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Slow Down

Apt Design — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 15:30:51 +0000

This is Part 5 in the Apt Design 2011 Ebook Series – Creating Work/Life Balance.
Click here to get the book and see the whole series.

You move fast.

Admit it. Much of the time, maybe most of the time, you hit the floor running and don’t get a break till you climb into bed at night. Its a problem so many of us are facing more and more in modern times.

Leo Babauta puts it this way in his book Focus,

We live in curious times. It’s called the Age of Information, but in another light it can be called the Age of Distraction. … never have the distractions been so voluminous, so overwhelming, so intense, so persistent as they are now. … More and more, we are connected, we are up to our necks in the stream of information, we are in the crossfire of the battle for our attention, and we are engaged in a harrying blur of multitasking activity.

But now a reversal has begun. You’ve seen it in plenty of other places before this blog post – a cultural movement to slow down, turn off the noise and live more freely. Here’s a look at some ways to live a better life by slowing down and doing less:

Don’t Do. Just Be.

In our current American culture there is so much emphasis on Getting Things Done. We make todo lists for every part of our life and there are thousands of books and videos telling us how to be more productive. Built into our modern worldview is the idea that we are only worthwhile if we are accomplishing something.

Break that thought habit. You don’t need to be constantly doing. Take some time to stop doing and start being. Relax and be yourself. Think quietly. Reflect. Breathe. Look at the stars. Sip tea by yourself while the sun rises. Pet a sleeping animal. Just sit and be.

Kill the Need to Know Instantly

In the past it took awhile to hear about things that had happened. You may not read about events until days, weeks or even months later. As our technology has advanced the time it takes for us to find out about things has significantly decreased until now there are an endless amount of ways for you to know what’s going on as it happens.

People used to survive without that instant knowledge. You still can.

You don’t need to know everything that happens the second that it happens. Try turning off whatever it is that’s constantly bombarding you with the immediate and the now and the urgent. The less you are being invaded with what is happening elsewhere the more you can focus on what is happening where you are. The point is not to see how long you can go without the stream of information, but to kill the need to know everything instantly.

Urgent is Poison

This need for doing things immediately is often worst in your job. You see it stamped across papers and blaring its little “!!!” at you in your inbox. Its called Urgent. And its poison. Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson from 37Signals put it this way in their book Rework:

Most things just don’t warrant that kind of hysteria. If a task doesn’t get done this very instant, nobody is going to die. Nobody’s going to lose their job. It won’t cost the company a ton of money. What it will do is create artificial stress, which leads to burnout and worse.

Relax a little. Slow things down. Enjoy being without doing.

Do This Now:

Try this. Find 5 full minutes to lay on the floor quietly and do nothing but breath and clear your mind of thoughts. 5 full minutes. I think you’ll find 2 things: 1. It will be harder than you think and 2. Afterwards you will feel even better than you would have thought.

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Advice from the Pros: How Writers Should Use Blogging and Social Media

Apt Design — Thu, 13 May 2010 05:42:29 +0000

Recently I gave a workshop at Write on the River, a writers’ conference for North Central Washington. My presentation was entitled Blogging and Social Media: What Every Writer Should Know. I spent a lot of time preparing and had lots of great information for the talk, but one of my favorite parts was getting to show the power of social media directly to attendees.

A few days before the conference I had tweeted some of the most helpful and influential people who tweet about blogging and social media for writers. My basic question to all of them was this, “I’m giving a workshop for writers about blogging and social media – could you give your 140 char. of advice about them?” I received replies from everyone I tweeted, and all within 24 hours.

Thus one of the most powerful aspects of social media is displayed. When else in the history could I get on such easy, instant, direct contact with someone who gets the respect and following of tens of thousands of people?

So without further ado, here is advice from the pros: How Writers Should Use Blogging and Social Media:

Ronnie Smith

Ronnie runs writersrelief.com, a great website with lots of tips, hints, and hot leads for submitting and publishing your books, poems, and stories.
@WritersRelief >10,000 followers

Advice? Proofread. Be consistent. Smile. :-) Sounds like a great workshop.

