Who is this Guy Chris Greaves? -2

Two months ago in Who is this Guy Chris Greaves? I issued some crude statistics on what a CEO would see if he received a mailing from me and decided to check me out by using the Google search engine.

I have re-issued the search with these results:

Quantities may vary if you repeat the search, depending on the date, and on the size of your monitor screen.

The results can be summarized as follows

Name Only	& Toronto	& Mississauga
4 out 7 or 57%	10 out of 10 or 100%	Top 6 out of 10 or 60%

The only change is in the Mississauga rankings (I live in Toronto, but right on the border of Mississauga), so this is an improvement, but not by much.

The good news is that “Arguments with the 407-ETR” has dropped off the radar; that sort of thing isn’t likely to impress a CEO at first glance.

Over the past two weeks I’ve been working diligently at tweeting my blogs, products and services, but I know I need to get more out there.

It’s a process, not an act!

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Staying Ahead of the Avalanche - 3

Well! This feels good.

I have run through all 376 records in my contact list.

For the past few weeks I have opened up the database form and clicked on the button “FollowUpToday”; there are usually 3 or 4 records that had been marked for flow-up on that particular day.

Once those were done I’d click on “FollowUpPast”, and it’s that count that I’ve been whittling down at the rate of 15 envelopes printed per day.

This morning that command showed up empty at around 10 a.m., so I have not one single contact record untouched over the past two months.

I’m taking a break.

Tomorrow I’ll click the “FollowUpToday” and probably come up empty.

Then I’ll click the “FollowUpPast” and probably come up empty.

Then I’ll click the “StalestActive” and it will show me a record due for follow-up on the 31st of October (I just checked). I’ll be able to reduce the interval on my “touchings” and make a point of working on anything up to 10 records per day to keep up to date – postal mailings, emails, phone calls – all part of the mix.

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Check Your Stress on the Bathroom Scales

It’s no secret that I’m losing weight.

Indeed, the fact that I *AM* losing weight makes me more inclined to tell everyone about it.

Heh heh!

You can ignore the scale on the Left-hand side. I’m using a set of scales that may not be correctly calibrated.

What counts to me is the DIFFERENCE in weight from day to day, and in the chart above you can see that in early September I am about 4 pounds lighter than I was last June.

I have been weighing myself daily for about five years now, and can stretch that chart to cover all five years.

I am fascinated by perturbations; what makes my weight spike at intervals?

The yellow marks are my daily recorded weight values; they fluctuate, quite naturally, by plus or minus two pounds per day.

So what counts is the TREND of my weight, which is outlined in red and also in blue; I use blue when my recorded daily weight is less than my trend, which is a running average.

(Blue is therefore the equivalent of a Gold Star, without the expense of buying gold stars!).

Observe the are bounded in green.

Just over a week ago, Friday 26th, my early-morning weight pegged in at 167 lbs. No cause for alarm, but why on that day? I was taking two days holiday, and was looking forward to it.

Don’t you think my stress would be DOWN that morning?

No. Weight is a function of stress; when we are stressed out we drink beer (calories) or eat ice-cream (calories); we eat to feel comfortable, and if we aren’t comfortable in our daily lives, we treat ourselves.

My guess is that in the three or four days leading up to my heavenly vacation, the PROMISE of a great time in the future felt like pressure in the present.

So Friday morning, before I set off, I had a peak at 167 lbs, brought about by snacking to relieve the stress of waiting for vacation.

Once on vacation I pig out on hamburgers, ice-cream, I treat myself to a can of pop, and generally disregard any heart-and-stroke advice for two days.

And look at how my weight starts coming down again, even though I’m eating what I shouldn’t!

Weigh yourself daily and plot the trend.

Then go back to those peaks and work out what it is that causes you stress.

And get rid of it.

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The Personal Touch

I am asked how much time I spend on mailings.

The mechanical part (click on a button, choose a PDF, choose File, Print, choose “MakeEnvelopeFromSnapshot” and choose “PrintFrontAndBackOfEnvelope” takes less than 60 seconds.

Sometimes the printer gets all sulky and takes over two minutes to reset after printing one side of an envelope. (I learned long ago not to “batch” personalized letters.

The hand-writing part for a generic not takes less than 30 seconds.

But more and more I find myself spending three or more minutes reading my comments on the contact, reading press releases, trying to come up with SOMEthing that indicates I’ve spent some time thinking of what I’ve written.

Because I’m hoping that the recipient will spend some time thinking of what I’ve written.

Talk to Me !

Anatomy of a Proposal

This is an appropriate time to write this up on two counts:

(a) I am re-reading “ Documentation and the Nursing Process ” by Lois White; I taught from this slim book about ten years ago and love it for its stress on Goals, Objectives, Deliverables, Measurement and Documentation.

(b) I have entered preliminary discussions with a chap who wants me to develop a system, but I am leery of projects proposed by individuals. All too often they want a full-fledged system for peanuts, and I can’t do that.

So here goes:

1: I want some cash NOW!

2: I don’t want to get jerked around

3: I want to offer only what I can guarantee as a short-term deliverable.

4: I want to proceed in small measured steps

5: I want to minimize the amount of work I do up front by me

6: I want to minimize the up front dollar investment by him

7: I want to minimize the risk for both of us.

My terms will be cash in advance; I don’t know this fellow, and I don’t know how adaptable he is.

Next: My Plan

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Does Staying-In-Touch Work?

“Alex, Chris Greaves is the script guru I suggested you speak with about your flyers. I met him at AIC, we keep in touch every once in a while. He’s not a web guy, but a MS/parser/automator guy who may have ideas on your project. Cheers, Carole”

• Does Staying-In-Touch Work?

You Betcha!

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Holiday Priorities

As I write, today is a public holiday. Everybody is on vacation, except me. I’m at work.

Since 1970 I’ve taken options to work on a public holiday and then take a day off when the shops are open. I slept in this mooring, rising after 9 a.m. and I sit down and realize that:-

(a) Today is Monday and I didn’t pre-post my 6 posts for this blog (I post them in advance now, and let them time-release during the week)

(b) Yesterday I did not spend the time working through a week’s accumulation of interesting-links-for-other-blogs

(c) Danny has emailed me a specific failure in one of my applications and

(d) There’s a backlog of personal email to be tackled.

That will do for now; you know what I’m talking about when I say “Four urgent tasks”.

Question is, how to assign a priority to each task; it’s a given that once I start a task I’m going to see it through to conclusion, but which task comes FIRST.

To my mind the best bet is the task that seems to offer the earliest completion. I don’t know what I’ll uncover with Danny’s bug; it could be a five-minute task, it could extend to a four-hour slog through code. But I know that releasing 6 Torontopreneur posts into the wild will take me 20 minutes, tops.

So that’s my urgent task this morning.

I can deal with any personal email within 3 minutes, even to the extent of muttering “There, there, what a pity; please tell me more”, so that’s second.

Danny comes third. It has to be done.

Fourth is wading through “clippings” file and drafting a blog item for each, doing a bit of research, finding or making an image and so on.

Is this the correct sequence? I’ll not know until the end of this day; but I do know that if I don’t set a sequence by priority, I’ll waffle.

Talk to Me !