Productivity
On a typical day, Javier Yat changes four or five flat tires at his auto repair store in Brooklyn. Decent, steady business but nothing special. When the sun sets, the business magic begins. Most nights, Javier parks a van, loaded with tires, along the Belt Parkway, just down the road from a 12-inch-deep pothole. Nighttime…
Ripped from The Headlines… The Washington state Department of Licensing installed one of those automated phone trees (“Press 1 for… Press 2 for …”) and combined it with AI so Spanish speakers could get answers in their native language. A government license bureau + phone trees + early-adoption AI. What could go wrong?! Well… …when…
Once upon a time, I tried to change the oil in my car all by myself. It didn’t go well. My first mistake: Choosing a drain pan that was too small for the job. My second mistake: Trying to cap the drain while oil was pouring from it to prevent the too-small pan from spilling.…
If you host webinars, workshops, or other live events, here’s a great way to increase the attendance rate: Automatically email a calendar invitation to registrants so the event shows up in their calendar and they’re less likely to miss it. It’s easy to send such invitations when we create an event in Google, Outlook, or…
A few hours before my meeting with Tony, I visited his website to size up his business. I filled out the “join our email list” form in the site’s footer, and a message appeared where the form used to be: “Thanks for submitting your information.” That was it. No thank you page. No follow-up email.…
Some days, more than others, you’re just happy to be alive. Yesterday was one of those days. I was in seat 14B, Southwest Flight 1397 from Philadelphia to St. Louis, staring out the window as the Boeing 737 eased toward the ground for landing when… …suddenly the plane surged upward and turned hard to the…
Back in 2020, when COVID moved me from a commercial building to my home office, Melissa and I rebuilt our backyard. New pool deck, driveway, landscaping, and outdoor kitchen. My home office overlooked the construction site. And for five months, while construction happened, my productivity plummeted. Every time I heard an unexpected “bang!” or a…
The following question landed in my inbox recently from a business owner who’s struggling to turn his book into clients: *** “Hey Tom — How do I get the names and emails of people who buy my book on Amazon? I’ve made a few sales. But I don’t know who the buyers are.” *** Short…
Yesterday, Melissa and I kicked off the new year with a visit to the Saint Louis Art Museum and the exhibit “Anselm Kiefer – Becoming the Sea.” As we entered the exhibit, a museum employee asked us for our zip code and then dutifully recorded it when we told her. The museum tracks where its…
I saw a great question this morning on Reddit: “One marketing tactic you believed in earlier but completely stopped using?” The most common answer: Chasing vanity metrics on social media. Said one Redditor: “I used to obsess over likes, follower counts, all that shiny stuff. It felt like progress, you know? But then I realized……