 Great photo by Andrea Piacquadio. Zoom! And another year goes screaming past. Are we really ready for our year-end round-up of best-practice articles, written for our beloved creatives audience, here at Copel Communications?
The calendar doesn’t lie. Here’s your chance to catch those ones you’d missed, and/or revisit those that helped:
Have suggestions for an upcoming post? Contact us. We’d love to hear from you!
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 Great photo by Antoni Shkraba. Boy do the months ever sail past. Time, already, for our annual round-up of our top posts for consultants from 2024. Here’s your chance to catch any you may have missed, or to brush up on others you may want to re-visit:
As we start working on next year’s articles, we’d like to take this time to thank you for tuning in to our 2024 entries. We love sharing the love, and your comments make our day. Have suggestions for an upcoming post? Contact us. We’d love to hear from you!  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. It’s that time of year again: Time for the annual year-in-review of our top articles from Copel Communications. We do two of these each December: one for our “Creatives” audience, and another for our consultants audience.
This one is the former. (We’d published the other one recently.) Here are the top articles we’ve posted for creatives, chock full of tips and tricks that you can put to use ASAP. Enjoy!
That wraps up this year. And so… Happy New Year! Any topics you’d like to see us address in 2024? Contact us and let us know!  Great photo by Andrea Piacquadio. 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!  Great photo by Moose Photos 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!  It’s that time of year again: the end of the year. That’s when we provide our annual year-in-review of our top articles from Copel Communications. We do two of these each December: one for our “Creatives” audience, and another for our consultants audience.
This one is the former. Here are the top articles we’ve posted for creatives, chock full of cool tips and tricks. In case you missed any of these, here’s your chance to get some fast, free pointers. Enjoy!
Have suggestions for topics you’d like us to cover next year? Contact us. We’ve love to hear ‘em.  It’s that time of year again: time for our annual year-in-review wrap-up of our top articles from Copel Communications. We do two of these each December: one for our “Creatives” audience, and another for our consultants audience.
This one (although it's posting first) is the latter. Here are the top articles we’ve published for consultants, chock full of counterintuitive tips and business-building tricks. In case you missed any of these, here’s your chance to get some fast, free pointers. Enjoy!
Have suggestions for topics you’d like us to cover next year? Contact us. We’ve love to hear from you.  Boy did this year ever fly past! We hope you’ve stayed productive and healthy.
In what’s become a big tradition here at Copel Communications, we’d like to offer you our annual wrap-up of creative skill-building articles for the entire year. If you missed any of these, here’s your chance to catch up; if you already enjoyed any of these, here’s an opportunity to re-hone your skills. Enjoy!
Have a creative topic you’d like us to weigh in on next year? Let us know. We’d love to hear from you.  It’s that time of year again. Time for our annual wrap-up of business-building posts for consultants from Copel Communications. If you missed any, here’s your chance to catch up; if you had some faves, here’s an easy place to revisit them.
We hope you had a good year, and that 2021 was better than 2020... and that 2022 will be even better than that. Meantime, enjoy the biz-building reading below!
Have a topic you’d like us to weigh in on next year? Let us know. We’d love to hear from you. |