![]() We can’t count how many corporate videos we write here at Copel Communications. That’s because video is simply a killer medium, however you look at it:
But video can be a killer in other ways, too. Like production budget. Turnaround time. And keeping the project on track as it goes. In this article, we’re going to explain a way to keep your next corporate video on-track, using a technique we’ve developed, honed, and proven over the years. Note that we say “corporate video.” The technique we’re about to describe doesn’t work for narrative films, home movies, or Hollywood blockbusters. But it’s great for videos you need to make quickly and cost-effectively—and which, more than anything, sell. The old-school approach A video script is formatted in two columns: one for audio, and one for video. Very straightforward. (And wholly different from, for example, the WGA format for screenplays, which is structured to support dialogue being delivered by actors within a given scene.) But if you ever looked at a video script, you’ll know, without even reading it, that it’s hard to read. It’s like looking at the blueprint of a jetliner and trying to figure out what makes it fly. There’s stuff all over the place: Indications for on-screen titles, transitions, sound effects, music cues, suggestions for stock footage, directions for layering of motion graphics, et cetera, et cetera. It’s a very useful tool for a video editor. Or a voice-over artist. But for you (or for your client), it’s pretty indigestible. The old-school approach is straightforward: Start with that script. And that’s the rule we’re about to break. Going rogue There actually is somewhat of an analogy for the work-around we’re about to describe. And it’s based not in corporate video, but in feature films. In Hollywood, it’s known as the “treatment.” For our corporate purposes, we’ll call it “the spine.” It goes something like this: A Hollywood screenplay is typically just over 100 pages long (with the rule of thumb being one page for each minute of on-screen time). The treatment is a short narrative description of what happens in the finished movie. Like a synopsis. It could be a page; it could be five pages. Regardless, it’s quicker and easier to read than a 100-page screenplay. And it can be useful in getting people with limited time to wrap their heads around the movie-to-be. The treatment, as we’d noted, is a narrative, third-person account of the story and its characters. But a good creative treatment should be fun to read, and typically will include some choice snippets of dialogue, to help convey the mood and “sell” the piece. The ”spine,” for your corporate video, is similar. But it’s even simpler. The original name we’d given it was the “audio spine,” and that should tell you a ton. Think about it. Your corporate video doesn’t feature, say, two characters toughing it out in an argument or bar-room brawl. It shows stuff that you do, and a voice-over narrator is your guide. Ta-dah. That’s where the “audio spine” comes from. If you can write that announcer track, you’ve cleared a huge hurdle. Plus, you have something that, unlike a two-column video script, is incredibly easy to digest, regardless of the reader/audience. Hence, the “spine.” On your way So the trick is to write that “spine” first. Iterate and improve it via review and revision. Then get sign-off on it. From there, you can paste the approved “spine” into the “Audio” column of your to-be video script. At that point, it becomes straightforward—although of course, not simple—to populate the rest of the script with visuals, sound effects, and all the other elements we’d mentioned above. The nice thing about starting with a “spine” is that it’s fast and easy. It locks the most important element of your video script early. Which keeps all the subsequent steps on-track, and thus faster and better cost-contained. We use this approach a lot. So should you. Need help with video scripting? We’d love to come to your rescue. Contact us today to get started.
