Today I spent the day compiling all of the ideas and prioritizing what to act on first. My result was an action plan and a prioritized list of projects.

Since I heard others at the conference wondering what to do first, I thought it would be helpful to write about my process.

This post also serves as an example of the tools that I’m developing for Strategic Life Tools to help others do self-guided life coaching to plan and design their life (though most tools will be less complicated than this one).

If you’re interested in using tools like this to improve your life, sign up on the early access list.

My Process

The process I used had 4 stages:

1. Scan & Tag
   Scan through all of my notes and tag the ideas that are important.
2. Compile
   Type or copy the idea into a central action plan.
3. Strategize
   Develop criteria for how I plan to evaluate the list of potential ideas.
4. Analyze
   Evaluate each idea against the criteria.

For each stage, I processed everything before moving on to the next stage. This helped me stay in the same mental context, which allowed me to process ideas faster and ensured consistency with how I evaluated the ideas.

My notes from the conference came from:

• Moleskin Notebook
  Most of my conference notes were taken in a bound notebook. At previous conferences, I’ve used a laptop, but decided this time to try something different.
• Index Cards
  Outside the talks, I took notes on index cards kept in a pocket index card holder. These included notes from talking to others and ideas that popped into my head while walking around.
• Starred Slack Items
  Anything I wanted to review in Slack, I starred to review it later.

In the past, these often get thrown in a drawer when I returned from the conference or otherwise forgotten about. I’ve learned I need to set aside time to process my learnings afterwards. I had scheduled today as that day for me.

1. Scan & Tag

When taking notes during the conference, I don’t try to evaluate whether they would be good to implement. I aim to listen and learn, keeping my brain out of analytical mode. Thus the first step I did was to scan through all of my notes and tag anything that might be a good idea.

I tagged ideas on paper by highlighting them with a highlighter. When I’ve used Word to take notes in the past, I’ve used the highlighter tool there to highlight my notes.

To help me manage the list of ideas, I used four highlighter colors based on when I expected the idea to be relevant to be:

• Next
  Ideas to work on immediately or in the next month.
• Soon 
  Ideas to work on after the next month, up to 4 months out.
• Later
  Ideas to work on after 4 months, up to a year out.
• Future
  Ideas to work on in more than a year.

Because it’s so close to the end of the year, I defined Next to be tasks to start before the end of the year.

When I tagged ideas, the only thing I did was scan my notes and highlight them with one of the colors. This helped me keep in mind what each color stood for, and allowed me to get everything tagged quickly.

An example of a page from my notebook afterwards is:

2. Compile

Once I had everything tagged, I switched into compile mode. For this I used a Word document divided into one section for each timeframe from the last step. To that, I added groupings for three types of ideas:

• To Do
  Potential projects and tasks to execute.
• To Answer
  Relevant questions about my business to answer that require thought or experiments.
• To Remember
  Insights that aren’t directly actionable, but will be relevant later for a project or task.

I use nested bullet points to keep track of the main idea and its supporting information and ideas. For the outer bullet point this time, I chose a checkbox, keeping me in the mode of action items.

To do this exercise yourself, download the template Conference Action Plan I created, or check out my completed MicroConf Europe 2017 Action Plan.

3. Strategize

Next I developed a system for evaluating ideas. I started by creating a set of dimensions that I could use when evaluating and scoring ideas to determine the most important.

Then I assigned weights to each dimension based on what is important to me in my business currently and created a scoring system for scoring ideas based on those dimensions.

I also created a Word template for evaluating ideas. I wound up using a spreadsheet instead, but the Word template helped me think through how I wanted to structure my analysis. If you want to try using the template, you can download the Project Prioritization Worksheet.

Create Planning Dimensions

I divided my dimensions into three groups: benefits, costs and risks. Technically risks are a type of cost, but I like to keep them separate so I can evaluate and mitigate risks separate from costs.

BENEFITS

• Subscribers
  Will this idea increase the quantity or quality of people subscribing to my e-mail lists or joining my Strategic Life Mastermind Facebook group? Will this idea increase the rate at which people join?
• Leads
  Will this idea increase the quantity or quality of people joining my sales funnel? Will this idea increase the rate at which they become leads?
• Revenue
  Will this idea increase my revenue, either on a one-time or recurring basis? This includes ideas which convert leads to customers, increase the conversion rate of leads to customers or increase upsells.
• Insight
  Will this idea teach me specific ways to do the next ideas better, or general ways to improve my entire business at a foundational level?
• Assets
  Will this idea result in assets like articles, e-books, keywords lists, etc that I can reuse in the future, or which can be added into the site as a potential product?

