Nick Usborne

Monday Spark: 4 Ways to get more done, and feel a LOT better about your day.

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get things doneYou know the feeling. At the end of the day you look back and see how little you have managed to get done. And it makes you feel bad.

Another day, you look back and see you have achieved a great deal. And that makes you feel fantastic.

Wouldn’t it be nice to have that second kind of day, every day? Of course it would. You’ll be a whole lot more productive, and you’ll feel great too.

Best of all, this is a self-perpetuating cycle. The better your day is today, the more positive you will feel about tomorrow, and so on.

We all know this, and you have probably already heard everything I share in the 4 points below.

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In social media, don’t ignore the little guys. Or doggies.

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popcorn social media contentThis is the flip side to my previous post on social media, in which I advised that you focus just on the high-value core of your social media network.

Today I’m suggesting that while you keep one eye on developing that core, you should also pay attention to connections which don’t appear to have any immediate value to you.

How come? Why bother with people who don’t have many connections of their own, and don’t appear to offer much value?

For a couple of reasons.

First, because if you dismiss people out of hand, simply because they don’t have many followers or friends, then you’re missing out on the “social” in social media.

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Monday Spark: Reframing just a small slice of your day can make a big difference.

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reframe your dayWe tend to repeat the same old patterns every day.

We have a routine, from the moment the alarm goes off. We get things done in the same sequence. We see the day through the same set of lenses. We have our weekday lenses and our weekend lenses.

There is nothing inherently wrong about this, except that it makes it hard for us to see or do anything different or new. We get stuck in a rut, driven by fixed perceptions.

One of the most fixed events in many people’s lives is the daily commute. Watch this video and see how perceptions of a metro ride can be reframed. (And thank you, Faith Attaguile, for bringing this to my attention through your Google+ post.)

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Freelancers – Engage with the high-value core of your social network.

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social media networkingAs freelancers we can all benefit from social media. By connecting with our peers, industry thought-leaders and client prospects, we can grow our reputations, increase our knowledge and expertise, and find new clients.

However, we can also end up spending way too much time on social media sites for very little return.

We have to look at how much time we are spending on social media each day, and make sure that time is being well spent. You need to balance your billable hours against your unbillable hours.

So how should freelancers use social media, with minimal wastage?

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Monday Spark: Dogs like treats, and so do we.

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freelancer treat yourselfAfter lunch each day we give our two dogs a small treat. Just a small dog cookie each.

It’s not much, but it makes their day. They look forward to their cookie at the first sign that lunch time is approaching.

Afterwards, they get into some serious playacting, trying to persuade us that we had, in fact, forgotten to give them their cookie five minutes before. One time in a hundred this actually works. I can only imagine the level of satisfaction this gives them. Two cookies, and fooling the man, both on the same day.

The point is, it doesn’t take much to make their day.

And I think the same is true for us.

A small treat can turn an OK day into a great day. Or a rough day into an OK day.

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Online writers and copywriters: Social media IS the web.

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social media conversationMost online writers and copywriters learned their craft at a time when the web was all about static websites.

To put a date on that, let’s say the period of “come and spend time on my great website” was between 1995 and 2008. More or less.

I’m pretty sure the majority of freelancers learned how to write for the web during this period.

Is this a problem? Could be.

Before then, in the eighties and very early nineties, the Internet was around, but the web wasn’t. In other words, people were connecting through the infrastructure of the Internet, but there were no browsers. No web as we know it.

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