 Great photo by Meta AI. “Patch” can mean a lot of things. Patch of grass. Soul patch. Patch cord. Bald patch. We could go on.
Here, though, we’re talking about marketing and advertising. And the idea of a patch—which we’ll define in detail in just a minute—is an oldie but goodie you may have overlooked. It’s so simple and so obvious that it’s easy to take for granted, and thus miss. Let us explain by way of the true client story that sparked this article. We recently were helping a client to create a promotional package for a speaker’s bureau, to get them booked at lots of different live engagements targeting their specialized audience. And we needed to flesh out this package with a “sizzle reel” of their past live engagements: Video clips. Now this client had been on stage a lot. That’s the good news. The bad news is that there was precious little video to document it. We needed every shot, heck, every frame we could get our hands on. And then we found it. What looked like a veritable little silver mine. It was a short clip, but boy was it juicy. It showed our client on stage, in front of a big crowd, delivering some real rousing zingers. It was great! But this silver mine was tarnished. First, it wasn’t created by our client. It was created by someone else who had either organized that event or maybe was in the audience. We found it on YouTube. This created Challenge 1: Find that person and ask/beg/plead/cajole/bargain for permission to use/edit/re-purpose it. This turned out to be surprisingly easy. A quick Googling led us to the poster’s website, and thus to their email address, and they were delightfully generous, to the point of even directing us toward a higher-resolution version of the video clip. Now isn’t that nice? But then there’s Challenge 2. That video was stamped. Right across the lower third, it read “[Speaker Name] of ABC Company, Speaking at XYZ Event 2019.” Oh no! The “[Speaker Name]” was correct; that was our client. But “ABC Company” no longer existed; the client had since changed the name, after, um, 2019, which made this clip look positively ancient. Naturally—since of course you’re thinking of this—we’d asked the original poster of the video (the one who’d granted us access, and the higher-res version) if they had a pristine copy of the source video, with no titles stamped on top. And no, they did not. How do you solve Challenge 2? It’s right in the title of this article: You patch it. You basically build a new title bar, and overlay it on top of the outdated/offensive one. Don’t try and match the style of the old one; why bother? You want this to look intentional, as if that “title” was your idea, and was there all along—not like you’re trying to cover some mistake. Oh, did we mention Challenge 3? Turns out that the original poster had added background music to this video of our client, on stage, speaking. When it rains, it pours. You can’t patch your way out of that one. Fortunately, however, you can somewhat reduce “background noise” (!) in editing, and we’d had our own up-tempo music track for the sizzle reel, which we used to help drown out the old music. Patching, like this, applies to lots of media. You’ve likely seen tons of patches in your life and never ever realized it. They work on TV spots, print ads, web pages, brochures, trade show banners, infomercials, you name it. The only limit is your creativity. Need a creative solution to a tricky marketing challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help!
0 Comments
 Great photo by Grok. In case you were unaware, here at Copel Communications, we alternate our blog articles between those directed toward business owners/consultants (at the top of the month), and our “creatives” audiences of ad agencies and other creative folk (at mid-month).