COSTS

• Time
  How much of my own effort will this take? Once I have a team, how much of my team’s effort will this take? If I am outsourcing or delegating, how much management effort will it take?
• Money
  How much money will it cost? These are costs specific to the idea including direct costs such as buying software & services or advertising and personnel costs such as hiring contractors. At the moment, my fixed costs are low, so I’m didn’t evaluate indirect costs like rent, hosting, etc.
• Energy
  How excited am I do to this idea? Will this idea increase or reduce my energy for doing other projects? Once I have a team, how excited and energetic would it be for the team? Would it boost or reduce morale?
• Focus
  How easy will it be for me to stay focused? Will I need to switch between different mental contexts frequently, potentially opening myself up for distraction or context switching costs? How much will it leverage what I’m already doing in my business?
• Learning
  How much effort will I need to acquire new knowledge or skills to execute this idea?

RISKS

• Alignment
  How related is this idea to what I am already doing in my business? Does it reinforce my existing efforts or do I risk getting too scattered in my projects?
• Commitment Level
  How much do I need to commit on an ongoing basis if I start this idea, or can this be one on a one-off basis? What are the consequences if I stop doing an on-going idea (e.g. start a blog, then let it go stale)?
• Execution Risk
  How experienced am I or is the person doing the idea? What outside dependencies exist that are not within my control that could derail the idea?
• Risk Isolation
  How isolated is the idea from the rest of the business? If it fails, will that failure remain contained or cascade throughout the rest of the business?
• Failure Consequences
  What are the consequences of failure? Are there ongoing costs after the failure occurs (e.g. damage to a brand) or does the failure just have a one-time cost (e.g. shutting down the idea)?

Not all of these are risks in the classic sense, but they are risks from the perspective of how I decided to evaluate my ideas today.

Develop Weights & Scoring

Once I had my dimensions defined, I assigned weights on a scale of 1-10 based on the importance of that dimension to my business. I then created a scoring system to rate ideas on those dimensions.

The scoring system had 5 levels that determined the amount of benefit, cost or risk:

• Extra Low
• Low
• Medium
• High
• Extra High

For each dimension, I created written descriptions of what these levels meant. This allowed me to standardize (somewhat) how I was evaluating each idea on these dimensions. For instance, for the Time dimension, I used the amount of effort required before the end of the year:

• Extra Low
  Up to 1 hour of effort, no management time at all
• Low
  Between 1-4 hours of effort, or up to 1 hour of management time
• Medium
  Between 4 hours and 1 day of effort, or 1-2 hours of management time
• High
  Between 1 day and 1 week of effort, or between 2 hours and 1 day of management time
• Extra High
  Over a 1 week of effort or over 1 day of management time

I still made gut guesses on how the ideas rated on each dimension, but the written descriptions helped me calibrate my gut. The written descriptions were customized to me and where I am in my business right now.

While the same idea could have multiple outcomes, depending on how its executed and external factors, for this exercise I tried to guess what would happen in the most likely scenario.

To allow the scoring system to be used with my analysis, I assigned weights to each scoring level.

I originally used weights from 1-5, but it soon became obvious that this wasn’t creating the right scores. An Extra High idea was more than 5x the effort of a Extra Low idea. So I switched to using multiples of 2 (we’re geeks, right?), with Extra Low having a weight of 1 and Extra High having a weight of 16.

4. Analyze Ideas

My final step was to develop a spreadsheet that I could use to enter, rate and sort ideas to identify the ones that were most relevant for my business.

Enter Ideas

First I entered all of the ideas, coming up with short title for each. I also included the business category, because, when managing my time, I’ll often segment my days into Marketing days, Infrastructure days, etc.

Rate Ideas

After all the ideas were entered, then I started rating ideas. I did this by rating every idea for a single dimension before moving onto the next dimension. This helped me keep the scoring system I developed in my head, allowing me to rate the ideas faster and more consistently. In Excel, it’s also fast to move down a column doing data entry.

Score Ideas

Once I had entered ratings for all of the dimensions for each idea, I created a Total Score column to rate each idea. This was a weighted sum where an idea’s score weight for a dimension was multiplied by the dimension weight and each multiplied result was added together. Benefit values had positive values and costs & risks had negative values.

For instance, a simplified formula might look like:

(Revenue Score * Revenue Weight) - (Cost Score * Cost Weight) - (Alignment Score * Alignment Weight)

I did this using lookup tables to make the weights configurable, so the actual formula in Excel looks pretty gnarly (I actually edited it in Sublime).

Since the Total Score as a raw value made it hard to see how ideas compared relatively to one another, I created a Score Index, which was a normalized version of the total score. The formula was:

(Total Score - Minimum Total Score) / (Maximum Total Score - Minimum Total Score) * 100

Where the minimum and maximum total score were calculated from all of the ideas with a value in the Total Score column.

