How to Blog on Company Time Without Getting Dooced

by Tracksuit CEO

Everybody knows the story of Heather Armstrong who was fired for her blog. From her pen name Dooce the phrase Dooced was born and is now part of our blog-wide lexicon. Now the blogosphere is full of writers and entrepreneurs who are trying to avoid Mrs. Armstrong’s fate. How can you write a blog or keep a MySpace/Facebook profile without getting burned for it? That’s the topic of a panel that I suggested for next year’s SXSW Interactive forum right here in Austin. I am ashamed to confess that I have never been to the Interactive portion of this festival and am determined to make it this year. One part of my multi-pronged initiative for attending this next year (without paying, of course) is to get my panel voted on and picked.

I want my panel to discuss the various ways you can avoid being fired (or not being hired in the first place) for your blog/online profile. And ways you can use your on-the-clock Internet time productively; by blogging or pursuing other online business ventures without getting nailed. I’d like to have a panel that includes both people fired for their blogs and those who have been able to keep both their blog and their day jobs going in tandem.

Fellow blogger Rohit Bhargava from Influential Marketing Blog featured my panel as one of the “panels worth voting for”. I’m right there under Kofi Annan (heard of him?) Thanks Rohit! So please give Rohit a vote on his 3 panel submissions; my favorite being: 10 Easy Ways To Piss Off a Blogger (and Other Mistakes Marketers Make).

And most importantly, in the name of free SXSW admission for the TrackSuit CEO, go and vote for my panel: Blog on Company Time Without Getting Dooced. And please, fellow bloggers, if you’re interested in speaking on my panel (should it be chosen) let me know. I’m pretty wide open right now to panelist ideas. Happy voting and I plan on seeing you at SXSW 2008.

Update: Thank you readers for your votes and support! My topic was chosen for a Core Conversation at this upcoming SXSW Interactive. I’ll be leading the discussion with my friend and business partner Ross Hunter. And guess what? They furnished us with passes to the Interactive and Film segments of the festival. I can’t thank you guys enough and I promise to make this talk interesting and informative!

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Recycle it Your Own Damn Self!

Those blue recycling bins are great. They’re a subtle reminder to think twice before you throw recyclables into the garbage can. Although there are a few people who seem to think that trash goes into the recycling bin (please don’t get me started). But these bins serve as another reminder. They display the three words: Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. And these are in order of importance, reducing lessens the need for reusing or recycling.

I’m always looking for ways to reduce but I recently discovered a way to reuse before I recycle. It’s a system called the ’scratch tray’ and it’s very straightforward. First you save all of the paper you would normally recycle (unless it has sensitive info on it, but those you would probably shred anyway). Then you simply load the scratch paper upside-down into one of the trays in your office printer. You designate that the scratch tray. And a big part of the success of this system is communicating with the people who use the printer regularly. How do you do this?

• Make sticky note reminders to go on their monitors
• When you tell them about it show them an example (”observe: xeroxed butt cheeks on this side, important map directions on the other”)
• Send out an office wide email
• Show them how to print from a different tray (some people still don’t know how to do this, you’ll look like a computer whiz)

So the next time you get an urgent fax regarding the inheritance you’re due from the King of Nigeria– put that paper to some use in your printer’s new ’scratch tray’– after you send them all of your bank account info, of course. First things first right?

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How to do the Algorithm March

I’m taking the day off today to teach the TrackSuit family the algorithm march. You guys should learn it too:

Check out 967 Filipino prisoners doing it!

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Give Me 30 Seconds and I’ll Give You Control Over Your Thoughts

I recently traded my car for a bus pass and I’m getting a lot of reading and writing done on my commute. The only problem is that sometimes when I read in a moving vehicle I start to get car sick. When I start feeling bad I put the book up and immediately start to feel better. Yesterday I went to pull my book out at the bus stop and the very sight of it made me feel ill. I was confused because my mind wanted to read the book but my body was telling me to put it away. It dawned on me that I subconsciously associated the book with motion sickness, so even looking at it made me feel bad.

I mean I’m as sick as a dog and I’m reminded of Alex McDowell in A Clockwork Orange when he’s shown the images of sex and violence while being given the medicine that makes him nauseous. And when he’s released the very thought of sex or violence make him want to throw up.