This article is one of the latter. And it begins with a story. A colleague called us up not long ago, bemoaning the fact that her creative agency (we’re obfuscating/anonymizing here) had seen a sudden drop in business, since all of her clients were switching to AI for their creative work. To say she was unhappy was an understatement; there was a distinct edge of panic in her voice. But was she right? And how does this story relate to you, and your business? Are the ubiquitous doom-and-gloom headlines correct? And what the heck is an “Upwork moment,” which we’d teased in the headline? Let’s unpack this part-by-part. They’re going where? A little more (fudged/anonymized) info about this colleague of ours. Her creative agency serves big you-know-them national brands. They’ve entrusted her and her great staff, for years, to deliver beautiful hand-crafted creative which elevates these brands to their respective audiences. Collectively, there’s billions of dollars of brand equity at stake here. Now ask yourself an obvious question: Are these huge brands suddenly asking ChatGPT to do the same thing for them? Yeah, we’re laughing, too. These huge brands know that ChatGPT can’t come close when it comes to quality. They also know that ChatGPT (or any other widget of its ilk) treads in very murky waters when it comes to copyright clearance. Do you honestly think that they’d risk their billion-dollar brands on that? Do you think that they would dump our colleague and her team, in order to get such sketchy and legally-questionable content… merely to save a few bucks? You think they don’t have “a few bucks”? Or is the answer perhaps far more mundane? Spoiler alert: It is. As we’d told our colleague: “This isn’t AI. It’s just a downturn. A basic dip in your business, wherein a few accounts happen to be slow at the exact same time.” You could hear her sigh of relief. “Oh,” she said. “That, I can deal with.” It was, in short, familiar territory. Solve-able via old-school tricks like shaking the trees and good old-fashioned business development or biz-dev. Beware the ostrich Does this mean that AI isn’t a threat, or at least a factor? Get your head out of the sand. It’s a real thing. But then again, so was Google. So was the internet. We’re still breathing. The world didn’t end. The sky didn’t fall. Which brings us back to our “Upwork moment.” Several years ago, back around 2013, Upwork and other gig-economy platforms, such as Fiverr, burst onto the scene. Many people predicted that they would rob us of all our work and that we here at Copel Communications would promptly go out of business. We’re still breathing. The sky is still blue above us. But Upwork and Fiverr are still here and thriving. So what gives? As it turns out, Upwork was a really great find for businesses who, say, wanted dirt-cheap copywriting and didn’t care too much about the quality. So if you wanted to hire a writer from India who would create a 2,000-word blog for 15 bucks, Upwork was a godsend. This did not put us out of business. All it did was to better delineate various strata of clients and providers—and we don’t interact with either of them. Our work is higher-end than that, and our clients are, too. If you’ve read this far into this article, 1) thanks, and 2) you’re likely in the same watertight boat. Which gets back to AI. Sure, there are tons of people, worldwide, for whom AI/ChatGPT-generated content is good enough, and you certainly can’t beat the price. That is, free. For them, it’s a godsend. For us—and for you, and for our now-breathing-again colleague—it’s just another way the rest of the landscape is evolving around us. The sky ain’t falling tomorrow, either. Have a comment? Leave it in the comments below, or feel free to contact us directly.  The joy of de-selecting. Do not get us wrong. We are not luddites here at Copel Communications! We love shiny new tech.
We use AI a lot, too. So don’t think that this article—about yanking the plug on Apple Intelligence—is about some kind of irrational fear of technology. Nope. It’s far simpler than that. It’s about helping our clients to make money. Wait, what?? Apple Intelligence stands in the way of that? A solution in search of a problem The comedian John Mulaney once compared his aging body to the iPhone: each year it looks the same, but it just gets worse. LOL! We’ve been on Apple tech since the very first generation of Macs, so we have a well-entrenched more-love-than-hate relationship with the folks in Cupertino. But Apple Intelligence crossed a new threshold for us. Sure, you’ve seen all of the “ingenious” new features that Apple will foist on you, every single year, with every new OS update, whether it’s for your Mac, your iPhone, whatever. Each one purports to be the greatest thing ever—which is a tacit admission that the very thing it’s replacing, which had been identically hyped at its outset… wasn’t. Fine. It’s easy for us to throw stones, and we’re well aware of Theodore Roosevelt’s famous “Man in the arena” quote (the important part: “It’s not the critic who counts”). And besides, every time Apple rolls out a controversial feature, it typically back-pedals with a new slider whereby you can disable it. Liquid Glass, anyone? You certainly remember--remember? it’s still ongoing—all the hype around Apple’s version of AI. It was so special that it wasn’t just AI, i.e., artificial intelligence. Oh no. The “A” now stood for “Apple.” Apple Intelligence. Capitalized. It would solve everything in your life. Until it didn’t. The last straw As we’ve taken pains to make clear: We’re not afraid of technology. When Apple Intelligence rolled out, and even as it got updates and bug fixes, we stuck with it, waiting (and wondering) for it to help us in our daily lives. Until it tried to answer emails and text messages on our behalf. Woah. Stop the presses. It’s one thing to suggest some verbiage. It’s another to insert it into a reply by default, whereby our accidentally depressing the spacebar would constitute “Send.” A client asked us a question. We were about to give them a well-considered and nuanced answer, with a few factors to consider. And there’s Apple Intelligence, replying to our client with “Sounds great! I agree!” Fortunately, we caught this before any damage was done. Here at Copel Communications, clients pay us for our intelligence. The real kind. Not the over-hyped artificial kind. Hence the illustration for this article. We effectively rocketed our way to System Prefs to disable this hallucinogenic digital sidekick. Should you? Your choice. But now you know where we stand. And should you contact us, you also know that you’ll get a real reply, from a real sentient human.  Great photo by Grok. Wait, it’s December already? We must have blinked.
