New Years Resolution #3: Eat Better at Work

Let’s face it. Most of us could eat better at work.

Packing a lunch takes time, but fast food restaurants are everywhere. So are vending machines and coffeeshops with muffins and donuts. Who wants to crunch into a carrot stick when everyone else is having slices of pizza?

If concerns about your long-term health aren’t enough to convince you to eat better in the here and now, think about this: you’ll start feeling better—right now, today—if you start eating better.

First, the obvious

Eat your peas and lay off the fast food.

There. We said it. We’re not your mother, so let’s move on.

Start with breakfast

Breakfast really is the most important meal of the day. Unless you snacked last night, your stomach will have been empty for a solid 18 hours by lunchtime if you skip breakfast. Your energy will be low, your brain will be fogged up like a sauna and your blood sugar will be on the floor.

If you don’t want to fall asleep during your 11:00 meeting, eat something in the morning before you go to work, and don’t make it a bowl of cereal either. If you’re going to work instead of out for a run, your body needs protein, not carbs, first thing in the morning.

Fruit is good too, but you’ve been kidding yourself about that glass of orange juice. It’s just a straight shot of sugar. You’ll crash long before lunch if you don’t also consume something else. Really, it’s not much better for you than a can of soda.

Pack your own lunch

You’ll save money, of course, if you pack your own lunch, and you’ll eat healthier too if you plan what you’ll have in advance instead of letting your id take over when the waiter asks what you’ll be having.

They say you’re not supposed to go to the grocery store when you’re hungry because you’re more likely to stock up on junk food. The same applies to packing your lunch. Tend to your brown bag after you’ve already had breakfast.

Eat away from your desk

Research has shown that if you turn your desk into a dining room table, you’ll subconsciously label your desk as the place where you eat and you’ll be more likely to chow down all day.

So pack it up and go somewhere else on your lunch hour. Getting up and moving around is good for your body and mind anyway.

Snack smarter

If you like sugary treats but you also want to eat healthier, there’s no need to cut yourself off entirely. Just bring a small cupcake, three of four Hershey’s kisses or half a Snickers bar, then switch to something a little better like almonds or pistachios.

You’ll satisfy your cravings just as much as if you’d scarfed down a whole candy bar plus a slice of cheesecake, but your body will thank you and you’ll feel a lot better.

And bonus: no sugar crash.

Watch it with the coffee

Coffee may be okay in moderation, but too much of it, according to Positive Health Wellness, can be a detriment, and Health Ambition argues that it may even be bad for you.

According to the Mayo Clinic, there’s a 21 percent increase in all-cause mortality among those who drink more than four cups of coffee per day. So you might want to switch to another stimulant after your third.

Try this: a cup of tea made with yerba mate and ginseng. (Yes, that requires two separate tea bags.) The effects are similar to those of Adderall—a boost in energy and sharpened mental focus—and it works almost as well, but it’s not a controlled substance, it won’t make you jittery, it won’t make you crash and it’s certainly not going to kill you.

New Years Resolution #2: Be More Punctual

Our experience of time is drastically changing, but it’s changing so slowly that most of us don’t even notice.

In his mega-bestselling book Future Shock, Alvin Toffler explained how the industrial revolution transformed our experience of organization and time before explaining the new shifts heading our way as we transition into a post-industrial society.

“Mass education was the ingenious machine constructed by industrialism to produce the kind of adults it needed,” he wrote. “The problem was inordinately complex. How to pre-adapt children for a new world – a world of repetitive indoor toil, smoke, noise, machines, crowded living conditions, collective discipline, a world in which time was to be regulated not by the cycle of sun and moon, but by the factory whistle and the clock.”

That’s why we grew up with school bells. Administrators placed there to prepare us for the factory whistle, when we’d have to be precisely on time—right down to the second—or industrial machinery would grind to a halt.

Most of us don’t work in factories anymore. Our time is no longer punctuated by school bells and factory whistles, but hardly any of us are regulated by the sun and the moon these days either. In our post-industrial era, most of us are living somewhere in between.

Punctuality is more important than it was before the industrial revolution, but for many of us it’s less important than it was in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. As a consequence, a lot of us are chronically late. It’s annoying and disrespectful and it hampers productivity, but terrible things rarely happen if we’re late all the time, so the problem festers.