Dana Lynn Smith

Book marketing coach and author of The Savvy Book Marketer Guides at www.SavvyBookMarketer.com.
@bookmarketer > 3,000 followers

Blogging: Combine author blog & website; plan on paper first; keyword optimize; blog 3x/week http://bit.ly/BloggingResources

Social Media: Choose right networks; build effective profile; budget time; write effective updates http://bit.ly/SocialResources

Joanna Penn

Is the author of thecreativepenn.com, offering TONS of advice on writing, blogging, social media and how to get published. Tweets lots of links to great content for writers across the web.
@thecreativepenn >12,000 followers

get a distinctive blog, add great content regularly, be useful, use multimedia, stay in niche, focus hard on 1 social network

Alexandra Levit

Business/workplace author and speaker with 5 pubbed books and 2 syndicated columns. Featured in New York Times, USA Today, National Public Radio, ABC News, Fox News, CNBC, the Associated Press, Glamour, Cosmopolitan, and Fortune.
@alevit > 34,000 followers

Set aside an hour a day for blogging and social media. Otherwise they will eat up time surreptitiously.

Leo Babauta

Started ZenHabits.net, one of the best blogs ever (in my opinion) and WriteToDone.com, a blog to help writers improve their craft and their art. He’s a true poster-child for noname-to-stardom blogging. With his great content he got over 100,000 readers of his blog in less than 2 years. He’s also published multiple books from his blog.
@zen_habits > 42,000 followers

Writing advice: Say less, choose carefully, clear distractions. And it’s all distractions, if it’s not writing.

Have more advice for writers using blogging and social media? Give it below in the comments and be sure to leave your social media links.

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The Power of a Personal Voice

Apt Design — Fri, 12 Mar 2010 15:30:40 +0000

For the past few months the Gold’s Gyms of the Wenatchee Valley have been doing a great job of connecting to their members in a variety of ways, and not only while they are at the gym working out.

The Gold’s Gyms have been updating their blog often with great fitness and nutrition tips, as well as lots of overall wellness advice. But as the year began Melissa Schwab, a Gold’s Gym member, began blogging on the site about her experience trying to lose weight and get in shape as she participated in the Gold’s Gym Challenge. Hits to the site and comments on the posts are way up as people are excited to hear about someone’s experience from the trenches. They get to hear about the highs and the lows, the good times and the bad – told with the power of a personal voice.

At the same time Gold’s Gym staff ramped up work on the local Gold’s Gym Facebook fan page. And fan numbers and interaction there jumped significantly too. Staff created contests like “Post a picture that best says Strength to you,” kept Challengers and members updated on important times and events, as well as just providing a space for members to interact and support each other online.

To top it off the Wenatchee Valley Gold’s Gyms cross-promoted the blog, Facebook page and corporate site – all linked to each other and displayed in-gym. Members now have a great network online to get information about they gym, receive free fitness advice, hear about other’s experiences and get to know one another.

Your Person-ness

That’s one reason why writing a blog can help your online presence so much. People get that personal voice. They want to know that your company is more than just a big factory churning out goods. With a blog your personality comes through, and so does your person-ness. That’s not the only reason for a blog, and they certainly take time and energy to do right, but showing customers who you are is important.

But maybe even better – what are you clients and members and customers saying? That’s what people really want to hear about. How often do you buy something online without reading at least a few reviews first (witness the power of sites like Yelp)? Being involved in social media – having a Facebook fan page or Twitter account, allows for a centralized hub for discussion about your company. Just like Melissa’s blog, that involves people hearing the good and the bad. But it involves people, and it involves hearing – both of which are good for your company.

Take a minute to think about it. How could a blog or social media help you say something? Or, how can you use those tools to let others talk about you? How could you harness the power of a personal voice?

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10 Excellent WordPress Plugins to Make Your Site Better

Apt Design — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 17:00:05 +0000

WordPress is a great CMS (Content Management System) for building any type of website. Web designers all over the world galaxy love WordPress for its simplicity in setting up, ease in customizing design, and for how simple it is for anyone to make updates to content.

What makes WordPress even better is the great variety of high-quality plugins that add all sorts of increased functionality to your website. WordPress.org hosts a great database of thousands of plugins you can install with one click on your own site. Most plugins are created for free by awesome coders helping make the world a better place. They deserve serious thanks. (So if you are a coder who has created a free WordPress plugin – THANKS!)

