​We’ve worked in marketing long enough to know our bounds. Note the careful phrasing of the name of this article: “Goofy gadgets to help you be more productive.” We never said “guaranteed to make you more productive.” 
 
That said, let’s dive into the challenge, and how it affects you in your daily work life, and, of course, all the neat stuff. 
 
Why is this needed?
 
That’s a great question. Let’s consider the answer before we move on. 
 
Put it this way: You wouldn’t need any of the stuff we’re about to describe—and we wouldn’t need to write this article about it—if you, and we, were all naturally super productive and creative, all day long, without any dips in our performance, energy, or creativity levels. 
 
Of course we aren’t. We’re human. 
 
(Now there is an entire sub-topic of this discussion, which we’ve pet-named the “Best Energy Theory,” revolving around the intentional pairing of your daily peak energy periods to the daily tasks which are hardest to perform, and vice versa, but that goes beyond the scope of this article. Reach out to us if you’d like us to write an article devoted solely to that topic.) 
 
So. There are little gadgets, toys, food, furniture, you name it, which can help you get through the day, and have more/better work to show for it, too. Here, we’ll rattle through some oddball (and not-so-oddball) items from our daily inventory here at Copel Communications. 
 
Some of these may overlap stuff that you already use. Some, we hope, will be new and useful to you. 
 
And of course this is a two-way street. We would love to hear about the stuff you use, that’s novel to us. Reach out or simply post a comment so everyone gets edified equally. 
 
Paging Dr. Maslow
 
Let’s start with the bottom of the Hierarchy of Needs pyramid. If you’re in the knowledge-work biz, you’re sitting at a desk for the bulk of your day. 
 
Don’t go hungry. In the movie business, this is what’s known as “craft service”: a setup of all kinds of goodies (think of a mini convenience store) with sweet and salty snacks, bottled water, you name it. 
 
Pick fun stuff. Keep it in arm’s reach. Think of it as a “caloric heads-up display”: You can keep working, keep reading, keep typing, etc., without so much as taking your eyes off the screen, and not get distracted by hunger. 
 
Or thirst. And of course, yes, there’s caffeine. As in, duh. You didn’t turn to this article to learn about that.
 
Crank up the comfort
 
Where are you sitting, right now? We don’t mean “in your office.” We mean, “what kind of chair?” Again, you want to be comfortable. You want to want to sit in that awesome chair—and only get to do so if you’ll be getting work done while sitting in it. 
 
Some easy tricks: You can (we did) dress up an old leather office chair with a plush sheepskin cover, like the airline pilots use. So it’s never too cold in winter nor too hot in summer. And you can (we did) add a plug-in seat heater, too, for those chilly mornings. Again, you want to love sitting there, so you can be totally relaxed and focused on the work at hand. Put another way: We once heard an expert on airline seating say (and we love this quote): “Comfort is the absence of discomfort.” Brilliant, no? 
 
Dial down the stress
 
Stress, at work, is unavoidable. But you can fight back. We’ve got a whole slew of spring-loaded and sponge-rubber finger squeezers. Stress balls. A neck/shoulder heater. Numerous massaging gadgets, including a lumbar massager and even a pneumatic/electronic eye massager. (As you might’ve guessed, you can’t work while wearing that eye massager; it blocks your vision. But sometimes a ten-minute session helps to regain your focus.) 
 
Reduce the distractions
 
As we sit here typing this, our office window is behind us. Would be nice to peek outside and see how the weather is looking, right? That’s why we added a remote-sensing weather station to our desk. We can see the outside temperature and humidity trends at a glance, and return to our real work, having scratched that itch. 
 
Similarly, we just have some neat artwork in our office to look at and be inspired by: Posters, drawings, cards, miniature sculptures, models. They provide just the right amount of eye candy to keep us sated. 
 
Don’t work in a bare office. Dress it to your liking. Make it a happy space. You’ll be more productive. 
 