Sort Ideas

Finally, I sorted the spreadsheet by the Score Index column to get a prioritized list of the ideas.

Note: Because I used an extra header row in my Excel spreadsheet, I needed to highlight all the rows I wanted to sort starting at row 2 before pressing the Sort button. If you use my template below, you’ll have to do the same.

The Results

Figuring out my customer drivers came up as the top result–which makes sense, since it will have a broad impact throughout my business and is a key insight needed to effectively acquire subscribers, leads and customers.

My next step is to enter existing projects and other potential ideas from before the conference, so I can evaluate all of my potential tasks holistically, and develop a prioritized plan for the next couple months.

In doing this exercise, I also realized my dimensions were not optimal, so I may iterate on these as well.

Downloadable Templates

If you want to try this exercise on your own, you can download the templates I created:

• Conference Action Plan Template
• Project Prioritization Worksheet
• Project Prioritization Analysis

While the links are embedded above, to make it easier, you can download examples of how I filled these out:

• MicroConf Europe 2017 Action Plan
• MicroConf Europe 2017 Project Prioritization Analysis

Finally, if you like this approach to planning, and are interested in tools like this for envisioning and planning your life goals–or just changes to your life right now–check out my new business Strategic Life Tools that will be launching later this month. Not all of the tools are this complicated, I promise.

If you have comments or questions about my process or the templates, please post them below.

The post How To Prioritize After a Conference first appeared on Fast Fedora | Trevor Lohrbeer.

1) Work for the acquirer
2) Take a vacation
3) Start a new business

How about all three?

After selling Lab Escape to Teikametrics, I was under a two-year contract that ended earlier this year. After some consulting and prep work, my life partner and I took off for Europe on our Grand European Adventure—a 3-month tour across Europe.

We started at the Méra Festival in Transylvania, toured around Romania, stopped in Belgrade on the way to the Guca Trumpet Festival in Serbia, spent a week exploring Budapest in between the Sziget Festival and the St. Stephen’s Day celebrations, danced our way through Vienna, toured Salzburg, visited my relatives in the Black Forest and Cologne, spent a week improving our dance skills at Balboa Castle Camp, hung out catching our breath in Berlin and ended with three weeks in Italy. Whew!

Now I’m settling in Berlin for a few months to work on my next startup: Strategic Life Tools

Strategic Life Tools will be a monthly subscription membership site that provides a collection of tools and techniques for helping people more effectively plan their future. I’ll be using the many of the techniques described on this site, plus tools & templates I’ve designed for myself and used in coaching others.

If you’re interested, sign up for the Strategic Life Challenge, a free 28-Day e-mail course I’m launching this Sunday that will contain a preview of some of the tools and help you work on your life plan.

Since I want everyone working through the course together, registration closes this Saturday, November 4th at midnight—so register soon.

If you’re not ready for that, but want to join the site when it launches, sign up for early access here. My plan is to launch the site later this month after I attend MicroConf Europe.

It’s been almost 2 years since my last blog post. But I’m finally back!

In future blog posts, I’ll talk more about how I’m building Strategic Life Tools, my future plans for Lean Decisions and what I learned selling Lab Escape. Stay tuned.

The post My Next Startup: Strategic Life Tools first appeared on Fast Fedora | Trevor Lohrbeer.

As part of developing my plan for 2016, I decided to grade myself on how well I achieved my 2015 plan. I know report cards can be stressful for some people. I personally view grades not as judgments, but as feedback on how I performed. Grades are a convenient language for me to rate myself and identify areas for improvement.

How did I do? Overall, I would give myself a C+. I achieved most of my important goals, but fell short on many others.

Below you can see the details of my report card, as it relates to my 2015 plan. I’ll be using this to improve how I plan the upcoming year.

If you’re interested in conducting your own annual review, check out Chris Guillibeau’s How To Conduct Your Own Annual Review, or see examples by reading Sacha Chua’s 2015 In Review or James Clear’s 2015 Annual Review.

Themes

Words provide touchstones that allow us to define and connect with the story arcs of our lives.

For 2015, I chose one word for each major part of my life and two phrases for the year. My grades for how well I lived up to my themes are below.

Phrases

Words

Objectives & Key Results

My Objectives & Key Results (OKRs) were a hybrid with S.M.A.R.T. goals (Specific. Measureable. Achievable. Results-Focused. Timely). Objectives in OKRs should feel uncomfortable & ambitious. Some of mine were, some weren’t.