Diana DeLonzor, author of Never Be Late Again, says “Most late people have been late all their life, and they are late for every type of activity — good or bad.”

She argues that the chronically late are often overly optimistic and unrealistic. They think they can stop for gas and coffee on the way to work in the morning, but fail to take into account the construction zone down the block and the traffic jam on the bridge.

If you recognize yourself here, just plan to be early and more often than not you’ll arrive bang on time.

The same applies to long deadlines. Try to finish big projects early instead of nosing in just under the wire.

Americans who stay late at the office often give the impression that they’re hard-workers, but Europeans who stay late at the office come across as incompetent. Their colleagues often wonder why on earth it’s taking so long when everyone is already finished.

That doesn’t mean you should be the first out the door every day if you work in the US, but if you’re wrapping up a project by 3:00 in the afternoon the day before it’s deliverable, you’ll project an image of competence as well as punctuality.

Your colleagues, friends and family will all respect you more if you’re reliably on-time. You’ll respect yourself more, too. Your status will be greater, and that really does matter.

Humans are hard-wired to fret about status because those of us with higher status have always gotten a larger share of scarce resources. We aren’t scrounging like hunter-gatherers anymore, but the best jobs and the best salaries are finite. Don’t kneecap yourself with your tardiness.

Perhaps best of all, though, you’ll be more relaxed. Being late, and the fear of being late, adds stress to our lives, but with just a small bit of effort it’s one of the easiest stressors to banish.

New Years Resolution #1: Be More Productive

Most of us would like to be more productive, but it’s hard to resolve to be more productive if we think it means living with a cattle prod in our backs. There’s more to life than just work, after all, and most of us are already working hard enough as it is.

We don’t have to work harder, though, to be more productive. We need to work smarter, and it’s not as tough as it sounds.

Get up an hour earlier

Successful people tend to wake up earlier than everyone else. So do what they do. Get up earlier.

You don’t necessarily have to start work an hour earlier. You certainly can, but it isn’t required. Just get out of bed.

Take an extra hour for yourself to do whatever it is you’d be doing if you had the day off. Take a walk. Read a book. Go out for breakfast. Write another page or two in your novel.

When it’s time to start working, you’ll be fully awake, fed and relaxed while everyone else is rushing into the office with nothing but a to-go cup of coffee in their stomachs and sleep inertia clouding their minds. You’ll be that chipper morning person that everyone hates, but you’ll get more done and you’ll feel better.

Create your own deadlines

Deadlines are great motivators. They keep us on schedule. They force us to be disciplined.

They can also be sources of stress. Not once in the history of deadlines has anything good happened because somebody missed one.

So create your own advance deadlines. If a project is due in two weeks, quietly impose your own deadline in ten days.

Chances are, you’ll get your work done early. And you’ll be less stressed because if you miss the artificial deadline, no biggie.

Say no to optional meetings and other distractions

If you sit through an entire meeting at work without saying a word or writing anything down on your notepad, perhaps you did not need to be there.

If you work from home and find yourself making a grilled cheese sandwich during a phone conference, you’re either goofing around on the job or you could have better spent your time on something else.

We feel like we’ve accomplished something at the end of a meeting, though, even if we just sat there taking up space.

An hour-long meeting burns up more than just an hour of time. Chances are you won’t be doing anything productive for at least fifteen minutes ahead of time and for at least fifteen minutes afterward.

So if a meeting is optional, just say no and stick to what matters.

Stop pretending you can multitask

If you think you can multitask, think again.

“Humans don’t really multitask – we task switch,” says Eyal Ophir, the primary researcher on the pioneering Stanford Multitasking study.

“Our brains are serial machines, so we just switch very quickly between tasks, and it feels like we’re multitasking. So when we found that heavy media multitaskers performed worse on a classic test of task-switching, it was like finding out that these heavy media multitaskers were worse at multitasking.”

That’s a bit counterintuitive, to be sure, but keep reading.

Recent research suggests that the cost of task switching is rooted in cognitive interference from the irrelevant task set: interference from all those thoughts about the task you’re NOT doing. Every task you do competes for your mental resources, even once you think it’s no longer relevant.

