How To Fake Being Organized

Turn Here is a guest column on Wednesdays by Caitlin McCabe who blogs over at Smile Like You Mean It and is into architecture, social media, and irreverence.

I am not nor have I ever been an organized person. It’s not like I ever set out to simply ignore the rules of being organized….. it’s just not something that comes naturally to me. For example: remember “clean out your cubby day” when you were in 4th grade? That was my nightmare. I was the kid with 100,000 papers jammed into their cubby so that they had to start a “clean your cubby day” to get the kid to take it all home. I’m not proud of it, it just is.

The worst part is I don’t really want to be organized I just want it to be ok. I just want it to look like I am the type of person that doesn’t have 100,000 papers jammed somewhere.

Over the years I have learned enough tricks to seem like I’m organized enough that people actually tell me “you’re such an organized person” which makes me chuckle because it’s worked. I have enough tricks now to make it seem like I’m not the “clean out your cubby day” kid.

I’m not endorsing being unorganized but here are a few tips in a pinch.

1) Be on time. I can’t stress this enough. Being on time for a meeting sets the tone that people’s time is valuable and you respect that. My trick for this is to set every clock in my house and my car clock ahead at least 10 min. The person who is late always looks unorganized even if they aren’t. Forewarning: No one else in your household will enjoy the clock trick but you.

2) Send follow ups. People who send an email after a meeting with a client, interview, whatever will look well put together. Bonus points if you write the deliverables or next steps in the e-mail.

3) Carry your things in a nice folder. I like those folders that are leather and have pockets for business cards and a notebook. Don’t carry a junk notebook unless you take really good notes otherwise it will look sloppy. If you take few notes (I have a really good memory and I don’t take notes because I can’t pay attention and take notes) you’ll need something more professional.

4) Use Google calendar. I’m not a calendar person and have been beaten by so many calendars I’ve lost count. Not writing dates down means you’ll miss appointments so if you go into Google Calendar you can set up a million reminders for each appointment. I usually have at least 2 emails and 1 pop up and have managed to miss no calls or meetings in the last 6 months.

Training yourself to be more inspired

Turn Here is a guest column on Wednesdays by Caitlin McCabe who blogs over at Smile Like You Mean It and is into architecture, social media, and irreverence.

“For my part I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.” -Vincent van Gogh

“You ever notice that they don’t make TV shows about people that watch TV shows?”  – My friend T

One of the absolute worst things that can happen to a creative person (and aren’t we all?) is the dreaded times when we feel uninspired.  We want to write, create, and play, but it’s no use.  Nothing is happening.  It’s doubly hard when it’s part of our jobs to be creative…. then you get stressed out about not being creative and get even less creative.  If you’ve ever had to write ad copy for a really boring kitchen appliance you know what I mean.

I used to think inspiration was like a little fairy gift that came when it wanted to and had to be coaxed out, appreciated, and thanked.  Sometimes, when you get an unforeseen burst of inspiration, this is true but fortunately you can also train yourself to be better at it.

Becoming more creative can be like yoga or an exercise routine at first, in that you’ll have to make some time and you may feel awkward or annoyed with it.

For example, the part where I tell you that you have to carry a notebook and that you have to use it can be awkward when you are looking crazy scribbling things down in the checkout aisle of the grocery store.  You’ll think “I’ll just write it down later.  I’ll remember,” but you won’t remember; you’ve got to write ideas down as they come.

The purpose of the notebook portion of the inspiration boot camp is not to write down all of the things you think of because they are all nuggets of genius.  You will be writing down ideas so that you start noticing when you have ideas.  You have ideas all the time every day but if you are not taking a moment to recognize them and bring them to the front of your brain you won’t remember the majority of them.

The next step in the inspiration boot camp is to watch less TV and listen to more music.  Instead of one show a week, turn on Pandora.com and listen to something that is instrumental (I recommend Juan Serrano which is Spanish Guitar) for the duration of a TV show.  Doctors and creative genius’s like Shakespeare and Plato state the powers of music in healing and creating.   No one, to my knowledge, has made such claims about TV.

Play more.  At work, it’s important to be more efficient.  During the rest of life, it’s not.  Arranging things, moving things around, and playing with things  can help train your brain to seek other uses for things before you immediately think of a way to deal with it and move on.  I’ve been playing with bouncy balls in checkout aisles and arranging food on my plate to look interesting for years.  It’s also kind of fun to look for faces when you walk down a street or sit on a subway.  You spend a lot of time at work telling your brain to streamline, streamline, streamline and these are good ways to break away from that process.

Another way to start training yourself to be inspired is to start collections.  If you give yourself a reason to slow down and notice what you’re doing you will notice a lot more.  I’ve been collecting marbles and rocks and while I was looking found earrings, beads, phones, and even an engagement ring while I was walking around!