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![]() Special news! Sure, we’ve got a good blog article here, and we’ll get to it in just a second. But first, a little announcement, which segues to this article quite nicely: We’re proud to announce that this article, these very words you are reading right now, are officially our tenth anniversary blog post. That’s right: We started publishing these in January 2015, and at that time, committed to publishing them twice a month. If you’re unaware—or simply curious—our cadence goes like this: At the top of the month, we publish articles focused primarily for our consulting/business-owner audience. At mid-month, we publish blogs focused a little more toward our “creative” audience, which includes ad agencies and other creative people we enjoy working with. Ten years! And we never missed a post. That’s 240 articles, if we’ve done our math right. And we’re not stopping now. Thanks so much for joining us for this great, long ride! Let’s dive into our latest topic. Why blogging shouldn’t be a New Year’s resolution If you watched any TV during New Year’s, you were surely inundated with ads for gym memberships. It’s as predictable as sunrise. Why? Because people invariably make a New Year’s resolution to “get in shape,” and those gyms are all too happy to cash in. Be honest. How many people have you known (you may be one of them) who made one of these resolutions, joined a gym, bragged to all their friends for the first month or two… and then kind of quietly quit thereafter? Getting in shape takes commitment. In that regard, it’s exactly like blogging. Or doing social posts. Pretty much anything that has to do with your marketing outreach. Not everyone is an Olympian or an NFL star. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t whip your marketing into shape. The good news: It’s much easier than doing squats or lifting weights. You might be surprised at the trick to all this. Ready? Aim low. What??? What???? You read right. This is counterintuitive advice if ever we’d dispensed any. Aim low. Allow us to explain. The attainable cadence The reason that so many people burn out on those January gym memberships is that they aim unrealistically high. So they over-do it. They can’t sustain that level of exertion. And so they just drop out. By aiming so high, they turn it into an all-or-nothing proposition. Which is exactly what you don’t want to do. So ask yourself this: How many blogs could I reasonably push out, every single month? Factor into your answer disruptions like client emergencies and vacation time. Now take your answer, and cut it in half. Really? Really. The resulting number should be laughably easy to attain. And that’s the number you want. For us, here at Copel Communications, we could probably turn these out every single week. But that’s pushing it. So we do it every two weeks, i.e., twice a month. And, as we’d noted above, we’ve never missed a beat. The calendar trick Surely, we’ve had our share of client emergencies, vacation time, and what-not. But the trick is to create what’s called an editorial blog post calendar in which you pre-select the topics you want to blog about. Once you have that in place (we do ours in the fourth quarter each year for the subsequent year), you can then use it to write your blogs in advance so that you always have a cushion for when those client emergencies and/or vacation dates arise. Think of it. You now have two cushions: 1) You cut your originally-intended cadence in half. 2) You have extra blogs, already written, in the pipeline, which you can publish with a single click. When you look at it—and do it—that way, there’s zero stress. And you hit the mark every time. Again, blogging is just one type of output. You can apply this exact same approach to all kinds of marketing and business-development outreach, including emails, webinars, videos, you name it. Who’da thought it would all start by aiming low? Need help with this or similar challenges? Contact us. We’d be delighted to pitch in. ![]() We recently had a client dump a whole bunch of input on us, as part of a larger marketing project we were helping them with. This data dump, incidentally, was incomplete. They gave us links to videos, and slide decks, and web pages, and Word docs… yet when we cross-checked the lists of stuff we were supposed to receive vs. the stuff we actually received, we found gaps. Plus there was stuff—input—that we flat-out didn’t understand. Was it even relevant? Were we missing something? Clearly, a big team meeting was needed. But our preliminary order of business was simply wrangling all of the input—and making sure that the checklists indeed teed up with requirements of the final deliverable. This was not easy. So. Where are we going with this? And how does this help answer the perennial question of “How will this help me make more money?” Seeing the bigger picture Sure, we’d needed to book, organize, and run, a meeting. And the clock was ticking. This, incidentally, gets to the answer to the italicized question we’d posed above. Time is money. And when you multiply the number of people in the room by what they’re worth, on an hourly basis, the stakes go up real high, real fast. So this is about more than just booking a meeting. There are bigger takeaways than that. This is about bringing different people together in service of a larger—and more profitable—goal. And it’s, frankly, about sweating a ton of details in advance. Chop, chop Know what we ended up creating from all this mess? A “next steps” email to the team we were working with. Think about that. How many times have you had to compose a “next steps” email? It’s hard. We had to lay out:
