Working

Thinking Worker, Working Thinker

Garth Beyer

It’s often thought that there are thinkers and then there are doers. Moreover, that which thinkers think should be produced by workers and not the thinkers themselves.

A PR pro thinks of a new brand positioning strategy and calls the doers to see it through while she goes back to thinking, planning, strategizing. Is it right for their to be a divide between thinking and doing?

I came across this statement by art critic John Ruskin, “It is only by labour that thought can be made healthy.”

Thinkers may come up with good ideas, but it’s really only when they themselves see the idea through that they naturally turn it into something remarkable.

Just as the thinker falls short in their thinking when they don’t do, the worker falls short when they don’t think. That’s why there are so many products, services, business that don’t work; there is a disconnect between thinking and working.

 

Stay Positive & Can We Change This?

Work From Home

Garth Beyer

A lot of people desire it, say they want it, and seek out jobs that offer the chance.

But do you really want to work from home? Or do you want to work where you don’t have to deal with face-to-face feedback? Or because no one can sneak up behind you and catch you escaping from the duties of your job to watch another cat video? Or you want to sleep in longer because you’re really not that excited about what you do?

Home might not be where you want to work it might be an excuse to a larger problem.

If you figure out why you want to work from home, you’ll have found the requirements a job away from home will need to offer for you to work happily there. Then go do that instead.

 

Stay Positive & Best To Work Where You Can Learn From Others Anyway

How To Not Burn Yourself Out (It’s Ironic)

Garth Beyer

Overworked

Spending hours on Pinterest or skipping lunch to continue working on your business plan is exhausting. To be an expert in social media, undo, marketing, guitar, writing greeting cards, anything, it takes tons of time.

Over and over I’ve watched others burn out from spending hours upon hours on something.

I’ve seen friends spend days learning cool Twitter marketing skills just to burn out and scrap their campaign idea.  Others have exhausted themselves from writing for 4 hours straight or playing a video game for 8 hours non-stop. (Ask anyone in my family or my close friends, I’m quite notorious for burning myself out too, and it’s taken a number of years to write this post with pure confidence.)

The best way I’ve learned to not burn myself out is to do a little bit of everything. To be a social media expert, don’t spend all your hours trying to leverage Twitter. Do something with Twitter once a day and move on to doing something with all the other social media outlets. Instead of going all in, go in on all.

It’s not about knowing a little bit about everything anymore. Now it’s about learning a little bit about everything continuously over a period of time until you’re an expert on a lot of things.

This also means to go out and run in the rain, to cook yourself a damn good meal, to email a family member you haven’t spoken to in a while. Everything in moderation.

 

Stay Positive & Emphasis On The Everything

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The Faults Of Overtime

Garth Beyer

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The fault is all on you.

Quite recently in my career as a journalist, I decided that I would not do an interview that goes over an hour. Collectively, the interview may take more than an hour, but the total would not be one continuous effort to get all that I could out of it. I also hold this rule for team meetings or anything one does in groups.

When the hour is up. It’s up. Not a minute over. Sometimes – and preferably – it ends a few minutes short of an hour.

People are exhausting. So is caring, listening, and interacting with other people. I’ve come to the conclusion that speaking for an extra three minutes or asking people to stay late or staying on one topic when it was scheduled to change 10 minutes ago does more harm than good. Why does this matter?

Think about your work. What do you do? There are very (very!) few jobs that don’t require you to interact with another person or group of people. (For those few jobs that don’t, I guarantee they would only benefit by having human to human interaction.) The thought behind this is that while an extra two minutes may mean nothing to you, those you interact with may view their time as more valuable. (Not to mention, your inability to recognize this leaves those who you interact with with the impression that you don’t care about them, which is exactly what you set out not to do.)

To stay parallel with my recent writing on consumerism and positive emotionalism (that people buy products that make them feel certain ways and sacrifice leisure time to do so), overtime needs mentioning.

The concept behind normal working hours and being paid a larger amount if you worked over those hours (overtime) was introduced in 1937 by the Fair Labor Standards Act. The development overtime has taken in the workplace is outstanding, both in terms of higher pay for working overtime and pushing employers to heavily restrict the ability for workers to work overtime. In turn, offering workers more leisure time.

I argue that with this additional leisure time, people still participate in overtime. With “overtime” being defined as our pursuit of that which makes us feel the way we want to feel through working more than is reasonable and beyond meaningful. (Work, by my definition, is anything that we put effort into doing without passion.) One does not need to have a full-time cubicle job with benefits for one to be considered working. Many times, just doing dishes and vacuuming is work.

The pivotal point here is that overtime is an average object covered with a cloak of hope. Hope that if one works hard enough, that what is under the cloak will turn into something that makes them feel better; be it a bigger car, a better type of coffee brew, or just new dishes.

What puzzles me most is that we work overtime to perform this cloak-covered magic when we are better off performing the real magic of working with passion (making art).

The wand is in your hand.

 

Stay Positive & You Don’t Need An Object Just To Wave It

Garth E. Beyer

Ironically, Seth Godin touched on part of this post this morning. Full disclosure, I had the idea and began writing about this prior to my viewing of his blog.

