I might be the last person to know this, but Tuesday is the most productive day of the week. I was alerted to this fact by this blog post, which pointed to some research by Robert Half International. But then when I went to dig in deeper, Tuesday-is-the-most-productive-day-ever was all over the Internet. 

This article says that in 2002, 1998 &1987 the data showed the same thing - Tuesday is the most productive day of the week at work.

Here’s a piece from 2002 talking about how Tuesday is the best day to get work done.

And then there’s this 1994 book: Office Biology or Why Tuesday Is Your Most Productive Day and Other Relevant Facts for Survival in the Workplace. There is a whole book about how Tuesdays are so productive. How could I have missed this incredibly important fact for all these years?

I have to admit, I was a bit skeptical at first. I wasn’t really sure that Tuesday was my go-to day of productivity. Then I was reading a post by Steve Rubel on his Micro Persuasion blog about becoming an expert, and in the post, Rubel included a chart of his Google Reader reading habits. And then it dawned on me that I should check my stats in Google Reader to see what they showed.

I typically read RSS feeds from Google Reader at about the same rate every day, with the exception of the weekends. Or so I thought! Here are my trends for the last 30 days:

Those big spikes? Those are Tuesdays!

Here is the day of week chart:

And just for fun, here’s the time of day chart. Anyone who knows me well - or ever worked with me - will not be surprised at the early morning lull.

So what does all this mean? For me, it means that it’s time to take some deliberate action. If I am more produtive on Tuesdays, I’m going to be proactive about keeping that day as productive as possible. I am not going to schedule meetings on Tuesdays, for example, because meetings break up the flow of my day. And I plan to complete one major, sticky, important-but-difficult or important-but-boring project every Tuesday. I’ll keep you posted on the progress.

What do you think? And what do your *Trends* show? Is Tuesday your go-to day?

*If you use Google Reader, you can find this data by clicking the Trends link at the top of the left-hand navigation in Google Reader.

As I write this post, I’m getting ready to go away for a long weekend with Chris (my husband) to visit friends and family in Philadelphia. Anyone who has read this blog for any length of time knows that both of us are entrepreneurs - Chris helped start Spine Frontier a couple of years ago and I started Pure Incubation back in September. It may be obvious from that statement alone, but let me just come right out and say it - we are both insanely busy with our jobs. It is hard to get away for a vacation - even for a weekend - and to take a day off (gasp!) is practically impossible. But we are doing it this weekend.

As I was thinking about leaving, though, all the reasons why we shouldn’t go away kept swirling through my head. And they almost kept us from going (we didn’t book our flights until 5 days ago, for example). So I thought it might be useful to give my fellow entrepreneurs a list of 10 reasons that they should take more vacations. Refer back to this post anytime you are considering going away, but almost back out. Be strong! Take that vacation!

1) You work too much. I have no problem with working hard - or long - but if you are an entrepreneur, it’s likely that you work too much. Like to the point where you aren’t getting enough sleep, exercising regularly or eating well. Working a lot isn’t necessarily the best way to be productive and it’s hard to stop once you’re in the habit. So stop everything for a couple of days, get some sanity back, and you’ll be able to return to the job with a more realistic outlook on work duration - and you’ll likely be more productive during the hours that you are working.

2) New environments spark creativity. Right before I quit my last job, I took a vacation to Arizona. On the trip, we went to visit Taliesin West, the Frank Lloyd Wright school of architecture. I know very little about architecture, but seeing the amazing creative environment that was built at that school was so inspiring to me that I know that I had to leave my job. It opened my heart up again to the creativity that was just dying to come out - and that I could bury in the sameness of my everyday life.

3) You are getting boring to be around. This is happening to me. I meet with friends for a drink or dinner, and they ask me what’s going on, and pretty much the only thing that I have to tell them about is my business. And to me, it’s really exciting and fun and interesting to talk about my work. But I can tell that their eyes are starting to glaze over at times. Going on a vacation will give me something else to talk about - outside of my work.