Because it’s already time for the round-up of our top posts for consultants from 2025—an annual tradition here at Copel Communications. Here, then, is your chance to catch any articles you may have missed, or to brush up on others you may want to re-visit:
Phew! That should be enough reading and tips to tide you over for a little bit. But how about next year? Any topics you’d like us to address? Contact us and let us know!  Great photo by Grok. If you’re an aspiring business book writer, this article is for you. And if you know someone who is, this article is for them. Share it with them.
Our topic: How to get the most from your ghost copy-editor. We feel pretty qualified to weigh in on this topic, having ghost-copy-edited numerous books for various authors, some of whose works have gone on to become Amazon bestsellers. First things first: Credit where it’s due. Those aforementioned bestsellers did not become bestsellers because of us. It was due to the authors’ vision, as well as the complete marketing team that guided the book through its gestation. Still. We were along for the process from concept to completion. Interested in penning a business book? Let’s dive in. Division of labor When you hear phrases like “ghost writer” or “ghost copy-editor,” you likely think of some celebrity, sitting back and sipping martinis, while some poor hack does all the work of actually writing the celebrity’s so-called “memoir,” or whatever. And that may well be true, in that instance. But that is not what we’re talking about here. Here, we’re talking about you, as a thought-leader in your business area of interest. You want to share your wisdom and experience with others. Done right, everyone benefits: Your readers elevate their knowledge. And you elevate your status as an authority. Heck, a published authority. So this is, clearly, not about sipping martinis and letting someone else come up with the ideas. The ideas here are yours. All of them. After that, however, it gets fuzzier. And that’s not a bad thing. In fact, the opposite is true. When this process is done right, it’s custom tailored to you, and no one else. We’ve worked with authors who are detail freaks. We’ve worked with authors who are bulls-in-China-shops. And in every case, it’s our job to accommodate their style of working. Ta-dah. If you take nothing else away from this article, it should be this: Your preferred and most comfortable style of working is the one that is best for you, when working with a ghost copy-editor. Period. It’s hard enough for you to get these ideas out of your head and down on paper. And then to pay someone to lubricate that process can feel like adding insult to injury. But if it’s a good fit, it will be the opposite. It will be intuitive, stress-relieving, and rewarding. You’ll get to see pages appear that make you say, “Dang! I never realized I was that good!” And that’s just when it comes to the finished product: the pages. In consultant-speak, that’s the “destination.” Which is certainly crucial. But equally important is the “journey.” How do you like to work? In person? Via Zoom? Transactionally and asynchronously, via email? Or some crazy hybrid of all of the above? Are you serious? Are you playful? Do you work in marathons? Or sprints? Again, it doesn’t matter. Whatever works best for you is what’s best. Period. So we’ve done brainstorming sessions to help authors tease out ideas. And we’ve worked with others who have simply “thrown stuff over the wall” at us, nearly completely baked. And what’s our reward? Sure, we get paid. But the far bigger reward is seeing the happiness that our authors derive from both the journey and the destination. Remember: “Ghost.” Our name does not appear, anywhere, on any of the books we’ve helped shepherd to press. So it’s got to be a good relationship—on both sides—for it to work. Writing a book is a big project. It takes a long time, typically measured in months. So be sure you choose a ghost you can live with. Have a book project you’d like to discuss? Contact us, and let’s see if it’s a good fit.  Great photo by Grok. You may know—if you don’t, here it comes—that we’ve been writing these blogs, twice a month, for more than ten years, here at Copel Communications.