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Visitors, Clicks, Subscriptions

Garth Beyer

Visitors, clicks, subscriptions, pinbacks, emails, tweets, retweets, follows, facebook impressions, favorites, stars, ratings, statistics, forwards, reblogs, and bookmarks are all great. All fantastic. All give the ego a boost, maybe your moral too.

But do they matter?

If you create out of the necessity for subscriptions, if you create solely because you have people reblogging your creations, if you create to see your stats rise, you’re working, not creating.

If you can take out all stats, trackers, measures, feedback, impressions, reach, views, and audience and still create – that’s what defines an artist. A creator for the sake of creation, a creator that will follow through no matter what, with no guarantee of it working, and no expectation of it meaning anything to anyone but you, the artist.

 

Stay Positive & Artistry Is Always A Lonesome Process At Its Core

Garth E. Beyer

Progress While You Wait

Progress While You Wait

Garth Beyer

As much as we Public Relations Specialists pride ourselves with always being busy, there is a fair amount of waiting involved in every project.

It may be waiting for your source to tell you to come into her office, it may be waiting for the elevator to open for you (or the ride on the elevator), it may be a phone call that you absolutely can not miss, so you wait right next to it. The moments of waiting come in all sorts of variations of time, place, circumstance, and so on.

These moments of waiting are vital to your firm, agency, company, or organization you are representing. It’s in these moments of waiting that you are stripped of your title, any recognition people may have of you, and authority. To everyone passing by you, riding in that elevator, or wondering why you are hovering over your phone, you are just another normal blob in their world. You’re just another human being with nothing special to offer them. Or are you?

I just got home from the coffee shop. Waiting at the door of the apartment complex was a delivery person from a restaurant called Burrito (how original, but that’s not the point). We exchanged only a few sentences, but in those sentences, I could tell he made the most of his job, that he remained positive, that he was grateful for me even noticing him. He was sociable and wished me a great night.

You may be reading this and think that it’s normal. Is it though? When was the last time you actually talked to someone else’s delivery boy and left with a smile? It’s not normal, but it’s memorable.

Let’s jump back. What was the delivery boy doing again? Waiting. And no, I’m not going to order from the restaurant, simply because of the fact that I’m not fond of burritos, but what I will do (am doing) is talk about this experience.

Ask anyone in business which profits them more, one person buying a burrito, or one person writing and speaking to a thousand people about someone who works at the restaurant, basically promoting it? You obviously already know the answer, word of mouth is what makes businesses the most successful.

The delivery persons success could possibly be the same as anyone’s in PR. We all have to wait, but in that waiting, we can make a hundred little ruckus’, we can get people to talk about who we represent, we can very simply, provide an experience for them to remember – and of course the name of the company we are representing.

Next time when you tell someone you are waiting, don’t feel bad. Don’t feel that you’re not making any progress because you’re not working. Clearly, sometimes profits come more from waiting than they do working. It’s all a matter of you making it so.

Read This If You Feel That You Can’t Save Money

Garth Beyer

I have experience with a budget. I know various formats that can be used for a variety of people. I am 19 years old and have written at least 10 different budgets for myself alone and 20 with someone else. In addition I have reviewed others’ budgets and studied the art of budgeting intensely. When a person passes the point of giving themselves excuses to not write a budget, the next thing I hear is that they are not saving any money.

They write a budget and at the end it shows that they will be saving at least 200 dollars. Yet at the end of the month they are negative 20 dollars. Of course there were life changes during the month and as I always say about budgets, they are not constant, but they are a constant process. No budget will work two months in a row perfectly unless you do absolutely nothing with your life, make no income, and no expenses. Not the most sought after life.

After another attempt at adjusting the budget for the following month, the same results occur. They just can’t save any money.

As I corrected budgets, for a long time I would find ways to lower expenses and cut back. A little about my story, I moved to Madison WI with someone in Aug 2011. Being young and in love, you can guess that we did not have much money. We had saved enough to last seven months living at the lowest amount of expenses possible. We quickly got jobs. (Check my LinkedIn and you can know why, but don’t judge a book by its cover. I actually got the jobs I have because of what is NOT on my résumé) Now that we were set with employment, our goal was to keep saved what we had and save more from our paychecks. Hell no it’s not easy! Can you imagine spending 55 dollars a week on groceries for two people? We do it. We minimize every other expense as much as we can as well. Yet at the end of each month, we only save about 50-250 dollars a month.

Last month we sat down with the budget and tried to make more adjustments so we could save more. It just couldn’t be done unless we wanted to sacrifice all of our happiness. Then it hit me, kinda like a master craftsmen would slap his apprentice over his head once he figured out how to accomplish something he thought could not be done. It was almost as if the slap had a voice and said “You idiot, of course that’s the only way. Why are you spending all of your time on limiting yourself to save money!”

What I learned — If you can’t save money, EARN MORE

I and so many others are doing the right thing with creating a budget but were so focused on making the current monthly income we have work properly. If we could just take all that energy and focus on making more money… You can only imagine how much life would change and the money you would save.

We are a perfect example, we now save 300-450 a month and have only just began our approach at earning more since we couldn’t save more.

Stay Positive and Know Where Your Energy Is Going

Garth E. Beyer