One of the worst things to do is stress out when you can’t be creative (again, pretty tough if you’re paid to do it) but simply walking away and doing something else can be a huge help.  I once sat in a room for 8 hours trying to come up with an idea for a client and came up with nothing.  8 hours.  Instead of waiting for the inspiration fairy to come I should have started doing some simple inspiration techniques like pull out your idea notebook and read through it to bring your mind back to a moment when you were feeling inspired.  The point is, the more you are familiar with that feeling the easier it is to recall it when you need it.

Good luck!

How to delegate for people who hate delegating

Turn Here is a guest column on Wednesdays by Caitlin McCabe who blogs over at Smile Like You Mean It and is into architecture, social media, and irreverence.

Something that not a lot of my online network knows is that I have fake nails.  Everyone in my face-to-face life has an opinion about it. For example, my mom hates them and tells me that it’s ridiculous.  My friend’s husband is enthralled with how much money I spend on them and lots of people think it’s wasteful and/or too much time to have them.  Some people like the fact that I paint them weird (I say stylish) colors.

Really, it’s none of those things.  Instead, my nails were lesson 1 for me in delegating.

Good grooming is important in business and so are your hands.   I hate the idea of presenting an idea with gross, chewed up nails so I started doing them myself.  Keeping up with this generally meant spending two hours each week and buying products.  When I had them professionally done, I only spent an hour every other week and $35.

Hi, my name is Caitlin and I have spent years learning to delegate.

That sentence has made me very, very busy throughout my life.  So busy that I’ve missed a lot of birthday parties, family brunches, movies, and get-togethers.  So busy that I’ve sometimes had a job title longer than I probably should have just because I was “way too busy” to take on any other responsibilities.  Being “super busy” doesn’t mean that you are really important or moving forward.  It just means that you might be halfway to work and realize that you forgot your laptop.  I have gotten to the office and realized that I forgot to put on a bra as a result of early morning conference calls and paperwork.

You are probably too busy too.

I know someone has written “the 4 hour workweek” but here’s the thing:  most of us are just trying not to go nuts with all of our to-do’s and maybe we need a baby step or two.  Also, there are people out there like me who just don’t really delegate well.  Here’s how you should start:

1) Realize that you are too busy. It’s possible you are too busy to move forward.  Once you admit that you are at capacity, you will be able to decide which things need to go.  So say it.  Go ahead, I’ll wait.

Ok, now you are ready to let someone else do something you were once doing, because you want to move forward right?

2) Start Small.  Delegate 1 thing.  For me, that one thing was the 2 hours I was spending doing my nails each week; there was just no way I was going to start with work delegation.   Pick out the thing that you spend 3 useless hours on a week that you can let someone else do.  Maybe it’s answering cold sales calls or explaining what your company does to people.  You might even be surprised, my nail people put my self-manicures to shame and once I calculated what I make an hour and apply it to the two hours I spent doing my nails, it’s less expensive to get them done.

3) Delegate beyond work.  Maybe you spend just the right amount of time on work and you can shift things in your personal life easily.  For example, could you join Peapod and stop grocery shopping?  Could you get a salon blowout and spend less time in the morning doing your hair?  Resist the urge to say that it’s more expensive because that’s assuming that your time is worth nothing which it isn’t.

4)  Pay someone.  This might make you feel better.  Simply asking someone else to take on more responsibility makes me cringe.  Why would someone do another job simply because I asked?  Even if I am their boss.  Create incentive.  Pay them or find some other reward to even the playing field.

The sort of sinister side to this is that if I pay someone or create a reward, I am far more justified in yelling at them if it’s not done or not done correctly.  I could have asked the New Jersey-ite to walk the dog every day, but since I don’t pay him I’d probably end up stuck with it occasionally and I couldn’t really yell at him.  So we hired a dog walker and spend a lot less time running home at noon to do it.

5) Don’t delegate jobs you love even if they are below you.  I will never delegate reading social media blogs.  Even if I am the most busy person in the universe.  My boss once tried to make me delegate advertising strategy sessions to someone else and I felt the bright spot going out of my day.  Don’t delegate things you love in order to move forward or you’ll regret it.

Once you start with small things, I promise it gets easier.

Natural Talent or Practice Makes Perfect?

Turn Here is a guest column by Caitlin McCabe who blogs over at Smile Like You Mean It and is into architecture, social media, and irreverence.

Natural Talent:
I’m kind of a… book girl. I always have been. When I was young, I’d sit in my room for a whole day and read book after book and that’s fine with me because now I’ve read a whole lot of books that most people haven’t. Sometimes it makes me feel cooler because some smart person is talking about a book and I’ve read it. Sometimes it makes me feel like a dork that I’d rather read when my boyfriend wants to go see Transformers.