The more you do, the more you increase this competition. So that momentary interruption is still fighting for some of your mental resources even when you’d like to focus back on your main task. The more competing tasks you take on, the more interference you must overcome to fully dedicate yourself to what’s really important.

What may be worse is that over time you may be training yourself NOT to focus. You teach yourself that something more exciting might be just around the corner – behind that notification, or the app on your mobile phone, or the email you haven’t checked.

Take plenty of breaks

Seriously.

A long work day isn’t a sprint, it’s a marathon. It’s longer than a marathon, actually.

The median time to finish running a marathon (26.2) miles, is a little longer than four hours for men and a little less than five hours for women.

The average workday, meanwhile, is eight hours long. Nine if you count the lunch break.

So don’t try to sprint through it. Even the best athletes in the world can only sprint for a couple of minutes before flaming out.

The human body can only run for so long before losing energy, and the human brain can only focus for so long before it’s running on empty.

“Our research suggests that, when faced with long tasks (such as studying before a final exam or doing your taxes), it is best to impose brief breaks on yourself,” says Psychology Professor Alejandro Lleras at the University of Illinois. “Brief mental breaks will actually help you stay focused on your task!”

Turn off the Internet

When it is time to focus, however, you do need to actually focus. Checking your email or Facebook or your favorite blogs every five minutes is not the kind of break your mind needs at work.

Some of us have a hard time restraining ourselves, but there’s an app for that. It’s called Freedom. It will block any and all web sites on your computer for whatever amount of time you specify.

You can turn the Internet off for eight hours if you really want to go for it, but it’s probably best to use Freedom in 30 or 60 minute intervals. It will all but force you to stay focused during that time.

A pop-up window will tell you when the time has elapsed and you have web access again. That’s your cue to take the break your mind needs. Go for short walk. Refill your coffee mug. Chat up your friends in the break room.

Then get back to work!

Check Out These Vintage Star Wars Trailers

Marketing the new Star Wars film, The Force Awakens, is a bit tricky in China. The Chinese, for the most part, aren’t familiar with the franchise. It is, at the Wall Street Journal put it, an unfamiliar force.

But there was a time when Americans had no idea what Star Wars was all about either.

Take a look at the original trailer released in 1977 when our minds were all still tabula rasa.

It’s low tech, like the original film—nobody had even imagined CGI yet—but it seemed high tech at the time.

George Lucas, who will forever be the man who brought us Star Wars, is advertised in the original trailer as the man who brought us the now mostly-forgotten American Graffiti.

You’d have no idea, watching that original trailer, what the story is about if you didn’t already know. The marketers weren’t interested in telling us what it’s about. We were where the Chinese mostly are now.

Instead, the marketers told us what kind of story it is.

It’s “the story of a boy, a girl and the universe. It’s a big sprawling space saga of rebellion and romance. It’s an epic of heroes and villains and aliens from a thousand worlds.”

Awesome.

Back then, the film was still just called Star Wars. It was not yet the first (or fourth) in a series. No one knew there would be a sequel, let alone any prequels. Not until later was it renamed Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope.

By the time The Empire Strikes Back came out in 1980, just about everyone in the galaxy (outside China, anyway, and also the Soviet bloc) knew all about Star Wars.

Here’s the original trailer.

It begins with a voiceover. “The Star Wars saga continues with a special limited engagement of The Empire Strikes Back!”

Laughable now, isn’t it? A special limited engagement? Really? As if the studio was going to pull the film after a week or so and not let anyone else pay to see it.

No marketer would even consider saying such a thing in a movie trailer today, but hardly anyone had a VCR in 1980. Video rental stores weren’t around yet, let alone Netflix and Apple TV. Perhaps the Star Wars fan base really did think they’d have to get to the theater post haste or they’d miss it.

The rest of the trailer is brilliant marketing from beginning to end. No one else says a word until the end, not even the characters. We just see Han Solo, Luke Skywalker, Princess Leia and Darth Vader running around and shooting and light sabering in all kinds of action sequences in exotic new settings. Hoth, ice planet. Dagobah, swamp planet. An asteroid felt teeming with Tie Fighters.

The audience knew exactly what it was going to get: something familiar, yet different. And better!

The original Return of the Jedi trailer is equally brilliant.