4) It’s been a long time since you’ve been on a vacation. Admit it - when’s the last time that you took a vacation? A real one. A work trip doesn’t count. If it’s been longer than 6 months, it’s time.

5) You need to reconnect. For me, the trip will be great because I’ll be able to reconnect with Chris. We see each other during the worst part of our days - in the mornings (when I can barely function) and after work (when all Chris wants to do is veg out and recover from the insanity of his day). A vacation is going to give us the opportunity to spend the good parts of our days together - and this is important. Maybe you need to reconnect with your spouse, or your friend, or your kids or your parents - or maybe you just need to reconnect with yourself (solo vacations are highly underrated in my opinion). Invite whoever it is that you’re missing to go away with you and spend the time reconnecting.

6) You need to get out of the house. OK, this one might just be for me. But my office is IN my house, and I can never escape work (or the house). I love where I live, I look at the ocean from my office window, but I need to get outside of these walls. If you work from home, which many entrepreneurs do for a season, you know what I mean.

7) It’s helpful to remind yourself why you’re working so hard. Most of us aren’t working our butts off for nothing. There is usually a dream, a goal, a vision to come at the end of it. For me, I want to be able to travel. So taking periodic vacations reminds me why I’m doing all of this.

8) You need some fresh air. You’re probably working so hard and so much that you spend most of the daylight hours in your office, wherever it may be. You need to get outside, to breathe the air, to have the sun shine on your face. Typically people spend time outside on their vacations, whether it’s strolling through a neighborhood or doing something active.

9) Talking to people in other places will help your business. No matter what your company is doing or building, you have customers that you need to serve. And getting out of your familiar bubble will allow you to talk to people about what you’re doing - and will help you refine your ideas to make sure that you’re serving them better.

10) Vacations are fun. At least, they should be. And if a vacation isn’t fun to you, do something that is. The point is, you need to lighten up sometimes, have a little fun, laugh, joke around, remember that everything isn’t serious and at the point of imminent collapse (which is how entrepreneurs usually feel).

Bonus #11) Your employees want you to go away. (This is for those of you who have employees.) If you ever worked for someone else, you know how it is when the boss is away - there’s a feeling of freedom, of lightness, of relief. As the boss, you may not want your employees to feel this freedom. But it’s important not only for you to get a break, but for your employees to get a break from you. When you get back from vacation, you’ll find that they are refreshed, as well.

Happy travels!

(the pictures here are all from Philly - “Love” by vic15, Dance Philadelphia by my aim is true, Joan of Arc by pwbaker)

Everyone knows at least one skimmer. Someone who doesn’t really read their email that closely, the person who reads enough to “get the point” but might miss a lot of the details.

The life of a skimmer is trecherous. They go to meetings and get asked a question “about that email that was sent yesterday” and have absolutely no idea how to answer. They never know what time the party is going to start, or who was invited, or what day it is going to be held.

Skimming causes problems. But for whatever reason, skimmers can’t stop. They might just think it’s ridiculous that people send long email messages. They might be “all about efficiency” or “impatient” or “don’t care.” The list of reasons is long.

I know some skimmers, and they are going to think this blog is about them. But it’s not. It’s about what happened to me when I became a skimmer and what I learned from the experience.

I am NOT the skimming type. I am detail-oriented, I read every word. I’m the person who explains what’s going on to the skimmers during the meetings. But with starting all these businesses, I have a lot of details going on at once. And a couple of weeks back, I forgot that my book club was meeting in a week and I still hadn’t bought a book.

My book club is a little non-traditional - it’s a history book club, we pick a different historical topic every time we meet, everyone reads a different book, and then we attempt to explain to each other what we read to try to surround the topic and get a better understanding of history. This is not because we are history buffs, but because - to put it kindly - our historical knowledge is somewhat lacking. In past book clubs, we have read about apartheid in South Africa, the time of the Cultural Revolution and Mao Zedong, and the Crusades. This book club topic was Cuba and Castro, which turned out to be very timely.