We still have the email we’d sent to our client. It’s just 397 words long. And yet it took us an hour to write. Yup. We can’t share it here—it’s confidential—but we’ll bet you could read the thing in under two minutes. And that was the intention. And that was why it was so hard to compose. Important point: Every recipient and cc on this email is very busy. We had to make our case, be ultra clear, and close with a specific call-to-action (“Shall we send you slots for a meeting?”). This email took us an hour to write because the initial draft was about double the length of the final one. We sweated the details. We moved paragraphs. We moved sentences within paragraphs. And we cut, cut, cut, as much as we could. Speed reading Honestly: Do you think that any of our client-recipients of this email would have guessed that it took us an hour to write this two-minute read? Of course not. They never gave it a thought. We didn’t want them to give it a thought. But we needed to get stuff done, quickly, succinctly, and efficiently, and this much-sweated-over email was the best way to do it. And think of this: What kinds of replies did this email elicit? Were they equally-well-thought-out, carefully-considered-and-organized responses? Of course not! They were more like “Good idea; how’s Wednesday?” Were we upset by this? Did we feel slighted or unappreciated? Nope. We beamed. Mission accomplished. Because when you fast-forward this story, 1) all of the missing input magically appeared, prior to the meeting, 2) all of the related gaps were filled, and 3) the meeting itself went swimmingly—a full-court press in which seemingly impossible goals were surmounted in a shockingly short timeframe. And, frankly, none of it would have happened without the “next steps” email. Now do you see the broader lesson here? People routinely dash off emails with nary a thought. But sometimes, when the situation calls for it, you’ve got to hunker down and really figure out the tactics of where you’re headed, and do the hard work of putting that into something that can be read at 10x the speed it took to write. Need help getting all of these “tactical marketing ducks” in a row, whether via email or not? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help. ![]() Here at Copel Communications, we get tasked with lots of different writing assignments. There are video scripts. Blogs. Case studies. Email campaigns. Sales decks. Landing pages. Social posts. You name it. Thing is, a lot of these overlap. And therein lies an opportunity—for you—to approach your marketing outreach more effectively and cost-efficiently. Learn from our experience and evolved best practice. It’s actually pretty simple, but it requires both foresight and discipline. Signed, sealed deliverables Our clients will typically want to promote something (a product, a service, an announcement) to as many people/prospects as possible. Which requires leveraging various media, such as web pages, YouTube, email, and so on. And here’s where the “package” concept originated. We realized, early on, that all of these deliverables-centered-around-the-same-story were basically all parts of the same, bigger thing. Thus we coined the phrase “content package”; you might not see it described that way elsewhere. The idea of “packaging” these, however, is powerful. First of all, it’s hugely efficient. If you’re going to create one of these things, create all of them… at the same time. Note that we said “create.” Not, say, “post” or “publish.” That might be staggered, depending on your media plan. But you do want to create them all at once. It’s going to be easier and more efficient for your writing resource, since they’ll need to align their proverbial ducks just once. That will translate to more consistent content across the package’s discrete elements—and lower costs, too. Here’s another advantage of packaging these assignments together: It’s effectively a marketing checklist. By green-lighting a package, you eliminate the possibility of later discovering that you’d inadvertently left one element out. What’s the core asset? The components of any content package will be dissimilar, not in terms of facts or messaging, but rather in terms of sheer size. The package might include, say, an 800-word blog, along with a 280-character tweet (or X-chirp, or whatever it’s called nowadays). The point is, if you’re going to create all this stuff, know that it’s always easier to cut than to add. That matters, whether you’re creating the materials yourself or assigning them to someone else. In other words, you don’t start with the tweet. Identify the biggest, most detailed, and labor-intensive element in the package, and create that one first. Once it’s nicely honed, you can use it as a feeder for all of the others. It’s not quite as simple as doing a “Save as…” and then chopping down, because there are other constraints and style and audience factors to take into consideration. But still, all the heavy lifting should be done for the “core” asset. Example: We have a client who publishes case studies in a tightly-defined three-tab format (“Client,” “Team,” “Solution”). But they’ll also push out a more narrative-style blog about the same story—and the blog always has more detail, captioned illustrations, and little behind-the-scenes anecdotes baked into it. So we always do the blog first. Then the case study. Then the three-touch email campaign. Then the social teasers for the blog and the case study… you get the idea. Packaged goods As we’d mentioned earlier, creating content packages requires foresight and discipline. Foresight, in that you must often delay gratification, knowing that one element of the package may well roll out at some time in the future. And discipline, in that you must remember to employ the content-package approach, and stick to it. But, like any best practice, once you get used to doing this, you’ll find it becomes second nature… to the vast advantage of your marketing outreach, and your production budget. Need help “packaging” up any content, or creating the elements thereof? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help. ![]() Here at Copel Communications, we’re huge fans of remote work. We’ve been doing it, exclusively, for nearly three decades now, with clients all over the country (and sometimes, the world). Remember the pandemic? People asked us how we adjusted. Our answer: The rest of the world merely caught up with us. That said, there are some glorious exceptions. We recently worked on a big project with a geographically-scattered client team with a deadline looming, and we ran the meeting on-site at our client’s headquarters office. Sure, there were disadvantages to this, but there were also some interesting advantages—that you can profit from in your next meeting or on-site. The cons Let’s get these out of the way. Scheduling this event for the numerous attendees was hard. It took lots of emails to send slots and check availabilities. Apps like Calendly might have helped… to an extent. But there were last-minute changes, in which one person’s suddenly-updated schedule impacted everyone’s, and we all had to start again. Then there were the logistics. They had to book the conference room. Order lunch. Set up the big screen for running preso’s in the room. And all of us had to dress up and drive. For a location which was, fortunately, only 30 minutes away, we had to allow a 15-minute cushion for traffic and parking. Not to mention the loading up the laptop and cables and all that junk. So, round trip, there’s, easily, two hours out of the day just gone, with zero work getting accomplished, while adding to the region’s traffic and carbon footprint from the commute. So… this better be one good meeting. Right? The pros After a zillion Zoom calls with this team, it was refreshing to see everyone in person. Everyone had… shoes. It was incredible. Granted, when we got there, after all the hellos and small talk, everyone still had to fire up their respective laptops and log into the local Wi-Fi network and all that. More zero-productive time. But then it was time for us to run this meeting. And of course we arrived prepared. So we shared the agenda, the input materials, the catch-up from the previous Zoom meeting, and started to get things underway. And up to this point, aside from seeing that people wore shoes and being able to physically see who was looking at whom at any given second, it wasn’t any more productive than a Zoom meeting. But there were differences. We’d mentioned that this was basically a fairly stressful gathering, since we were working on a difficult project on a deadline. So it was a little easier to feel the tension in the physical air… and to defuse it as well, with a stretch, a yawn, or a trot over to the snack table. And it was easier to handle the inevitable digressions, too, since we could “read” the room and still watch the clock, and keep the group reined in. But the best, and most un-Zoom-like part of the whole working session was the time spent not working. It was the lunch break. It wasn’t like, “Oh, let’s all log off and log back on in 30 minutes.” It was more like, “Who ordered the turkey club?” and “I thought you were a vegetarian,” and “No, Larry’s the vegetarian,” and then “That’s because my wife got me into it,” and, within short order, the room that had been filled with workers was replaced with a room filled with humans. It was great to simply not work. Hang out. Crack jokes. Our follow-up meeting, after this one, was back on Zoom again. It was infinitely easier, from a logistical standpoint. And it was better. The in-person bonding from the earlier on-site carried over and provided deeper connections going forward. Despite all the remote-lauding we’d done at the beginning of this article, the aforementioned on-site is hardly the only in-person meeting we’ve attended! Typically, we’ll do in-person at the beginning of an engagement, to meet all the players and make connections. That’s probably the best time to do it. But later ain’t too bad, either. Have a virtual-vs.-in-person story to share? Send it our way. We’d love to hear it. ![]() No that’s not a brand of beer. When we refer to “Draft Number 10,” we’re talking about Word docs. Oh. Which begs the question: Why embrace that? Just by its moniker, “Number 10,” it’s daunting and annoying. Who in their right mind would ever enjoy, let alone embrace, the tenth draft of anything? Wouldn’t you be automatically burned out? Let’s answer that “in their right mind” question first. This is business, not art If you’re a painter or a poet, up in your garret, you can dream and wile away the hours, finessing your grand opus—“a hundred visions and revisions,” in the words of T.S. Eliot—and you’ve only yourself (and perhaps your muse) to answer to. But we’re not talking about art here, despite our decades of experience (not to mention lots of awards) in creative services. We’re talking about business. Money. Deadlines. ROI. Where, then, does a Draft Number 10 even come from? Quick oh-now-you’ll-get-it answer: A client who’s a perfectionist. Aha. Now everything should make sense for you. We have a client—we’ve actually had lots of clients like this—who’s a perfectionist. Who will revise and