They describe it better than I can, so here’s their spiel:
- Create content for your favorite brands and bands.
- Win exciting rewards for reviewing, voting and sharing content across the web.
- Earn rewards like the chance to meet your favorite bands, clothes, scholarships and even cold, hard cash.
The best incentive to participate in viral marketing I’ve seen in some time. We’re kicking around a campaign to launch on Brickfish, and it might be ready as early as Monday! Stay tuned for more details next week!
In other news to wrap up the week, I’ve booked my flight to John Wayne Airport in Orange County for the California Associations of Realtor’s Expo next month. I’ll miss the first day of the show, but will be there staffing our booth October 10th and 11th. I figure while I’m down there I’ll see some friends in the area and enjoy a slight change of pace from Nor Cal life. The day before the show I’ll be staffing our online booth at eComXpo from the comforts of my office here in Oakland. So two shows in three days… that should be an interesting week to say the least!
Trade shows seem to be going well, customer acquisition is doing okay but could be better, and the affiliate program is pretty stagnant. We had a two and a half hour metrics meeting this morning, only half of which focused on the affiliate program, which I felt like a moron during. I guess I’ve been more focused on the quantity of affiliates than the quality, so that ends now.
We want to help our affiliates to be better affiliates. We’re also considering some BIG changes to the structure of payments, but I’m not at liberty to announce them yet. We’re going to start looking more at our affiliates individually and see what they’re doing and what is working. Hopefully this helps everyone. Me, because I won’t look like a goober when asked questions and I’ll have the answers, the affiliate, because they’ll be making money, and the other affiliates, because they can learn from the big money makers.
That makes sense, right?
Read MoreOMG!!! The sky is falling
After working on our bug fix list for a couple months now, the veep and I are finally having a meeting tomorrow to go over the list, prioritize anything that’s still pending, and then present it to the CTO.
How does PsPrint’s assistant marketing manager get put in charge of tracking all the IT problems reported to our tech department? Well, I don’t really know. But I was handed the task nonetheless. My guess it’s because of how disgustingly organized I am. So I have this handy dandy Excel log I update whenever anyone CC’s me on a support item, and I update it when I see the item’s been taken care of. It’s no big deal… takes just a few seconds out of my day a couple days a week. Although, it does make me curious about how other companies track things like this.
My last company was no source for comparison, really. With a staff of 8 people, 1 guy was in charge of all things technical. He maintained our database, he fixed things when they broke (except that one time we wanted to go all Office Space on our dying printer once the boss approved getting a new one). But with a stagnant concept of a company that wasn’t doing much to grow and was run by a glorified con-man, there wasn’t much for IT to work on to improve. So of course he had nothing but time to fix all our inane little networking and Windows Update issues.
Luckily these are all internal requests we have here… this person’s computer is acting weird, this gift code isn’t working, add such and such an email account to x distribution list. It’s not a whole lot of issues that affect our customers too badly. Even if a gift code doesn’t work, we can always apply the discount in the form of a refund. Our IT department focuses most of their energy on making the site better for customers… which leaves most the company to kind of fend for ourselves in terms of updating our computers and regular maintenance things like that. This is where it really is beneficial that we’re an online-based company. 99% of our employees that use computers for work are very computer savvy and self sufficient. I’d wager that about 80% of the office has a personal MySpace page.
Although I hate to admit it, we do get random glitches to our website. What big company doesn’t, right? But that’s part of growing and expanding as a company and business. We introduce new features or new partnerships with other companies and things don’t always work right off the bat. How many Xbox 360’s overheated and broke within a month after the first generation was released? C’mon, these things are rarely perfect from creation forward.
But that’s what makes PsPrint so exciting for me. We’re always changing, morphing, adding. Working on new partnerships with bigger and better companies. First NAR, tomorrow the world!
Read MoreThe Body is Willing, But the Mind is Weak
No, I didn’t get the saying wrong. That’s how I feel today. I’ve got a ton of energy physically speaking… got a great night’s sleep last night. But after even a short week of overloading my brain with end of month reporting, more reporting, affiliate network shopping, and more late nights at the office, my brain has decided to stage a sit in.
Actually, before about 11:30am this morning the brain was active too. However after sitting in various conference calls from then until about 2:15pm, my brain revolted from overload. First we heard all about LinkShare and their merchant platform. Then all about Widemile’s optimization services. Then talked to a couple cats at Clickbooth since we haven’t ventured into CPA marketing here at PsPrint yet.
Is it a bad thing that during our conference call I surfed over to MarketingTerms.com and had to look up CPA? I was pretty embarrassed with Anne sitting behind me… although I guess she actually didn’t notice until I mentioned it after the meeting. Oh well.
The last week I’ve been making sure our mailing services don’t break, which is nice for a change. At the end of August the mailing went crazy… it seemed like while I was on vacation everyone and their mother decided to place a mailing order. Which is great… but left me a lot of work to catch up on. We’ve been really focused on the affiliate program and it’s future. Which is great too. We’re looking at new features, better affiliate acquisition, possibly a new network, new creative, new campaigns… heck new everything. It’s an exciting time for me, especially since Anne confirmed that we’ll be attending Affiliate Summit 2008 West in Las Vegas in February. That means between my personal vacation, the National Association of Realtors show in November, and AS West I’ll be heading to Sin City three times in 6 months. Not too shabby for this California girl.
I’m also semi-addicted to del.icio.us now. Last night I imported all my bookmarks from home into it so now I can access them anywhere… and that’s half the point, right? It’s really actually pretty interesting to see how many other people have some of my favorite places bookmarked. I’m also surprised in some cases how few people have some websites bookmarked. For example, the View Askew Productions Message Board has over 10,000 registered members. But only 2 other people on del.icio.us have it bookmarked…one of which I even recognize (and promptly added to my network).
Time for my Friday ritual of trying to see the wood grain of my desk. Wish me luck.
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