So I headed over to Amazon.com to search for a book on Cuba. I have learned my lesson in previous book clubs to not get a book that’s too long, or one that’s too intellectual - I wouldn’t be able to get through either in a week. I also know that the crowds are usually right, so I always go for a bestseller.

So I searched on “Cuba.” The first book was a travel guide, I knew to skip that. Number 2 was a book called I Was Cuba: Treasures from the Ramiro Fernandez Collection, and it was under $20, had a 4.5 star rating with 12 reviewers. I clicked to the page to find out more. The book description said this, the full text is below. But to show you what I saw, I will BOLD the parts that I read (when skimming):

“While most think of Cuba as a mythical island of rum, rumba, and revolution, period photographs reveal a more complex place. I Was Cuba is an original look at Cuban history as seen through the Ramiro Fernandez Collection arguably the world’s leading archive of Cuban photos and ephemera. I Was Cuba showcases rare, vernacular images from the nineteenth century through the revolutionary period, exploring the everyday and the eccentric. With texts from famed Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas (Before Night Falls), this captivating volume is an intimate view into a bygone era of glamour, political upheaval, and astounding visual culture.”  

I bought the book. When it came, I found that this was not a book that I could read for book club - because there were no words. The “texts” were few and far between, and were simply short quotes. This book was a collection of (random, interesting, but not even that historical) photographs.

I bought a picture book for my book club.

And I was caught - a skimmer!

This experience helped me realize that being a skimmer is painful. But that sometimes everyone is going to skim. However, since I don’t want skimmers to skim when they are reading something that I wrote, especially an email, I need to work to combat skimming every way that I can.

So here are the five things that that you can make sure that your email messages get read by skimmers:

1) Put the point of the message in the subject line. Don’t waste the subject line with “hey” or “hello.” Put the subject of your message right in the subject line.

2) Make your point in the first sentence. Don’t take a long time to get to the point or explain background - you can do that later. Make the point in the first sentence of the first paragraph of the message.

3) Elaborate in the rest of the email - but keep your main point in the first sentence of each paragraph. Sometimes skimmers will “read” the whole email by reading the first sentence of each paragraph - so keep your main point up top.

4) If there is something that someone must read and it’s not at the top of the message, use the person’s name, in bold. And maybe underline it. This might offend a non-skimmer just a bit, but the skimmer is sure to notice their name bolded. Skimmers look for bold and bullets - they are a skimmer’s lifeline - so use them for important points in your email message. Because when she’s skimming a long email, Melissa I need you to do this, will really stand out.

5) Put a call-to-action before your signature. At the very end of the message, if there is some action that needs to be taken based on the message, remind the person at the end. “Please call me by the end of the day tomorrow.” or “I need your list of suggestions by noon.” That way the skimmer will know that they need to do something with the email, and your chances of getting a response will go way up.

And don’t follow my example and put a long personal story before the five main points in your message - the skimmers will never get that far.

I recently had this conversation with my Gen X friend (disclaimer: I am also in Gen X) that went something like this:

Friend: This intern, she would just come to work whenever she was available.

Me: You mean, she didn’t come in during her regularly scheduled hours?

Friend: No! She would call and tell me that she “Had class,” or “Something came up.” She just wouldn’t come in. She was an intern, we gave her this job, which was a pain in my butt to organize and manage, and she didn’t show up!

Me: So what happened?

Friend: She eventually asked me to meet with her and said “I’m sorry, but unless you have a specific project for me, I don’t think that I can keep working here.” I was psyched! I told her that the internship wasn’t working out, that I was sorry and that I wished her the best of luck. But good riddence!

Me: What was her deal?

Friend: She’s Gen Y.

Generation X - Those born from approximately 1961 to 1981, 51 million people.

Generation Y - Those born from approximately 1981 to 1995, 75 million people.

There are some pretty significant differences between workers from Gen X and workers from Gen Y (just as there were differences between Baby Boomers and Gen Xers). There are also some pretty significant stereotypes and perceptions floating around on both sides. We may not always get along, but we do always need to understand each other to be able to work together.