revise and revise a draft until it’s almost perfect… and then decide that it’s anything but, and then trash it, and start over, and then revise and revise and revise again, taking us along for the ride. As a creative resource, you could fight this. But you know that that would get you in trouble, and perhaps fired. You could just go with the flow: “Oh, this is the way they like to work. I’ll just… endure it, without complaining.” It’s possible that you could coast along like this indefinitely. But neither of the above approaches benefits anybody. Thus our advice to you in these situations: Embrace it. Heck, enjoy it. See it for the invaluable paid education that it is: Our fastidious client in this story—like most of the clients we’re lucky to work with, whether they’re fastidious or not—is quite brilliant. We would pay to learn their thought processes. To try and osmose just a tiny bit of that genius. Why do they toss Draft 5 and do a wholesale rework for Draft 6? Incidentally, the method behind the madness reveals—if you pay attention—that overall, these drafts get better as they go. It’s not a simple straight slope, were you to graph it. But the trend would be positive. Put it this way: Wouldn’t you love to see Einstein’s notes en route to e = mc2? We get paid for our services. It’s incumbent on us to remain profitable. So we don’t lose money on assignments like this—while, at the same time, we don’t take advantage of our clients’ generosity. And while we get paid in dollars, often the greater reward is the knowledge. The insight. And, frankly, the ability to help other clients like this in similar situations. As we’d said, we’re not along simply for the ride. We dive right in, on every single draft, seeing what’s changed and doing our best to make it better throughout. That’s why our clients entrust us on this journey. Need help with a client, or project, that feels unending? Contact us. We’d be happy—truly happy—to help. ![]() Boy is this ever a “modern problems” topic. As a former agency creative director, we’re used to, well, directing creative people. But nowadays, very often, you can’t. You can’t speak to them. You can’t see them. And yet you need to direct, and coach, and motivate them, to do their best work. What gives? The gig economy cometh Back in the day, we’d walk around the bull pen and engage with our artists at their drawing boards (yikes!) and computers. We’d go to recording studios and direct voiceover talent and jingle artists. We’d direct photographers on photo shoots, videographers on video shoots, and so on. Very straightforward. Enter Upwork. And Fiverr. And their ilk. The vaunted “Gig Economy,” wherein people can work, and make money, from anywhere. We’ve weighed in on this topic before. It’s a double-edged blade, which democratizes the availability of talent purveyors to buyers, while also (often) encouraging a race-to-the-bottom mentality when it comes to pricing and (often) quality. We won’t get into that here. What we will get into is the way that these platforms, such as Upwork and Fiverr, force you to work. They expressly forbid the talent on their platforms from engaging with the people who hire them… outside of the limited messaging capabilities of the platform itself. Think about that. We’ve had some tricky video assignments, for example, which we needed to dole out to qualified editors. The requirements for success were nuanced. Know the best way to communicate this to the editor? How about a phone call? Or better yet, Zoom? Nope. Not allowed by Upwork. Or Fiverr. (To the point where they’ll banish these workers from their platforms if they’re caught engaging in such egregious violations of their terms and conditions. The platforms are effectively dangling their livelihoods on a string.) So what do we do? How do we surmount these challenges? Is it possible to make lemonade from such tainted fruit? The pen is mightier than the restraint There’s really only one tool at your disposal if you’re looking to get great work out of these gig-economy vendors. And that’s the written word. Imagine that rousing speech and directions you’d planned (or hoped) to give that vendor in person. Write it down. Verbatim. It’s your only/best choice. Sure, you can, and should, list all the mandatories in the project (“The logo must stay on screen for at least four seconds,” etc.). But you need to put the “carrots” in there, too. We’ve ended some lengthy directions with exhortations such as, “If this one comes out great, there will be others in this series. So impress us!” You’re not some HAL-like computer spitting out commands. You’re a person, doing your best to connect to that vendor on the other side of the gig-platform wall. Be nice. Make friends. And don’t be surprised if the street isn’t exactly two-way. You may spend, say, an hour writing up an incredible input package. And you may get in return something as succinct as “ok got it thx.” Don’t be offended. Just roll with it. You don’t need, say, that graphic artist to spend an hour or two on a beautifully written reply; rather, you want them to devote their time to making beautiful graphics, following your instructions in both letter and spirit. Need help getting the best out of a hybrid team like this? Contact us. We do this all the time, and would be delighted to help you, too! ![]() Here we go again! Another year has zipped past… and presented us the opportunity to present you with a compendium of our top articles for consultants from this past year. If you missed any, here’s your chance to catch up. And if you have already seen, and liked, any of these, here’s your opportunity to revisit and brush up. Enjoy!