I started to wonder if I could make it work the other way and (mostly out of desperation) I decide to do an experiment of my own. This morning at the bus stop I held the book in front of me, I closed my eyes and forced myself to feel good feelings. I made myself feel excitement, happiness and gratitude and when I opened my eyes I kept the feelings going. In less than 30 seconds I was cured. It was that easy and that just proves that positive feelings are more powerful than negative ones. I undid weeks of negativity with less than a minute of positive thinking.

From what I understand, that is the basic premise behind NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming). You can quickly change the way you feel about something by simply visualizing it or thinking about it in a different way. How can we apply this to other areas of our life? Can this method work when it comes to people or places? Absolutely it can, and you should give it a try. Start with something small and start to work your way up and each step of the way you will realize how much control you actually have over you mind and your body.

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Who Else Wants to Coin a New Word?

Yesterday I was talking about the phenomena of forgetting someone’s name immediately after they are introduced to you. The word name-nesia just came to me and I was pretty sure I had never heard it before. I just coined a word! Well, not so fast. I went to Urban Dictionary, of course, and I’ll be damned if it wasn’t already there but with a slightly-off definition. That’s okay, I added a new one (pending review).

My brilliant wife coined a new word for being fired from your job for breastfeeding (more on that in a later post). She’s following a 3 step process for getting the word out there.

1. Define the word in Urban Dictionary: just register and submit
2. Define the word in wikis: Wikipedia and create your own at PBWiki
3. Blog about it: Use it as often as you can in your blog, your MySpace profile, just everywhere

Creating a Wikipedia entry can be pretty daunting but all the work has actually been done for you. Find a similar entry that you like, click the edit button next to it, and copy the whole thing, then paste it into your own entry. Edit from there, change the definition and references to suit your needs. There’s no need to learn any html or go too much into wiki etiquette. Hunter & Associates does a great post on why you need a wiki and how to get one going.

Ezra Pound always said “make it new” when it came to language (or was that Confucius?). We should always find ways to express ourselves more accurately and if it takes creating a new word to do it, well now you know how!

In the comments: Let me know if you’ve coined any words. If so, let me know and I’ll work them into a post.

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Name Memorization Lesson from Flight of the Conchords

I was watching this Flight of the Conchords clip where a guy named Brian bumps into a girl named Jenny, but can’t remember her name (or anything about her) for the entire song. Never has nervous laughter been put to music more awkwardly or hilariously.

Being married to someone with an uncanny memory for names (and numbers, and directions, etc.) has it’s benefits, but it can also be very humbling. Just yesterday, in the middle of telling a story, I forgot the same person’s name twice. I had to be reminded of this person’s name two times in the span of 30 seconds! Don’t think I wasn’t chastised for that by my wife with her perfect memory.

For those of us who aren’t blessed with instant name recall, here’s a technique I use that usually helps me overcome these embarrassing episodes of name-nesia. When you’re introduced to someone and they tell you their name, see their name in your mind on paper. Visualize the letters and you should be able to recall it at a later date much easier. If you’re not sure how their name is spelled just ask them, having a grasp of the spelling is key for making this technique work.

And if you run into someone at the park and can’t, for the life of you, remember their name or face, you may not know them at all like our friend Brian.

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How To Increase Productivity Using Your Kitchen Timer

Do you ever feel like there just aren’t enough hours in the day? I sure do, especially when it comes to playing Groovy Girls with my daughter. See, Groovy Girls are the TrackSuit family’s answer to Barbie Dolls (we don’t do Barbie, at least not yet). My daughter likes to play with these little dolls in her gigantic dollhouse. My wife pointed out to me that she works out her problems through this kind of play, much like I work out a lot of things through this blog. If you play with her and listen closely she will reveal a lot of how she sees the world, and when she asks me to play with her I feel it’s an honor.

The only problem is the second I walk in the door I pick up my 3 month old and I want to find out how everyone’s day went. Then there’s dinner and the daily things that keep this house running like a well-oiled machine (or at least a machine that you have every intention of keeping well oiled if you can find the time) and before you know it, it’s bedtime.