In the spirit of teamwork, here are some generalizations about each generation that may help. (Remember - these are generalizations, which means that they will not apply to everyone!)

Generation X: 

• Move in and out of workforce to accommodate career and kids.
• Practical and pragmatic.
• Self-reliant, individualistic.
• Want flexibility & freedom.
• Don’t trust institutions.
• Want to learn and have new work experiences.
• Value relationships over work.

Generation Y:

• Pampered, nurtured and programmed with a slew of scheduled activities since birth.
• High-performance. High-maintenence.
• Believe in their own worth.
• Question everything.
• Like to work on a team.
• Want a structured and supportive work environment.
• Tech-savvy.
• Financially smart.
• Think work-life balance is essential.
• Line between work and home is blurred.
• More than half move back home after college.
• Friendship is a strong motivator.
• Searching for meaning.
• Internet super-users.
• Incredible multi-taskers.

So how does this all combine when Gen X and Gen Y are working together (which is fairly standard these days)? Here are some great resources that are must-reads for understanding the dynamics of working with someone outside your generation:

- The Rising Rift Between Gen X and Gen Y
- Gen Y, Gen X and the Baby Boomers: Workplace Generation Wars
- Generation Y Rules: The Flexible Workforce Revolution
- Management Techniques for Bringing Out The Best in Generation Y

If you have a favorite article on this topic, please leave a link in the comments.

X photo by PixelFixer
Y photo by exfordy

There are so many good things about starting a company. The freedom. The independence. The creativity that it brings out in me. The amazing things that I’m learning. But the one thing that is so incredibly frustrating is that I have to rely on part-time contractors to get anything done.

The last job that I was at, I worked with an incredible team of people. Technically, I guess they worked for me, but each of them was so good at what they all did that I really considered us to be a team with myself at the helm, giving directions and making sure that the company, the development, the product – that everything was moving in the right direction. Quickly. Efficiently. FAST.

Now, I am a solo act. I am still working as quickly as I ever have – probably more so because I’ve upped the amount I’m working to approximately 15 hours per day (all the statistics about how much you work when you’re self-employed are right, it turns out). But no matter how quickly I work, I am always waiting for someone else to get something done.

Let me be really quick to say that I am not blaming anyone for this situation – I am still working with an amazing group of people. It’s just that they are only contracted to work some (small) number of hours per month. I mean, I work more hours PER DAY than each of them work per month. This is the way it has to be, but it really tests my patience.

According to Chris, this situation is attributable to the Good Fast Cheap theory of business. OK, I don’t think that Good Fast Cheap is technically a business theory, I think it’s more a concept that designers use when working for clients to try to help them understand how they work, but it’s a reality with my company so far. Chris’ claim (and I think he’s right) is that you can pick two of the three – Good, Fast, Cheap – but you will have to forgo the third. In my case, I have picked good and cheap, but I have to let go of FAST.

This is really too bad, because fast is one of my favorites.

I have a friend who is a nurse at a large hospital in the Baltimore area. She is committed to environmental causes, and has an “activist” personality – when she disagrees with something, she doesn’t stand by silently and watch things unfold. So when she could no longer tolerate all the bad environmental practices at her workplace, she decided to send the president of the hospital a letter along with a copy of the movie “An Inconvenient Truth.” Eventually, after some follow-up phone calls, she was put in touch with one of the executives of the hospital and is now heading up a committee to try to change some of the less-than-environmentally-friendly practices and policies.

She is frustrated. It’s hard work, slow-going and difficult for a nurse to get buy-in from the executives and directors. She’s putting in sometimes 40 extra hours per week on this project (on top of her regular hours). She is not getting paid for the additional work. And she feels guilty about spending so much time on the project because she could be playing with her daughters.

When I saw my friend a couple of weeks ago, I asked her if it was worth it. She couldn’t really answer me because she feels like nothing has changed from her efforts. But she is hopeful. And she made a convincing argument about why she is trying so hard.