In my use of WordPress to create websites that connect my clients and their markets I’ve come across a few that are indispensable. These plugins can be added to your site whether you are a professional developer or hobby blogger. These plugins stand out to me because they:

Are easy to add to the site
Have customizable options
Integrate seamlessly with the WP admin panel
Are easy to add custom design to
Are easy for clients to understand and use (when needed)

(see this article about what makes a good plugin in general)

So, while not an exhaustive list, here are some of my favorite plugins:

Akismet

Somehow the evil spam robots of the universe have even figured out how to leave spam comments on blogs. This can get annoying if you are constantly being bombarded with comments that aren’t real. Akismet is the fastest way to shut off the spam-flow. After installation I’ve never seen a spam comment get into the system. Nice!

Google Analytics

Okay, I honestly don’t use a plugin to add Google Analytics to my sites, I do it by adding code by hand. The point is that you need Google Analytics on your site no matter how you get it there. Analytics gives you an incredible amount of information about visitors to your site – where in the galaxy world they came from, what they were looking for, what they looked at while on your site, and much, much more. If you aren’t getting in-depth reports on your website traffic you need to reconsider what you are even doing with your website.

Google XML Sitemaps

One key to ranking well in search engines is to make your website easy for them to crawl and index. This plugin creates a sitemap for search engines to see what content you have on your site, then submits it to the search engines for you! How much easier can that get?

WP sIFR

The bane of website typography for designers is the fact that we’re limited to using a very small number of fonts for editable text. sIFR is a solution that uses Flash-based fonts to dynamically replace certain text. This increases the number of fonts you can use like, a hundred-fold. Looks way better and stays indexable by search engines. This plugin makes the process of adding this great functionality to your site painless.

Lightbox 2

Images opening in their own lightbox window on top of the current page is way cooler than them opening on their own blank page. Now adding this feature is a three step process: add the Lightbox 2 plugin, add your images, tell them to open (individually or as a group) with Lightbox.

Sociable

One of the best ways to spread the word about your blog or website is to let other people do it for you. Sociable automatically includes a widget at the bottom of your chosen posts and pages for people to share your site via social media. You can choose from over 99 different media sites – add as many or as few as you’d like and make sharing easy on your readers.

Twitter for WP

Everyone from movie stars to soccer moms is using Twitter these days, and if you’re using it it should be included on your site. Some Twitter widgets and plugins are big bulky things that look ugly and take up too much space. Enter Twitter for WP – super clean, simple and small. You can easily style your tweets to match the rest of your site and then everyone can know what you are doing!

WP List Cal

Lots of people want calendars on their site to list upcoming events, shows, or sales. However, it can be frustrating for users to see a big blank monthly calendar staring them in the face, where they then must click on each day to see what’s happening. WP List Cal just displays a beautiful list of your upcoming events, and adding new events is as easy as pie. Which I think means its really easy.

WP Polls

Adding polls to your site is a great way to get visitors to start interacting with your site – and to find out what they think! WP Polls makes adding polls to your site a snap. You can insert the polls into your blog posts, onto pages, or have the newest ones show up in the sidebar.

Yet Another Related Posts Plugin

Keep visitors on your site longer by referring them to other posts that they might enjoy. YARPP uses an algorithm developed by Martians that displays a list of recommended similar posts to the one your visitor is currently reading. Giving readers more of what they want, and giving you more reads – everybody wins!

So, there you go – my favorite WordPress plugins. Are you a WordPress user? What’s your favorite WordPress plugin?

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Now Twittering

Apt Design — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 16:53:58 +0000

Today I am growing my social networking tree a bit more. I’ve signed up for Twitter and begun twittering. Just the word “twittering” sounds fun anyways, we’ll see how it goes. Much more informal than LinkedIn or even blogging, my Twitter posts will give a glimpse of the day to day workings of Apt Design. You can follow me at http://twitter.com/aptdesign . (Icon via Function)

On another note, following my rereading of Cameron Moll‘s old but good post at A List Apart (Good Designers Redesign, Great Designers Realign), I am making some slight updates to the site. You may notice a higher-contrast color scheme and a new menu that emphasizes the pages my visitors come for most. If you have any feedback, leave a comment.

See you on Twitter!

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