How do we always have something new to talk about? More important for you and your business: How can you always have something new to talk about? And when we say “talk about,” we’re, well, talking about things like blog entries. Videos. Social posts. Stuff that keeps you out there, in the eyes of your target audience, as a thought leader. Interesting note: This becomes all the more challenging in the age of generative AI. How can you possibly stand out amid the overwhelming tsunami of auto-generated material? Fast forward We recently gave a presentation on this exact topic. We won’t dive into the details here, but AI—tools like ChatGPT—are amazing at effectively ingesting and then memorizing (how’s that for a mixed metaphor?) the entire internet. Just as easily, they can spit out (first half of previous metaphor) content at will, using said input. But they have one massive limitation that you don’t. It’s why their “intelligence” is artificial, and yours is quite real. We’ll circle back to their weakness—and your strength—in just a second. But first, let’s just talk about the mundane challenge of populating your marketing editorial calendar. You do have a marketing editorial calendar, don’t you? Oh, don’t be embarrassed. Lots of companies lack them. But it’s never too late to start. Think of it this way: Why break into a flop sweat every time you need to push out new material on a pre-determined cadence? If that’s an hour of stress, say, twice a month, why not eliminate it? The solution is easy: Dedicate one big chunk of time, typically around year-end, to simply jot down a list of every month of the year, and then brainstorm the topic you’ll develop content for, for each month. It’s hard, but it’s a one-shot effort, and you’ll end up with a year’s worth of topics. Yes, it’s hard. But there’s a neat trick to it, as the headline of this article has not-so-subtly implied. Back to that ChatGPT weakness. Hindsight is overrated ChatGPT seems brilliant because it can memorize the entire internet. That’s some feat. But here’s a feat you accomplish every day, which it can’t do: You look forward. The internet is a repository of stuff from the past. If you can spot trends among your clients, guess what? You’re already smarter than ChatGPT. This dovetails with our populate-the-calendar challenge rather nicely. While you may be doing this at year-end (or right now, no one cares), you’ll be using information that ChatGPT has zero access to: Your thoughts, and your files. So here—finally!—is the trick we’d teased at the outset: Looking for topics for marketing material for your business? Look no further than your recent invoices. Yep. You read right. Your invoices are magic fodder for this assignment. Look at any given one. It shows how you earned your keep, and how you delivered unique value, for any given client. And therein lies a story. Think back on what you’d billed for. There was, invariably, a challenge to solve. And you solved it. (And your client was happy to pay you for that expertise.) That’s a story. It’s a cool story. It’s a story that showcases your uniqueness and thought leadership. It’s also a story that ChatGPT couldn’t write in a million years. Here at Copel Communications, we practice what we preach. We build our editorial blog-post calendar, and stick to it. And we routinely open up our own billing files for cool stories that we can anonymize and share with you for handy tips and lessons learned. Need help with that next marketing challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help!  Great photo by Juliano Couto. We don’t know a company in the world that enjoys the prospect of exhibiting at a trade show. It’s often the epitome of stress.
But you can alleviate a good chunk of it. Hence this article. Grab the lowest-hanging fruit Sure, you’ll want to promote your presence at the upcoming show. That means creating ads and memes for social sites such as LinkedIn. But what if that were already done for you? Duh. It is, in most cases. The hosting company will typically create artwork that you can use for your own purposes. It’s in the “Exhibitor Kit” you got when you signed up, and/or it’s available for download on their website. These will be pre-created ads that say “Hey [Industry]! [Our company] will be at [Name of Trade Show] in [Location] on [Dates]! Look for us in Booth [Number]!” Granted, these won’t be stunning. Often, they’re stunningly generic. But they are there and you’re effectively getting them for free (with your paid entrance fee). So download ‘em, populate ‘em, and post ‘em. And if you belong to multiple LinkedIn groups—you do belong to multiple LinkedIn groups, don’t you?—be sure to post these things in every group you belong to, at regular intervals. That’s one little bit of pre-trade-show stress reduced. By the way, be sure to take advantage of all the stuff that the exhibiting venue gives you in advance. Submit all the information about your company to help populate, say, the mobile app that visitors will use to navigate the venue. You certainly don’t want to be left out of that. Update what you bring Is your booth or stand-up display skin still showing that outdated version of your company’s logo? Or artwork featuring people wearing Covid-era masks? Now’s the time to re-visit those materials, and update them as needed. This also applies to things like handouts, leaflets, flyers, brochures, and even business cards (you have them ready for that new sales rep you hired, right?). Note that all of the above-mentioned