Her belief is that even though she helps her family be environmentally conscious – by recycling, using energy-efficient light bulbs and appliances, eating locally grown food, driving a hybrid car – they will never have the environmental impact that the one hospital has in a very short period of time.

I looked it up. According to the Hospitals for a Healthy Environment (H2E) Web site, “The nation’s hospitals generate approximately 6,600 tons of waste per day. Though we commonly associate hospitals with regulated medical waste generation, as much as 80 to 85% of a health care facility’s waste is non-hazardous solid waste—such as paper, cardboard, food waste, metal, glass, and plastics—similar to what you would find in other commercial facilities.”

In contrast, each individual in the U.S. generates on average 4.4 pounds of waste per day per person. Don’t get me wrong, this is still bad because over the course of a lifetime, the average American will throw away 45,000 tons of trash.

But the hospitals in the U.S. generate that much waste in 6.8 days.

This sounds like I am drawing a conclusion that one person doesn’t make a difference, that no matter what our individual efforts are, they will never be enough to combat the negative impact of big business. But I’m not saying that one person can’t change the world –one person can have a significant impact, just look at my friend – but a company has a much bigger environmental footprint than any one person, and a big company even more so. So perhaps the time of the each individual is well-spent trying to influence the people around them. Change from the bottom up.

So what can your company do? And how can you help to influence the people around you to change? Here are some ways to get things done that will make a positive environmental impact.

Let your employees telecommute. Some corporate cultures are still trying to get over the idea that employees are less efficient if they work from home. The truth of the matter is that companies that offer telecommuting enjoy improved productivity of 7% to 20% or more. And every person that works from home helps the environment. To see just how much, check out this calculator that allows you to measure the amount of emissions and gasoline that is saved through telecommuting by entering the number of workers, miles of the commute and number of days working from home. Just see how quickly the numbers add up.

Recycle. This may seem so obvious. But one company that I worked at (recently!) had no recycling at the office. None. There were not even any bins to recycle paper. When I left that job, I spent the last two weeks cleaning out my office and hauling boxes of paper and magazines to the church down the street where they have a paper recycling dumpster.

Get a paper recycling dumpster. There are probably many places you can do this, but the one that I have seen is Paper Retriever. By signing up for the program, you can get a paper recycling dumpster in your office’s parking lot, fill it with paper and then donate the proceeds to a local school or environmental charity.

Use an environmentally friendly Web host. Facilities like Affordable Internet Services Online (AISO) use solar panels to run their data center and servers that reduce energy use by 60%.

Start reading an environmental blog.
Here are 20 options. By reading an environmental blog every day, it will help keep you plugged into environmental issues and thinking about ways that you can make a difference.

There’s a lot that you can do. There’s even more that your company can do with your help

~ Surprising Green ~

This past weekend, I participated in a benefit walk to raise money for breast cancer research. My team did the walk in honor of my grandma, so a large number of my family members and friends decided to participate. And although I can’t take credit for the idea, I did end up taking charge of most of the logistics and organization of the group. It turns out that you can learn a lot about project management by heading up a charity event and organizing a group of volunteers. So if you want to become a better manager, but don’t want to practice “on the job,” it might be worth the time to get a group of people together to do a good deed. In the process, you might find out the answers to these five questions:

·         Are you are an effective leader? – To be a leader, people need to follow you. By inviting people to participate in a community service event, you can gauge your ability to lead. If people are willing to give up their free time to participate in the event that you’re organizing, you’re likely going to be able to get your employees to help you with a work-related project. Granted, in a work situation, you’re paying people and they are required to follow you, but that issue is likely comparable to the loyalty that people feel to the cause that you’re working toward with your community service project. If you have trouble getting people to participate, however, don’t despair; you can learn how to be a better leader.

·         Are you able to organize deadlines and logistics? – This is one of the most important skills that a project manager needs to have (second only to having a complete understanding of the project that they are managing). Being able to keep track of all the details of a project is the key to finishing it successfully, and this type of project will give you experience organizing the details from registration to fundraising to the itinerary on the day of the event.