It, too, begins with a voice-over. “A long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.” We all knew instantly when we heard that that this was a trailer for a new Star Wars movie. The branding was already in place. All the marketers needed to do was use it.

Once again, we see some of our favorite characters in new settings (Endor, forest moon) having bigger and more spectacular adventures than ever. Something familiar, yet different, and this time with stepped-up special effects.

The franchise went a bit off the rails with the prequels. Some kind of a course correction was needed. Disney bought the rights from George Lucas and hired JJ Abrams to direct the seventh installment.

A terrific choice, we must say. Abrams has proven himself eminently capable of rebooting a science-fiction film franchise with the new Star Trek movies featuring younger versions of Kirk, Spock, Uhura, Scotty and Bones.

Abrams took Star Trek back to basics with smashing success, and it looks like he’s doing the same thing with The Force Awakens. It comes across right there in the trailer, which is drastically different from the orignal trailers.

First of all, it is not instantly obvious that this is a trailer for a Star Wars movie.

We see a mysterious figure swathed in all-enveloping cloth and eye goggles repelling down inside a futuristic structure. An unseen character’s voice asks, “who are you?”

Beginning with a question is a tried and true method for hooking an audience. Witholding the answer works even better.

In the trailer, a woman’s voice answers the question. “I’m no one.”

Audience: hooked and even more curious. It’s clearly a science-fiction film set partly in space, but we don’t know anything else yet.

The trailer cuts to a desert scene where some kind of robot that looks a little like R2D2 but clearly is not R2D2 rolls toward some sand dunes. Is this a Star Wars movie?

Then we see the Lucasfilm logo. It is a Star Wars movie!

And we’re back to basics now, too, with an army of stormtroopers at a fascistic Nuremberg-style rally.

Darth Vader is dead, but we catch a glimpse of a brand-new character in a black mask who promises to “finish” what the Dark Lord of the Sith started.

The Force Awakens is more of the same, only different, and this time with far more advanced special and cinematic effects.

Right in the middle of the trailer—bam, there’s Harrison Ford. Han Solo is back. So is the orignal Star Wars so many of us know and love, and it looks spectacular.

Enjoy the show.

Don’t Give Facebook’s Zuckerberg a Hard Time

Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg and his wife Priscilla Chan are placing 99 percent of their stock—valued at 45 billion dollars—into an investment vehicle for charity.

Put that way, it sounds slightly less generous than donating 45 billion dollars in cash, but in all likelihood the total over time will amount to much more.

Good for him. And good for his favorite charities.

Nobody needs 450 billion dollars. Zuckerberg could stash that much cash in an underground vault in his yard, where it wouldn’t even earn any interest, and he’d still have a cool half-million dollars a year to spend for a thousand years.

He won’t exactly be uncomfortable now that he’s knocked himself down to a “mere” 450 million. Even the Queen of England could get by on that much.

The response to Zuckerberg’s epic giveaway is mostly positive, of course, but there’s an undercurrent of skepticism out there, as well.

The Atlantic dismisses the whole thing as non-charity charity.

The New York Times is being downright churlish when it says, “[Zuckerberg’s] P.R. return-on-investment dwarfs that of his Facebook stock” and suggests he’s doing this for the tax break. “He amassed one of the greatest fortunes in the world — and is likely never to pay any taxes on it.”

Similar sentiments are all over Twitter right now.

Nobody spends that much money on public relations, partly because hardly anyone has that much to spend, but also because, even if they did, there is no chance that any amount of good press can yield more than 45 billion dollars in additional profits that wouldn’t have materialized otherwise.

And nobody gives 99 percent of their wealth away to avoid paying a much smaller percentage in taxes. The math doesn’t add up. It’s not even close.

The skepticism is perhaps understandable. Hardly any of us would donate 99 percent of our net worth to charity. Most of us can’t. We all need money to live, and we all want more than we need so we can live comfortably and stress-free.

There is a point, though, where enough is truly enough. Where money is just an abstraction. Where more money can’t possibly lead to any more happiness or contentment. Zuckerberg and his wife passed that point a long time ago.

Whether or not their initiative helps the world as much as they hope, they deserve praise, not a hard time. Hopefully they’ll inspire others in their income bracket to follow their lead.