materials are fairly production-heavy, as in turnaround time. So prioritize those first. Get the input out the door and into the vendors’ hands, allowing ample time for both revisions and delays. Also consider the promotional items you’ll bring. We had a client who would prioritize what kinds of goodies to give away at their booth based on whether or not they would fit into a carry-on bag, LOL! It’s true. Whatever works for you. Speaking of updating your materials: You’ll want to tweak your slide deck, for whether you’ll be showing it at your booth, presenting in a conference room, or entertaining prospects in a hospitality suite. Fortunately, unlike those printed materials such as booth skins and brochures, you can update your slide deck with just a few clicks, no vendors or turnaround time required. This is similar to your website. You do have a big tile on your home page advertising your upcoming presence at the show, don’t you? Don’t reinvent the wheel Here’s a classic question: “How do we get more prospects to visit our booth and give us their contact info?” It’s a valid question. It’s also one that’s been brainstormed, and answered, a zillion times. So don’t reinvent that wheel. Use the latest iteration of Google, a.k.a. ChatGPT. Simply ask it that exact question. It will effectively search the entire internet, and give you a list of suggestions, from giveaways and contests to customized swag bags. Speaking of not reinventing the wheel: We had a client employ a little desktop carnival-wheel game, wherein visitors could spin for prizes. Again: Ask ChatGPT: What are some good prizes? Obvious answers are discounts on your services, loss-leader free services, Amazon gift cards, “Spin Again” slots, and so on. Speaking of Amazon: these little wheels are easily found there. They’re inexpensive. And they’re made of dry-erase/white-board material, so they’re easy to customize—and re-customize, say, when you run out of a certain prize. And be sure to pre-write the “Congratulations!” emails you’ll be sending to all the prize winners, since you’ll have their email addresses—and will have input them into your CRM. For the love of QR codes How can you not love QR codes? They apply to almost everything we’d mentioned in this article. Put them on your flyers. On your swag. Business cards. Everywhere. Link them to the most appropriate page on your website—which, in this case, might be a special landing page for trade-show attendees, replete with some kind of promotion/savings for visiting that page (and providing their contact info, booking a call, or other similar call-to-action). Everything we’d mentioned above is stuff that you can, and should, do well in advance. The sooner you do it, the more pre-show stress you alleviate. Need help? Contact us. We’d love to pitch in.  Great photo by Matheus Bertelli. 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.  Our long-suffering dog. Thanksgiving is a tradition. Writing an article about what to give thanks for? Well, we’ve been doing it for so long each November, that it’s also a tradition here at Copel Communications.
Before we list what we’re thankful for, let’s turn the table on you. What are you thankful for this year? It can be big. It can be small. It can be professional. It can be personal. The thing is, there’s always stuff to be thankful for. You don’t need a national holiday to remind you. Just like you don’t need to book a spa day to take care of yourself. Or hug your kids to remind yourself that you love them. Chime in. Leave a comment. It might make you feel better; rest assured that it will make us feel great. The little things Sometimes, it can be a tiny bit of tech that makes your day nicer. We recently upgraded our AirPods, and are thankful that we can finally adjust the @#$% volume without having to reach for a phone or ask Siri. Here’s another technical marvel: A remote-controlled training collar. Our dog has a habit of running out in the middle of the night to bark at the deer; a little beep and vibration from the training collar broke him of that habit. He might still be looking at the deer at 3 a.m., but he’s not barking at them anymore. So we’re thankful for a better night’s sleep. Clearly, we’re starting small. And non-professionally. Let’s shift gears. The bigger/business things In 2024, we’re especially grateful for the power of networking. Whether it’s via in-person gatherings, Zoom meetings, LinkedIn, or forwarding a colleague’s Pitch59 card, it’s opened up new business possibilities. More importantly, it’s connected us to some really nice people. People first, business second. If you don’t like that person, you won’t like working with them. More importantly, the opposite is just as true. We’ll still reach out to, say, second-level connections on LinkedIn, and simply say “hi” to people whose profiles look interesting. It’s better than spamming them with a message-bot. Many people are understandably jaded these days, but there are still plenty of people out there who will respond with a “Hi, it’s nice to meet you.” Again: People first, business second. Saving the best for last We can’t build much suspense here, because you know what’s coming. Aside from the Big Two (having good health and being lucky enough to be in the USA), we’re grateful for our friends and family. That includes the dog. He’s been a good boy. Have a thankful-for to share? Contact us or simply comment below. We’d love to hear it.  Great photo by Andrea Piacquadio. 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. |