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I saw this today:

We are committed to continually enhancing your online experience.  
This is accomplished by occasional system outages.

I certainly hope that is incorrect. Perhaps they should have tried:

We are committed to continually enhancing your online experience.  
To accomplish this there will be occasional system outages while we perform upgrades and fixes.

My Resume Infographic

Check out this nifty little Facebook app that turns your LinkedIn profile into an info graphic resume.

Here’s mine—

They also correlate my Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter profiles to give me a bunch of badges—

Let’s Not Do Lunch + Some Other Things We Can Do

Let's do lunch, where there is no room for papers, I don't get to eat because we are talking and my fancy purse sits on the sidewalk inviting scuffs.

I hate lunch meetings. I didn’t used to, I used to think they were a good idea. Now I hate them, here’s why:

I eat the same thing for lunch every day and I eat it when I get hungry, sometimes 11 am, sometimes 2 pm.

A lunch meeting is generally too early or too late—but it doesn’t really matter what time it is, it’s a split in a productive day. And not “just an hour”, it’s the time it takes to get ready, drive to it, schedule work around it, come back and get remotivated.

Lunch is not conducive to serious business, you can’t easily show presentations, if you are pitching during lunch you don’t get to eat said lunch.

When I do go to lunch:

• With my friends, because it’s a good time to see them—before the end of the work day and family time kicks in.
• On Wednesdays, again with my friends, we’ve had a Sushi Wednesday lunch for about 5 years now.
• On second (or third) interviews, when my clients need a break from their day — when it’s social, even if it’s work social.

The one business lunch I look forward to:

There is one lunch I don’t miss. Once a month I meet with a group of people at Corporate Alliance and we have a nice catered meal at a big table (room for papers!). We have some structured social time to legitimately get to know each other. Then we talk about business, mine, theirs, our clients—whatever—and we see if we can help each other or offer advice.

Last time we were there during the structured social time they asked the seed question “Tell a memorable transportation story”. I’m all like, “BLAMMO, I’ve got this, the time my little sister threw up all over me on Trax!”. Then the president of Corporate Alliance tells this heartfelt story where her husband doled out some extra tickets to Obama’s Inauguration to people on the subway—the whole room is tearing up—and I’ve got a barf story.

If not lunch, what then?

So we need to get together, or we are trying to build a relationship—what else can we do? This is where the New Business Order comes in. The New Business Order is how we are doing business, as remote workers, small firms, up and comers in corporations. This is far away from the Good Old Boys Club. We tweet, we chat, we connect in a myriad of different ways, but we still need to hang out together, face-to-face. Here are some ideas:

• An actual meeting. I show up in your office, show you my presentation, we talk business. We share some funny stories. I leave.
• Golfing. But so many of us don’t play golf—how about mini golf? Sounds utterly ridiculous right? But it’s an activity where we spend time together. Bonus, we don’t have to change clothes.
• Go Kart Racing. I love this, I’ve been taken out by one employer and one client for go kart racing. Activity. Time Together.
• Aquarium. Also, sounds weird (ok, some of these are more like date ideas), but stay with me here. Take a client to the aquarium, look at the fish, watch the penguins.
• Do What They Do. Take a tour of their office. I once met a guy that worked in a down testing facility. Like pillows and goose feathers. I was dying to take a tour, unfortunately the business relationship dissolved before that could happen. I have a client that owns a gym, so I did a workout with him.
• Drop off lunch. Drop off some food for your client, or some cupcakes. Whatever, something that says “I was thinking about you, and I’m leaving these here.” You can even get a cookie with their logo on it from Cookie Impressions (who I met through Corporate Alliance).
• Coffee. Morning coffee, let’s get together around 9 and chat and have coffee—not a lot of people in Utah drink coffee, but it’s just a code word for sugar and tasty treats in a house that only sells such things. Get a soda, get a glass of water and ridiculous muffin, whatever.
• After work drinks. While we are on the topic of things a lot of people in Utah don’t do, there is the after work drinks idea. For some people it’s cocktails, again, this is just a code word for sitting somewhere, taking in sugar and perhaps fried food in a house that only sells such things. The important part here is that it bookends the work day — a place you can stop by for 30 minutes between the time you leave work and go home. 5:30 PM.

This guy hates lunch too—Steve sent this to me, I think his actual chat said “this guy hates lunch too”.

What about you, do you hate lunch meetings? Do you have any good ideas for non-lunch meetings?