Have any topics you’d like to see us address next year? Contact us. We’d be delighted to hear from you! ![]() Collaboration is the hot buzzword these days, when it comes to creating documents. Put your doc in the cloud! Let everyone offer input, in real time! The latest technology makes it possible! Isn’t that great? Not so fast. In this article, we’re going to weigh in on what you might not have considered a contentious topic. It’s not just “Word vs. Google Docs,” as the title of this article has implied. It’s more about “synchronous vs. asynchronous.” More importantly, it’s about creativity vs. chaos. Back in the old days We feel impelled to set up this story properly. Not very long ago, if you wanted to write something, you fired up Microsoft Word, and you wrote. When you were done, you had a document—a .doc, or later, a .docx—that contained your efforts, and was easy to share. It wasn’t just Word. There are a zillion other word processors out there, whose features are largely similar. You open them. You use them to write. You end up with a little document file when you’re done. We’ll lump all of these other apps together with Word—the 800-pound gorilla here—since they all operate in basically the same way. Working in this old-school manner, and knowing, in the business world, that documents are subject to input and revisions, it has always been incumbent on you to handle version control. That is, you wouldn’t take the doc you’d labored over, and then, while on the phone with your client, simply make all the changes that they suggest, into that original doc. Of course not. What would you do instead? Before taking down any of the client feedback, you’d do a “Save as...” and create a copy of your document, likely ending its filename with “v2” or something like that. We’re not losing you on any of this, are we? This certainly isn’t rocket science. But we’re describing this in detail to set up a point we’re going to make. Fast forward Google Docs is also like Word, in that, nowadays, there are lots of online/cloud-based word processors that act just like Google Docs. But like Word, Google Docs is the 800-pound gorilla in this space, so we’ll use it as our example here, representing all apps of its ilk. At first blush, Google Docs is identical to Word. It’s an app (web-based, vs. on-your-computer-based). You open it. You create a new document. And you save it to your Google Drive. So far, virtually no difference. But then things change. Since not only Google Docs but the documents you create with it are hosted in the cloud, it’s technically very simple to make documents share-able. Heck, you don’t even have to email them anymore. (Way too much work!) All you need to do is to grant someone else permission to edit your doc, and they can launch their Google Docs, open up your document, and make changes. So your client can type notes to you right in your doc. Or make their suggested changes, right in your doc. This can even happen while you’re working on it. In other words, you can actually have several people making changes to the same document, at the exact same time. And now, this is nothing like opening Word on your computer and sitting at your screen like a writer. It’s more like sitting in a committee meeting. Or maybe it’s more like a kids’ soccer game, with all the kids, of both teams, crowded chaotically around the ball. What’s better? (Or worse?) “Granting permission” is not some technological breakthrough. It’s been around for as long as there have been computer files. But the notion of making this available for a document that can be revised by multiple people in real time (“synchronous” editing) is relatively new: it coincides with the rise of cloud computing and storage. You can make a lot of arguments for how great this new technology is. You could say that it eliminates the laborious emailing of documents. It ensures a “single source of truth,” since the very latest version of the document is all that anyone sees. It makes sure that no one is working on an outdated version. And plus it creates unprecedented transparency: Everyone can see what everyone else is doing, in real time. Surely you’ve seen this: A little circle with someone else’s initials in it, showing them selecting text, or adding new verbiage, or whatever, like a multi-player online game. Now the big question: Does this make the document better? Follow-on question: Is this process better? We’d argue that the answer to both of these questions is “No.” Writing a document is not a democratic exercise. You’ll hear about a document’s “voice”—not its “crowd.” A good document has structure and logic. If various people are all tinkering with different parts of it at once, the final product will collapse like a house of cards. And what about all those worthless outdated versions that are now history? Well surprise: They’re not worthless. More often than not, you want to look at Version 2 when you’re working on Version 4, to see what was there before it changed: Not all movement is forward, and not all change is progress. Yes, there is a degree of “version