It has also made me really good at recognizing the dead giveaways that you are a “book person” like:

1) You get really excited when you go to someone’s house and see their bookshelf. You probably linger at the shelf going through titles longer than is appropriate.
2) You judge people on the books in that shelf and decide how well you will get along with them based on their selection. (By the way, I knew Rebecca and I would get along when I saw her bookshelf because she had White Oleander)
3) You have a book with you at almost all times because you never know when you’ll have 5 minutes of downtime.
4) You consider a Saturday morning at Barnes and Noble to be complete heaven.

So, I guess I have a natural talent for reading books, sifting through magazines, and making stuff out of old junk. There are others too I think, but this is what comes to mind first. My natural talent has made me a good fit for social media and advertising because when you read a book, you are always putting yourself into the mindset of someone else, which is exactly what you must do in order to talk to large groups of people online or off.

My natural affinity to this stuff has also kept me interested in this industry for years so I’ve gotten better at taking in knowledge really fast.

Practice Makes Perfect:
Last week I started a hip-hop dance class. I thought it would be fun and I was stressed out and needed to try something new. So I chose something that I figured would be “fun” and “different.” I figured that I would mine that tiny nugget of good dancer inside of me into a hip-hop dance queen. Turns out, that nugget is really, really small.

I was bad.  There is really no other way to put it.  The session was complete with me doing turns so that I was facing the back when everyone else was facing the front and other horrors that I’m still trying to erase from my mind.

When I left I decided that there was no way I was ever going back there. Ever. I think I honestly kind of expected to be somewhat good at it and when I wasn’t I didn’t even want to try. It had been a long time since I had tried to do anything I was really terrible at. My girlfriend told me that I was going to be horrible, maybe for a long while, and that working on it was what made the accomplishment so great.

Malcolm Gladwell wrote “Outliers” on the premise that you have to practice something 10,000 hours in order to be good at it.

There’s no way I’m going to 10,000 hip-hop dance classes.

So my thought is – and I’m talking career choices here, not fun hobbies – that you should choose something that you are more naturally inclined to do, right?  Because otherwise that 10,000 hours is going to be agony.  I mean, I could MAYBE be a hip-hop star after 10,000 hours of practice and then ice skate home through hell afterwards, but it won’t happen because you need the natural talent or affinity to get you to keep showing up for class.  You need both to be successful in your field.

The FTC… Making Sure We Know We’re Not Celebrities

Turn Here is a guest column by Caitlin McCabe who blogs over at Smile Like You Mean It and is into architecture, social media, and irreverence.

I am not at all shocked by the recent rules put into effect by the FTC regarding bloggers disclosing their endorsements.

I’m not shocked because every time I read a mommy blogger or beauty blogger talk about how great this or that product is, I have to wonder if the company sent them that item for free. Did Cuisinart send them the blender they love so dearly or do they really love it? I mean, would you tend to review something more favorably if it came for free? What about if someone actually paid you to write the positive review?

Also, I’m curious as to which bloggers are getting free stuff and which are just reviewing in hopes of getting free stuff…. and who are the ones reviewing things they genuinely like. Honestly, I have seen some pretty damn good bloggers go down in flames because of over-endorsement in their posts.

For the record, no one sends me free stuff. Maybe because I swear in my posts or maybe it’s because I’m generally poking fun of advertising. Maybe it’s because I have strange taste. Who knows.

So for my curiosity about who is getting free stuff, I kind of like this rule. That said, there are a LOT of things I don’t. For example, celebrities.

Side note: I have celebrities on my mind as I’m writing this post in LA, the mother-ship of free celebrity schwag and I’m more or less surrounded by people that make me feel poor and not cute which is, I’m pretty sure, the goal of most beauty advertising.  Should you want to see a 45 year-old with a 20 year-old body wearing tights – not pants – this is your place.

Anyway, product companies send celebrities free items all the time and then tell magazines that Sharon Stone loves their jeans. In fact, celebrities have been doing the “subtle endorsement” for years and years fueled by the gossip rag industry.  Now bloggers start to get in on the fun and suddenly we need a rule about it.

To make the FTC rules simple, you basically have to remember one thing: if it was sent to you for free or if you’re being paid to write about it, then you have to tell your readers. Most bloggers that I know are pretty protective of their readers and would disclose this kind of information in a heartbeat with or without a rule. Most bloggers respect their followers enough to tell them honestly what they think of a product so this would never be a problem. This rule is to stop the type of “pay-per-post” blogging that I have learned to dislike. If you’ve ever ended up on such a blog by accident you can tell right away.

If you’re really worried about this rule consider this: How in the world is the FTC going to police the millions of blogs out there?