This work includes the photo “London – Bankside – Mar 2010 – Closing the Deal” available under a Creative Commons Attribution license, © gareth1953.

Geeks and Exercise

What a happy looking piece of equipment. All yellow and sun shiny. Even the first couple swings are fun. And then, BLAMMO!

You are killing yourself. Every day you sit in your fancy Aeron chair in front of your big fancy Apple Cinema Display and you are killing yourself. It starts as an ache in your shoulders. Maybe another one in your lower back. Add another one in your neck (oh, but you just slept on it wrong). And your knees, your knees hurt (but you are getting older after all and you were a dancer for years). And you sit there, and you bang out your projects and you die a crippling death as your bones fuze together and your muscles alternately knot up or became slack and useless. I know because I was there.

And then a guy called us and wanted us to rebuild his website for him. He’s a personal trainer for older adults. We land the job, and I keep trying to understand his methods—because he owns this business with his wife and I want to make sure that a business with a similar structure gets the best of our time and attention. So the rubber hits the road, I pull my photographer along with me and we go do a workout. And we almost die. And my tooth is whistling.

Fast forward, the project is wrapping up and Steve says he wants to try working out at Age Performance. He likes that it’s a private gym (no sweaty grunters, no mirrors, no TVs). And he likes Paul—the owner who would become our trainer.

Fast forward again. It’s been six months and we’ve trained twice a week during that time. Steve looks so different we need new headshots on the web. A woman stopped me in the gym just this morning and told me how great I look. We put on some old clothes for Halloween—they were so loose I had to stuff padding in part of them. These same clothes were too tight a couple years ago.

Why We Exercise

Finding time and engery to exercise is incredibly difficult. As Paul says: as humans we innately want to 1) avoid pain, 2) seek pleasure and 3) conserve energy.

Today I want to pass along part of a blog post from Age Performance. He recently published an article Too Good to Be True listing 60 benefits to exercise. Skate over and read it in his own words, but here are the benefits Steve and I have reaped.

• Increased energy: The right combination of exercise and nutrition creates an hormonal environment conducive to fat loss, increased muscle strength and increased energy. When your body is working at peak efficiency, your energy levels soar! Everyday things become much easier to do.
• Increased Self-Esteem: Gaining control of your body size and weight through fitness is an amazing way to increase self-esteem. You look better and are more confident which empowers you in everything you do. You will find that the self-discipline required and learned through regular exercise spills over into other areas of your life and you will be better able to make other necessary and desirable changes.
• Decreased Risk of a Heart Attack: By exercising regularly and making positive changes in your diet, you lower your cholesterol and blood pressure and greatly diminish the chances of having a heart attack.
• Decreased Risk of Osteoporosis: Regular exercise, especially weight-bearing exercise, reduces the risk of osteoporosis, and can even reverse it buy building bone tissue!
• Increased Strength and Stamina: Every physical thing you do becomes easier which is immensely useful in everyday life.
• Reduced Depression: The production of Endorphins (Feel good hormones) is increased through exercise. Nothing improves mood and suppresses depression better than those endorphins.
• Decreased Stress Levels: The worries and stresses of everyday living (commuting, work demands, conflicts etc.) can stick with you long after the work day is done. Exercise right after work is the perfect natural therapy that can change your mood. You’ll sleep better too!
• And…
• Enhances quality of sleep.
• Improves body shape.
• Tones and firms muscles.
• Provides more muscular definition.
• Enables weight loss and keeps it off.
• Makes you limber.
• Improves endurance.
• Burns extra calories.
• Improves circulation and helps reduce blood pressure.
• Increases lean muscle tissue in the body.
• Improves appetite for healthy foods.
• Enhances coordination and balance.
• Improves posture.
• Eases and possibly eliminates back problems and pain.
• Makes the body use calories more efficiently.
• Lowers resting heart rate.
• Makes body more agile.
• Reduces joint discomfort.
• May add a few years to life.
• Increases your range of motion.
• Enhances immune system.
• Enables the body to utilize energy more efficiently.
• Improves liver functioning.
• Strengthens the heart.
• Improves blood flow.
• Increases maximum cardiac output.

I want to take a minute to thank Paul for becoming a great client, personal trainer and friend. This has been one of the most unique client/consultant relationships we’ve ever had and we’re grateful for it every day (even if it doesn’t seem like it at 7:30 in the morning when we get up to work out).