tracking” baked into these web-based word processors. But it doesn’t offer the control or granularity of the iconic “Save as...” command. And not to sound too pretentious, but how many hands does it take to hold a paintbrush? We’d prefer to get client feedback on a doc, interpret it to the needs of the doc, and then implement it carefully, rather than seeing an anonymously-named editor (“Wombat,” anyone?) arbitrarily adding and cutting. What are your thoughts on this topic? Do you agree with us? Want to try and convince us otherwise? Contact us. We’d love to hear from you. ![]() Oooh. Now there’s an intriguing title, isn’t it? Especially if it’s posted by Copel Communications, where we specialize in writing. How can you say organized without reading? Think about it. Everything you employ to stay organized—such as calendars, emails, and files—all require reading. Is there some secret trick? Why it’s hard There are countless articles out there about getting your business organized. And lots of them are self-serving: They’re basically promoting Slack, or Asana, or Evernote, or Things, or Monday, or Trello, or OmniFocus, or Habitica, or Notion, or Todoist, blah, blah, blah. You get the idea. So we’ll go you one better. Not only will we show you how to get better organized without reading, we’ll also show you how to do it without purchasing any new apps. Take that, Slack! Or Asana. Or Evernote. Or.... well, you get the idea. What don’t you read? There are basic sensory inputs that you can use, and respond to, which don’t require reading. There are, we suppose, scents. Or even tastes. But we’re not going to suggest lemon-flavored sticky notes. (Do those even exist?) Stay with us on this. (If you’re not ahead of us already.) There are sounds. Come to think of it, you already rely on a ton of these all the time. There are alerts for every time you get a text message. Or an email. And of course when your phone rings. There are even little sound effects embedded within LinkedIn: when you successfully make a post or reach out to a connection, you'll hear a little click or warble. Conceivably, you could use sounds to help you get organized; you could create your own, and link them to certain events, and spend you day, Pavlov-like, waiting for the next ding. Naaah. That ain’t it. There are also tactile cues. If you have low vision, you may already rely on a Braille reader. Your phone likely has haptic feedback: When you type or select an icon, you can feel a little click or buzz to help reinforce the action. That’s good. It’s out there. But it’s not something you’ll create yourself. Which leaves one more choice. The universal language The Big Element here is color. It’s so simple. Yet so astonishingly under-used for productivity purposes. We learned about this trick decades ago, in which someone we respected used different-colored index cards to create a project. All the things relating to Topic A would be yellow, and all the things relating to Topic B would be blue. When this person put the deck in order, they could easily see, simply by looking at the stack of cards, how evenly divided the project was between Topics A and B. Brilliant. Picture that: A little deck of cards, sitting atop a desk. You look at the stack, and if there’s a big cluster of blue in there, you’d know the project needed adjusting. And you'd never read a word. Even though each index card was covered with words. Now fast-forward from the age of index cards, to the days of mobile devices and computers. Some of this you may be doing already. But there are opportunities to expand on this. Your calendar program—whatever it is—lets you create categories, and assign colors to them. So if, say, your “Personal” category is blue, and your “Work” category is green, you can see your work-life balance when you simply zoom out to the week, month, or year view. You'd never read a single word. And you can add categories that are similarly color-coded. We know a guy (admittedly an old-fashioned one) who sets his daughter’s category in pink, and his son’s in blue. (His wife? Purple. Stuff he hates doing? Brown.) Read without reading Here’s another. In Word (or any word processor, for that matter), you can set text in different colors. You’ve surely used red to call out important stuff. But we’ll also use colors like gray to denote work-in-progress passages that likely will get deleted later, or simply pastes of source material, to set them apart from the passages we’re actively working on. Again, like a calendar, you can zoom out—to the point where the text is too small to read. Which is what you want! Like our old friend with the deck of index cards, you can see how a Word doc is stacking up, in terms of its content balance. Mac-specific tricks Here at Copel Communications, we use Macs. So here are some tricks you can employ if you use them, too. (There are likely Windows analogs for everything we’re about to suggest here.)
These are just a few tricks. Do you have others to share? Contact us. We’d love to learn them! |
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