Allow for goofiness
 
We participate in more than our share of Zoom calls these days. And sometimes these are flat-out brainstorming sessions, which actually require a degree of hair-let-down goofiness not just from us, but from the other participants on the calls. To that end, we’re fans of all the baked-in video effects that now come with the Mac operating system that let us, on occasion, toss confetti or light fireworks during a meeting. 
 
Heck, we even have a little rubber hand puppet of a great white shark which we keep handy. We can’t tell you how many times he’s bombed into Zoom meetings, often as “our attorney,” to add his opinion. 
 
Have the meetings gone better? More productively? You bet they have. 
 
What are your favorite tricks and tips? Contact us. We’d love to learn them. 

​RFPs—that is, Requests for Proposals—come in all shapes and sizes. Broadly, there are the ubiquitous ones that populate the world of government services contracting. There are plenty of private-sector RFPs out there, too. 
 
In this article, we’re going to address the tipping point that must inform all of your RFP pursuits: the notorious “go/no-go decision.” We’re looking out for your best interests here, trust us. 
 
All-American competition
 
A little background first. Why would a company (or the government) issue an RFP? The bigger question could be: Why wouldn’t they? 
 
Think about it. If you’re an entity that needs to spend money on services (or products, but we’ll focus on the former here), it’s entirely safe to assume that 1) you want the best possible services at 2) the lowest possible price. And what’s fairer, what’s more American, than level-playing-field competition? 
 
So. You issue an RFP. And you let all these suitors compete against each other. You get exactly what you’d wanted. It’s a beautiful thing. 
 
Or is it? 
 
The race to the bottom
 
Let’s get real jaded, real quick. How well does the government do things, compared to private industry? By and large, not nearly as well. There’s no profit motivation. There’s no “Government 2” that they’re competing against. There’s a baked-in complacency and a literal ability to print more money if they need it. 
 
This shows in their work. Think of all the shoddy government services you’ve had to suffer through—IRS, DMV, U.S. Postal Service, Amtrak, you name it. Think of how many times you’ve said, “If only Amazon were running this!”
 
And the crazy thing is, tons of these shoddy government services are actually provided by private-sector contractors! Why? Because they came in with the lowest bid.
 
We’re over-simplifying here—there are other ways that the government procures things, and even in the private sector, there are SLAs or “service-level agreements” which stipulate a minimum required level of performance—but, as we’d intimated, nice and jaded, RFPs often represent a race to the bottom. Cheapest possible—and just passable. 
 
Now pivot this scenario to your business. Would you want to willingly join in, in this death spiral? 
 
To RFP or not to RFP
 
The upside, for you, of competing on an RFP, is that it’s typically a pretty big contract. And it’s all or nothing. You either win it, or you don’t. And either way, you’re putting in a ton of work. 
 
Hmmm. 
 
This gets to the very core of the go/no-go decision. 
 
We were told, years ago, about an NFL coach who had a plaque in his office. It read: “Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing, Coming in second is un-American.”
 
Yowch. Painful. Brutal. But refreshingly similar to your RFP go/no-go decision. 
 
It boils down to this: Only respond if you can, and will, crush it. Partial measures are a total waste of time; expend that energy on other biz-dev. Assess your capabilities and those of your likeliest competitors. Can you crush the competition? If you can almost crush them, what would it take to push you over the top? 
 
Here’s a little anecdote for you. We were recently invited to compete on an RFP for a slate of marketing services. We could see, right away, that it wasn’t a great fit. We knew we could crush a certain part of what this company was requesting, but there were other parts that weren’t our specialty. 
 
We were just about to pass on this one when--hmmm—we learned, through the grapevine, that a few other companies, which we know and have worked with before, were also invited to respond to this exact same RFP. 
 
Know where this is going? Imagine where it went? 
 
Of course. We reached out to those other entities, and said, “Let’s consolidate!” 
 
And that’s exactly what happened. Working with the others, we created a veritable Dream Team… and crushed the RFP. 
 
By the way, there are interesting and creative ways to craft the actual RFP response itself, to help you win it, which go beyond the scope of this article. 
 
We’d love to help you in this realm. Contact us and let’s talk.