Category: Daily Life

In the Marketing Over Coffee LinkedIn group MindMaps came up as a topic. We talked about it this week and I said that I’d share more than I normally show in my Quarterly Review posts.

Here’s a full screenshot (click it for full size) with my gory details removed:

Here’s a zipped file if you have MindManager, or an exported Word Doc.

The process is simple – at the beginning of the year think about what you will accomplish on four fronts:

1. Family
2. Personal
3. Professional
4. Financial Goals

You’ll probably find that you have many of these quadrants already full of items, and that’s fine, it’s good to be able to give yourself some credit for your dumptruck full of stress that you’ve been taking for granted.

Some notes:

Family – Remember that your life is juggling, but not all the balls are the same. Your family is one of the glass ones, you drop that and it will never be the same. It doesn’t have to take all your time, but it does need to be first in your planning.

Personal – Here’s your one shot to pick something fun to do. Fitness also sets here, you’ve only got one body so you need to plan for it to last a while.

Professional – This will be different for everyone, but my mix has been the current job, side projects, and keeping your personal brand strong.

Financial – After the sands of time have blown away nobody will care about a few thousand bucks, but you do need to put some food on the table today. If you’ve been using Quicken, it’s pretty easy to forecast this stuff.

So from here, you need to check in at least once a month, better yet have a day once a week (Sunday nights tend to work well), where you look at your upcoming calendar and make sure you’ve made time for the big stuff.

Every quarter, update the scorecard to see how things are going. If you’ve got anything big planned please tell me about it, I’m still trying to fill my 2011 card.

My blogging holiday is over, having hit my 52 post goal before Thanksgiving I’ve been playing around with a bunch of other projects including a new laptop (and workflow) for me, and dumping 28 tons of gravel into a half filled root cellar in the garage (but that’s another post).

The first day of the new year was not a happy one here. Carin’s dog Hannah had reached 15 years old and has not been doing well for a couple of years. She went deaf about 3 years ago, and had a tumor removed two years ago. As we were driving out to see our family on New Year’s Day, even with her in the way back of the car I could see that a small growth she had in her mouth had exploded.

We had been preparing for this for a long time but it’s still so sad when the day arrives. Carin got her as a puppy 5 years before we started dating, and I used to joke that she took care of her until I showed up.

I’ve had many dogs and she was by far the smartest. Many of them would get their toys when told to, but you could say “No, the Blue one” and she would go back for the right one. Sadly, she is survived by Carter, who walks into things all the time.

We miss her, but it’s good to know that she’s no longer in pain, but the house still feels kind of empty.

As I clean out my inbox I have links worth sharing that finally come to light. I wrote about Mr. Rogers giving you the smackdown, and even though it was in 2007, the magic of the Google has kept it around and it was cited in a recent Fast Company article. Also interesting in my post is a comment with some kind words from a guy who was just beginning to really tear things up – Chris Brogan.

Over on Marketing Over Coffee we’ve released a special episode just for people who have bought the iTunes Marketing Over Coffee app (and folks that buy the Android app out probably later this week will also get it). The rest of the subscribers will get it the last week in December, but you faithful reader can also get it early since you go out of your way to check out this space.

MOC Interview with Sal Ferro and John Doyle of Alure Homes

[audio:http://traffic.libsyn.com/marketingovercoffee/MoC191-ehme.mp3]

Have a great Thanksgiving!

Big News
I’ve been reading what I can about HTML 5 lately and came across this great resource on Video for the Web. It covers codecs, wrappers and a bunch of other stuff including H.264, a video standard that HTML 5 supports.

Lesser News
This was also computer overhaul week. Besides my upgrade, which is, for the most part, completed, I also juiced up the Lovely Carin’s Mac with 4x the RAM and more than doubled the hard drive and went up to 7200 RPM. It really screams now.

I also gave Handbreak a try for getting  some of my DVDs into iTunes so I can check them out on the iPad. the H.264 standard looks amazing. I’m glad I saved all my source DVD’s so I can replace the files I have now. I joined the new gym down the street so I’m looking forward to catching up on the TV and movies I have missed in the past year. I’m thinking about catching the last season of 24 since I’ve see the others. The BBC’s Sherlock is great but doesn’t take long to watch. Any other suggestions welcome…

Not much writing about marketing lately, I know… contrary to the title of this blog. But hey, you can always swing over to Marketing Over Coffee to get my take there.

I wanted to thank the folks at Suffolk U. who invited me to stop by on Saturday to talk about social media, I hope they enjoyed it as much as I did. It also gave me an excuse to bring the camera downtown for some shooting.

