Top 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 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.
Read MoreAvoiding Former CoWorkers in San Jose
Sometimes it’s pleasant to see an old coworker… other times, it’s best to avoid them. Which is what I did at Search Engine Strategies last week in San Jose. I’m not necessarily proud of what I did, but I successfully avoided what could have been a rather awkward situation, so it worked out for the best.
I spent the majority of the day in the Social Media track of the conference, learning more about the inner workings of Digg, Technorati, Del.icio.us, and Wikipedia than I ever thought I wanted to know. Of course, one of the first things I did when getting back to the office was apply some of this and set up a Digg profile and a Technorati profile and an account on Del.icio.us. Since PsPrint doesn’t sell it’s content, I don’t really see Wikipedia as being that huge of an opportunity for us. But the others… well I’m shocked I wasn’t on them personally for awhile.
Now, my roots in social media lie in the likes of MySpace, message boards, and chat rooms. I’m not the seasoned internet user you’ll hear speaking at trade shows that’s been online since 1997… but that’s mostly because back in ’97 I was still writing history essays and doing math homework in High School. I’ve been online since about the time I got to college, Fall of 1999. Going away to college and having to make all new friends, I immediately found chat rooms as a place to connect with like minded people. A friend introduced me to Live Journal back in ’03 and I’ve been blogging ever since. When MySpace came around big time in ’05 I jumped on that bandwagon and haven’t looked back.
Has it really been 2 years on MySpace? How time flies. But, I digress. SES was a great show for me to attend. Very informative, and my favorite part was how organized all the panelists were. Everyone had a neat & tidy Power Point presentation that will be available online this week, so I barely had to take any notes. I’ve also decided that the next time I go to one of these shows and attend the educational panels I’m going to be bringing a laptop. Since there was really no need for me to take many notes, it would have been great to be able to surf the websites that the panelists talked about while they were talking about them. I’m all about multi-tasking, so getting some work done while learning is my ideal.
This is becoming an exciting time for me. Learning more and more about the field I’m working in and exploring social media marketing is really exciting me to be moving onward here at PsPrint.
Read MoreTurning Gray at 26?
While brushing my hair this morning I found not one but three gray hairs. It’s hard to tell the color of a single hair, it almost looked blond… but considering that my hair is naturally a dark brown, I sorta doubt they were blond.
Has the stress gotten to me already? My coworkers have joked that I’m no longer allowed to take Vacations because the rely on my being here so much (although this is something they joke about every time I take some time off for any reason…) And since returning from Sin City, the work load on my desk has been seemingly endless. I’ve been here two and a half extra hours each night trying to catch up before Labor Day, and with it also being the end of the month I have EOM reporting coming up to worry about as well.
What happened to the days when I just came in, did my job, and went home? I guess in the days of mailing services, marketing, advertising, sales, social media, the affiliate program, and email marketing there’s no sleep for the weary. It took me half a day just to catch up on Twitter posts and all the blogs I subscribe to through Google Reader. I’ve perhaps spent more time here at PsPrint than home in the last few days.
In case you’re wondering, I did enjoy my vacation. Some of the highlights included a helicopter tour over the strip at night, seeing Penn & Teller live and getting photos with them and their autographs, seeing lots of animals, going very high up at the top of the Stratosphere tower and the Paris Las Vegas Eiffel Tower, and traipsing all over Las Vegas Blvd. My travel friend and I basically saw everything we went to Vegas wanting to see, except we missed out on the Tournament of Kings dinner show at Excalibur. I think when I go back to Vegas in November to attend the National Association of Realtors’ conference, I might take an evening to head over there. I wasn’t quite ready to re-join reality!
Going to Vegas. BRB
So in less than 48 hours, this is where I will be… chilling with (hopefully) a fruity drink in my hand rearing to go and enjoy beautiful Las Vegas. I’ve needed a vacation for awhile now, and it’s good to go on a real vacation.
Of course, trying to get a bunch of projects done in time to go without worrying about work is almost impossible. It’s like the fates align to send every new project possible right into your inbox the day before you’re set to leave. Today was my last day in the office until next Tuesday, so of course new affiliate projects came across my desk, problems with mailing services customers happened, a new email marketing campaign launched, and I was IMed about a thousand times.
If only my vacation started tomorrow! While I won’t be in the office, I’ll instead be down in San Jose attending the Search Engine Strategies Expo at the Convention Center. They have a Social Media track of educational sessions that should be very informative and give me some good ideas for that task here at PsPrint in the coming months. I’ll be there in classes until about 2, then I’m going to walk around the expo and check it out a bit.
Afterward, that’s when my vacation starts! First I’ll be meeting up with a friend from out of town in San Jose to go to the Winchester Mystery House. It’s amazing how terrible of a tourist one can be in their own area… I’ve never been there, despite being fascinated by it’s history since 3rd grade. So going there, then Friday morning flying to Las Vegas. I can’t wait.
So, I bid this blog adieu until the 28th when I get back. I leave you with a question: what did you do on YOUR summer vacation? 😛
Read More