Five Things You Don ’t Know About Black Friday

Black Friday is coming.

The day after Thanksgiving. Beginning of the Christmas season. Biggest shopping day of the year.

But you know that already.

Here are five things you don’t know about Black Friday.

Where the name comes from–

The first people to call the day after Thanksgiving Black Friday were Philadelphia cops.

“Resulting traffic jams are an irksome problem to the police and, in Philadelphia, it became customary for officers to refer to the post-Thanksgiving days as Black Friday and Black Saturday,” Denny Griswold wrote in a public relations newsletter in 1961.

“Hardly a stimulus for good business, the problem was discussed by the merchants with their Deputy City Representative, Abe S. Rosen, one of the country’s most experienced municipal PR executives. He recommended adoption of a positive approach which would convert Black Friday and Black Saturday to Big Friday and Big Saturday.”

Renaming the “holiday” didn’t work, obviously. Black Friday it is, from now until the end of shopping.

The staggering sales figures–

Last year, American shoppers spent more than 50 billion dollars over the Black Friday weekend.

That’s one-and-a-half times the GDP of Montana.

It’s more than twice the GDP of Malta and 35 times the GDP of Belize.

Belize is a small country. We know. But still. 35 times.

It’s not just for Americans anymore–

Black Friday is now observed, if that’s the right word, in Canada, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Panama, Costa Rica, Brazil, South Africa, India, Romania, Denmark, Sweden, Hungary, Spain, Norway and France.

The day after Thanksgiving is meaningless in all of those countries. Thanksgiving is an American holiday. (Canada has its own Thanksgiving, but it’s celebrated six weeks earlier. And interestingly enough, Liberia also celebrates Thanksgiving, as it was founded by freed American slaves in 1847, but they don’t have Black Friday yet.)

Those countries imported Black Friday because, why not? Merchants make more money and shoppers get some steep discounts. Everybody wins.

Everybody, that is, except for the unlucky ones. Which leads us to:

The staggering body count–

Okay, the body count isn’t exactly staggering, but the fact that there’s any kind of a body count for a shopping holiday is pretty outrageous.

42 Million Dead In Bloodiest Black Friday Weekend On Record, The Onion reported in 2012. “First responders reporting from retail stores all across the nation said the record-breaking post-Thanksgiving shopping spree carnage began as early as midnight on Friday, when 13 million shoppers were reportedly trampled, pummeled, burned, stabbed, shot, lanced, and brutally beaten to death while attempting to participate in early holiday sales events.”

Yeah, that’s The Onion. It’s a joke.

Seriously, though stampeding, pummeling, and brutally beating to decide who gets the last discounted flat screen are par for the course now. According to the website blackfridaydeathcount.com, the casualties are now up to 7 dead and 98 wounded.

Two people were actually shot at a Toys ‘r Us in Palm Desert, California. Two more were shot outside a Wal-mart in Tallahassee, and another guy was shot in the leg while hauling a huge-screen TV to his car in Las Vegas.

If you find yourself thinking, “only in America,” hold your horses. The chaos is spreading now to Great Britain.

Last year, all sorts of people got trampled at a Wal-mart in London. The whole thing was captured on video. Manchester police arrested several people for assault. Witnesses said their fellow Brits behaved “like animals” and turned shopping centers into “war zones.”

But it’s all part of the fun as long as you aren’t the next person who gets trampled or shot.

You don’t have to leave home anymore–

You don’t have to go out. Stay home if you want.

No more pushing, shoving, hair-pulling or shooting. No more spending the night in the parking lot of a Wal-mart. No more trips to the hospital or arrests on your record.

You can get your Black Friday deals right here on the Internet.

Amazon has plenty of them. So do Target and Best Buy.

But last year, online sales accounted for only four percent of the Black Friday totals.

So while you can stay home and do your Christmas shopping in jammies and slippers, that’s not exactly the spirit.

Go on. Brave the hordes. Knock yourself out. Get some spectacular deals.

Just try not to die.

See Your Work Through Your Audience’s Eyes

You aren’t going to connect with your customers and your audience if you can’t see your work through their eyes. Before publishing those blog posts or sending the flyers off to the printer, you need to swap your writer hat with your reader hat and look at your content as if someone else wrote it.