My weekend was a bit messed up while I was getting the house ready for winter and found out that the bleeder valve in the shutoff for the hose spigot was mounted backwards. If you don’t speak plumbing just picture me standing in my basement in socks, jeans and a rugby shirt with water spraying out in a 6 foot jet all over everything. One shutoff and a walk to the downtown hardware store for a $3.50 part and all was back to normal.

Last weekend was a big deal for me. Comic Con came to Boston with a bunch of TV stars from back when I used to have time to watch TV. It’s been decades since I’ve gone to a con but I really wanted to meet Lee Majors. My entire life has been messing around with technology, and when you rewind the tape to the beginning there’s a kid getting his mind blown by an engineer making a bionic man. I figured it would be perfectly normal for a geek, a shadowy government dude and an astronaut to save the world every week. For those who missed the seventies I’m talking about Col. Steve Austin – The Six Million Dollar Man.

I also got to meet a guy you might know from Smallville or The Dukes of Hazzard:

It was great to talk with John, he saw my camera and brought me over to talk to the neighboring booth who was having trouble with theirs. After I got the flash going for them the let me take a special shot on the house:

It’s hard not to yell “YEEE HEEE HAAAAAWWW” when you are sitting in it. Also – everyone asks the same question – no, I did not have to climb in, the door does open.

Last, but not least, this week was Blogtoberfest, Jenny calling down the Martini Thunder yet again. I got a nice shot with the Sony NEX-5 with our own Paul Revere of Video Blogging:

Ok, last shot of my stupid grinning mug: this is my favorite shot of Blogtoberfest (I’m not sure if that link works, of course FB has no sharing URL, so I imagine they’ll sabotage a deep link). Flickr has it, so here it is, Ye Olde Bostone Bloggerse:

I know it’s last minute but if you are looking for a 5k Sunday morning I’ll be doing the Miles for Kyle. Have a good weekend!

I am a city person at heart. I like being around a lot of people, when I am downtown during the evenings I can feel the energy of everyone traveling around, each of them with their own story being played out. I get a bit of the same feeling first thing in the morning when I log on and see people from the west coast still posting things in their late night that gets handed off to my early morning, real time. At that point the web joins the ranks of the cities that never sleep.

I saw a flash of truth this morning as opposed to the normal “Gee, I forgot how much I like pickles” kind of crap. Someone mentioned the quiet lonely hours before going off to sleep. I remember, in what seems to be about 2 million years ago, feeling the same way going to bed at some hour when the people who run bakeries and coffee shops are opening up for the morning rush.

It was so well written, not only was it poetic, but it felt like the scene at the beginning of a movie. Like the “I wish” part at the beginning of every Disney movie ever made. The sad part was that it was deleted very quickly. This person is “a big deal on the internet”, but actually is one of the few that really is a big deal on the internet, so I’m sure that when something like that is put out there,  there’s a whole parade of pickle liking weirdos that come pouring in.

So, feeling fortunate enough to have seen something real this morning, and having no way to send back a bit of hope, I thought I’d store it here. I’m living proof that a prayer for a busy home can be answered. Although I don’t always get a full night sleep, I am happy in my bed.

On Saturday I will be running the Race for the Cure here in Boston. It’s a huge event with thousands of runners and a flat course around the Seaport district. I’ve offered to pay registration fees for any regular readers that want to run.

After that it’s over to Microsoft NERD for Podcamp Boston 5, I’ll be doing a session at 11am with Christopher S. Penn. If you are hitting any of these events please say hello!

Thanks to everyone that got in touch with me after the last post, your concern is truly appreciated. I had written that at a point where I was tired and waiting for things to move. This is why I know I am better than marketing than sales, I like the long term view, and the quick hit of response rates. The sales guys that grind out the large deals one at a time  deserve to get the best cash comp in the organization.

Part of writing that was the fact that I know that when it was all done, I wouldn’t really feel like writing, but I wanted to have something in the pipeline for when it was done. The weekend is finally here and I have a chance to clean up a bit. I just finished my first week at Boston Software Systems, a company that takes the paperwork and data entry out of healthcare. Hospitals often have multiple IS systems (and worse yet there are many groups of hospitals that share data between the multiple hospitals with multiple IS systems), and Boston Workstation can automate the data entry across systems. It’s simple to use and powerful because it is flexible enough to automate almost any task.

I’m excited to be working with a couple of guys that I have worked with before, Mark mentioned I was like the Blues Brothers getting the band together again. Now that my evenings are mine again I’ll be able to get back to more reading, which will result in more to talk about. Thanks for checking in with me here, I’m off to enjoy the weekend.