We realized that one of the reasons we don’t always drop everything and play dolls with her is that there is no definite amount of time we’ll be playing; will it be minutes? hours? We’d love to play all day but that just isn’t practical. So we came up with a good solution. When it’s time to play dolls or paint or whatever it is we’re not sure we have time to do, we give her the option of how many minutes she wants to play. Offer up 15 minutes, sometimes she wants less, sometimes more. Then set the timer and give her our total uninterrupted attention. When the timer goes off she knows it’s time for us to do something else and sometimes she’s already moved on to other things.

I’ve applied this method to other things in my life: house cleaning, desk organization. I set the kitchen timer or start the stopwatch on my sweet red digital watch (only a true TrackSuit CEO can pull off a red digital watch with business attire) and concentrate on that one task for a set amount of time.

This is a great technique for finding time to hone in on a single task in a world where our focus is increasingly fragmented by things like Twitter and Crackberry.

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What You Should Know About Giving Thanks In Advance

This week I have been trying to sell my car and was having no luck at all. I’m selling it because I just don’t use it. I ride the bus to my day job and I use the commute time to write, read, plan my day and listen to music. I’ve become very fond of our public transportation and decided that I’m ready to make a true commitment. So I put up the ad, but to no avail. Then I read a Message From the Universe in my inbox about giving thanks in advance. I realized that I had left out that very important step in making this happen. So I stopped and did it. I felt the feelings of deep gratitude, that little rush of excitement. And that was all I did. Within a few hours I got an email from my wife. She had totally reworked our Craigslist post. The new version was entitled: Volvo 240 DL Wagon + possible romance – $1750 and I knew it was just a matter of time before the emails started pouring in. And they did!

I realized that I just wasn’t letting things flow. I was annoyed with the process taking so long and was ready to just put a tarp over the thing when I changed my mindset. I changed how I felt about the process, felt the feelings I would feel if the car had already been sold and Voila! It also doesn’t hurt to be married to a rockstar, marketing goddess, food writer, wordsmith. I’m thankful for her too!

I’d really love to see this listing make the Best of Craigslist, so if you like it click the little Best Of button and I’ll let you guys know if it makes the list.

Powerful Visualization Taught In Mushaboom

In the song Mushaboom by Feist she sings:

“Helping the kids out of their coats
Oh wait the babies haven’t been born”

She knows the importance of visualization. In this song she’s going through her daily routine with children she doesn’t even have yet.

The clearer your vision is of what you want, the quicker you will make that dream a reality. And when it does come true it will be freakishly close to your vision. I practice these visualizations in my life and I know they work. You can test it out pretty easily, I did fairly recently. I was walking across our University campus and was reminded of a certain professor that I had when I was a junior. I couldn’t remember his name so I decided to visualize his face with the goal in mind of remembering his name. Later that day I was looking for electronic versions of Leonardo Da Vinci’s notebooks (if you know some good ones please let me know!) when I saw what looked like a related search result. I clicked on the link and BAM! there he was. A big picture of my old professor on a page that had nothing to do with Leonardo himself. It was actually all about this big Dante project he was spearheading. My point is that I set out to find something completely unrelated and I quickly found the name I had asked for earlier that day.

If you’ve never tested this technique out then do it today. Email me or share your results in the comments. And if you have used visualization in your life then share your experience so other people will know how powerful it is. 2 important things to take away with you: (1.) Thoughts become things (2.) Mushaboom is probably the coolest video ever!

How To Get Kicked Off of eBay For Free!

Thomas Jefferson said:

“Never buy what you do not want, because it is cheap; it will be dear to you.”

Meaning, be careful or you could get attached to some cheap piece of crap that you didn’t want in the first place. The TrackSuit CEO’s going to take it one step further and advise,

“Never take a free sample, because it is free; it will junk up your house/life.”

See how I used Jefferson’s age-old wisdom to apply to swag from conventions or sale promotion pamphlets you get on the street? That’s just how TJ and I roll! So the next time you’re offered one of those rubber coin holders (wait, those are cool you’ll want to take that)…the next time you’re offered a pair of dayglo sunglasses with a MetLife logo (circa 1989) think about whether that was something you were in need of before it was offered to you. If it wasn’t then this is an item you didn’t really want in the first place. When you think about the space in your home or office already occupied by giveaway tchotchkes, you will probably realize that you cannot afford to take any more free stuff.

And if you want to know about how difficult it is to get rid of these things then shoot me an email, I’ll tell you about the time I got kicked off of eBay trying to do just that.