·         How good are you at communicating with a diverse group of people? – This was a big issue for me because I was organizing a group of family members of varied technology backgrounds and abilities, and I was organizing everything via e-mail and the Internet. Everyone had an e-mail address, but it really differed how much each person used e-mail and felt comfortable with that mode of communication. A community service project often brings together people of different backgrounds that are organized around a common cause, and will give you valuable experience in working with diverse groups of people, whether it is their technology or ethnic backgrounds that make them diverse.

·         Do you have the ability to get other people to help you? – I organized this event from 300 miles away, so I wasn’t at the family BBQs when much of the informal discussion happened. Some people who lived in town, however, kept me in the loop about what was talked about, and one person volunteered to help get a room for us to meet in afterward. A community service project will inspire many volunteers, and will teach you to take help when it’s offered – especially if the help that’s offered is with doing something that you can’t get done easily yourself.

·         Are you a creative problem-solver? – One of the problems with this event was that in order for my team to get the official t-shirts for the walk, we had to order them 45 days ahead of time. This was simply not possible as the majority of the team didn’t even register until 2-3 weeks before the event. My backup plan was to use a t-shirt guy that my husband knows – but his lead time was 30 days. In my desperation (I wish I could say “In my creativity!”), I headed to the Internet where I found a slew of online t-shirt providers that could ship customized t-shirts within 7 days (as long as I rushed the order). This completely alleviated the stress of trying to get this done before I was physically able to. Snafus like this one are bound to come up with any project that you manage, providing many opportunities to try to think creatively about the problem to come up with a solution that won’t take all of your time and will get the issue solved.

~ Today’s view: http://www.flickr.com/photos/13799608@N08/1470099903/

This is not a comprehensive list of the things that you’ll need to do to prepare your Internet business for globalization, but you need to start somewhere. And if you haven’t started yet, now is the time. This quote in a recent press release from comScore says it all: “Internet users outside the U.S. now account for 80% of the world’s online population, with rapidly developing countries experiencing double-digit growth rates year-over-year.”

Let me repeat that – 80% of the world’s online population is made up of Internet users outside the U.S. Internet users are multinational. It’s time to get started on this. Here’s how.

1)      Make sure your tech people at every level of the organization know the strategic plan for globalization. You may or may not have a CIO or CTO who typically sits at the table for strategic technology planning, but do not leave even the lower-level tech folks out of the discussion on this issue. For globalization to even have a chance at working, the technology behind your site needs to support globalization. And that technology is fairly complicated. My (incredibly) simplified understanding of the issue is that you need to use Unicode. But trust me, there’s way more to it. Just take a look at Microsoft’s “Globalization Step-by-Step.” You need your tech people on this one.

2)      Get psyched up about hiring someone who lives and works outside of the country in which you operate. In order to effectively localize your site so that it really works for people in the country that you’re trying to reach, you’re going to need to hire someone who actually lives in that country. This is the only way that you’ll be able to avoid creating a site that – for the lack of a better way to describe it – feels weird to the local users.  

3)      Pick your short list of target countries. Just because you’re starting to look into globalization, that doesn’t mean that you should tackle every country at once. One suggestion is to take a look at the international traffic that is already coming to your Web site by examining your site analytics or log files. Chances are that the countries that are sending you a lot of traffic before you’ve done anything to your site are going to continue to provide a good market for your products and services.

4)      Register your domain name with the appropriate country-code top-level domains. There are rules that apply to the registering of these domains – some countries require citizenship, for example – but it is always worth trying to get the country-appropriate domain name to support your site.

5)      Practice patience. Just like your original business wasn’t built in a day, neither will your international extensions. It will take time for the local versions of your site to take off and for your site to become established in the markets that you’re trying to penetrate. Stick with it.

~ Today’s view:  http://www.flickr.com/photos/13799608@N08/1439224573/