Easier to say than to do, of course. You wrote it. Not somebody else.

But you can get there, sort of, by following a couple of steps.

Put it on ice

Just stop for a while. Save your document, close it and stick in the freezer.

The only way you can truly read your work as if someone else wrote it is to wait a long time. Like a year. And that’s obviously not going to happen. But the longer you can wait, the fresher your words will appear.

Read something else

You need a palette cleanser, though. If you pause a few minutes while drinking coffee, you’ll still taste the coffee even if nothing’s in your mouth. If you have a sip of water, you’ll still taste the coffee. If you want to stop tasting coffee, brush your teeth. Or eat a pickle. Your tongue needs a reset.

Your brain needs a reset, too, or there’s no chance you’ll see your own writing objectively.

So go read something else. And read something totally different. If you’re been working on a piece of content marketing all day, don’t read somebody else’s content marketing. Read a Jack Reacher novel. Try the sports page, some poetry, or the Huffington Post. Anything but copywriting and content marketing.

Write something else

Even better, write something else. That will really give you some distance.

Even if you work on something else for only an hour or two, your other piece of writing will look and feel a little bit alien all of a sudden. Almost as if someone else wrote it.

Go to bed

Your subconscious never sleeps. It’s always chewing on things. Solving problems. Turning things over. Coming up with solutions. It also moves on to other things entirely and gives you some space.

Print it

Have you ever laid down on your bed with the top of your head pointing toward the floor and looked up at the ceiling? Everything’s upside-down. It’s still your bedroom, but it looks like an entirely different and unexplored place, as if you’ve never even been there before. Everything is exactly the same, only totally different.

You can have a similar experience with your writing without hanging upside down. Just adjust the margins, alter the font, and print it.

It will look like someone else wrote it. It will even feel like someone else wrote it. It will be exactly the same, only totally different. You’ll see all kinds of things that you didn’t see before, especially if in the meantime you read something else, wrote something else, and slept on it.

Word of Mouth Marketing is Harder Than You Think

Word of mouth advertising is the best marketing you can get.

It’s the holy grail, the treasure chest from the sunken Spanish galleon, the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

It’s also almost entirely out of your control.

Almost. We’ll get to that, but first let’s behold just how powerful it can be when it works.

George Lucas thought of Star Wars as a b-movie. He had no idea—nobody did—that it would be the game-changing hit that it was.

What kind of marketing did the film have? Not much. Hardly any at all, actually. But the relatively small audience over the opening weekend loved it so much they told all their friends about it, who then told all their friends. Everyone raved about it, on and on for weeks, months and even years.

The Empire Strikes Back was even better, and by the time the third film, Return of the Jedi, was released, die-hard fans camped in line on sidewalks outside movie theaters for days so they could buy tickets to the first showing.

Marketing for the newest film in the franchise, The Force Awakens, is everywhere. It’s all over Internet. But initially, Lucas had pretty much nothing but word of mouth going.

And he didn’t do anything aside from making one of the awesomest movies ever to get that marketing kickstarted.

You can’t force people to talk about your product any more than you can force people to buy it. That’s entirely up to them. You can execute the most brilliant marketing strategy with precision and get no word of mouth to go along with it whatsoever. Alternatively, it can all go viral while you’re in a coma.

Which makes it seem a little like winning the lottery. You need to have a great product, of course. A dud won’t go viral unless everyone is talking about how shockingly awful it is. (Imagine if Apple released an old school flip phone, for instance.)

You can try to make something as extraordinary as Star Wars, and you should, but Star Wars is a rarity. Even if you do make something equally great, there’s still not much you can do to convince people to tell their friends all about it.

If they love it and it’s portable like a smart phone, they’ll probably show it off to their friends anyway. If it’s not portable—let’s say it’s the fastest, quietest and most reliable laser printer in the history of laser printers—they might not say anything. They certainly won’t bust it out of their pockets at lunch.

Your customers and potential customers will either talk about you and your stuff or they won’t. It’s entirely up to them.

But aside from making spectacular products, you can also create share-worthy content. Millions of people are accustomed to clicking one or more “share” buttons when they find something they like on the web. And creating something readers enjoy enough to “share” with their friends is a whole lot easier than making the second coming of Star Wars.

So get to it.