Priorities

More important than what I achieved is how my achievements aligned with my priorities. At the beginning of 2015, I did a paired comparison of my objectives for the first half of 2015. My priorities, with their associated weights and final grades are below.

The post My 2015 Report Card first appeared on Fast Fedora | Trevor Lohrbeer.

While surveys can be useful during customer discovery to understand the problems of potential customers and how your idea might solve their problem, they don’t validate that you have a market. They only suggest that a market may exist for a solution like yours.

To validate a market, you must have potential customers give up something of value in exchange for the hope of your solution.

Potential Customers

Talking to your mom, friends and business advisors can be useful to eliminate truly bad ideas. But unless the person you’re talking to has a decent chance of paying you money for your solution, they are not a potential customer.

Potential customers are the only people who count when looking for customer validation, since your business will survive or fail based on who pays you, not who likes your idea (or who tells you they like your idea, even if they don’t).

…Must Give Up Value…

Value can be personal details, time, reputation or money. Money is the ultimate validation.

If a person does not give up something of value, you have not validated that person as a potential customer. Clear and simple. Surveys almost always fail this test.

…In Exchange For…

The exchange is critical. If the exchange is not for your specific solution, you haven’t validated the customer.

People might agree to spend more time with you for social reasons, to give back to the community or because you’re fun to talk to. Exchanging time is only valid as customer validation when the person giving up their time is doing so to move closer to buying your solution.

And only after they know what your promise is. Giving up time for an initial interview or giving up contact details before hearing your pitch are not valid exchanges in the context of customer validation.

…The Hope Of Your Solution.

You may not have a product or service to exchange. But you can provide hope.

Even if you have a product or service, most customers won’t receive its benefit until after they purchase it. Sales & marketing deliver hope that those benefits will be received.

You give hope by showing you understand a potential customer’s need and how to satiate it.

Hope fuels desire. If no potential customer desires what you are presenting, and hopes to one day purchase it, you have no customer validation.

Where Surveys Are Valuable

Surveys don’t provide customer validation. But they do help with customer discovery: identifying the needs and identities of potential customers.

But you know what’s even better than surveys? Interviews.

Surveys restrict you to a fixed set of questions. Interviews allow you to explore a potential customer’s answers and gain far greater insight.

To learn how to do customer interviews right, check out:

• The Mom Test
• Jobs To Be Done
• How to Interview Your Customers

Special thanks to John at Asheville Startup Weekend for introducing me to the Mom Test, and for inspiring this post.

The post Surveys Are Not Customer Validation first appeared on Fast Fedora | Trevor Lohrbeer.

I have a secret: I recover well.

Today, in fact, is a major recovery day. I’ve been working on six daily habits. I broke my daily networking habit last month when work got intense. Then this past Wednesday, I broke all the rest in one fell swoop.

Recovering from habit failure is an rarely discussed key to habit success. Today, in honor of restarting all of my daily habits, and to fulfill my monthly blog post habit, I’ll discuss my strategies for recovering from habit failure.

How I Used To Approach Habits

I used to approach habits as an all-or-nothing venture. I either met my goal or didn’t.

I set high goals too. I wanted to push myself and get inspired by being ambitious.

I treated habits like a cliff face I had to scale. But climbing a cliff each time you need to start a habit can be discouraging. Big leaps can be tiring.

I switched to a staircase approach to starting a habit. I’d increase gradually, building up my willpower and gaining momentum. But when I fell, I still fell hard. The cliff was still waiting for me on the other end.

My New Approach

Now I use a staircase on both ends. I have small steps to build a habit and small stumbles to recover when I mess up. I rarely have a big fall anymore.

What do I mean by small stumbles?

I build stumbles into how I approach habits.

For exercise, I have a simple rule: exercise every day. I make it a priority, so most days it happens. But sometimes it doesn’t. When that happens, I have a fallback rule: skip no more than 2 days without exercising.

Because of this, when I break my exercise habit, I haven’t broken it entirely. I’ve moved to a lower level of commitment. This makes it easier to get back up.

I set low expectations.

For exercise, my complete rule is: exercise every day for at least 10 minutes. My real goal is to get 30-40 minutes of exercise a day. But by setting a low bar for success, I make it easier to keep my habit on days I’m feeling weak or busy.

That works well for my psychology. I like streaks and not having my habits broken.

Ultimately, I manage the momentum of my habits.

Rather than coming to a full stop, I decelerate. I shift to lower levels of effort.

Just like a car, getting back up to speed with my habits is easier if I have momentum. And if I do completely break my habit, small steps help me restart easily and get rolling again.

Sometimes though, like this week, I lose all momentum. 

To get restarted, I commit to a restart date. Before that date, I don’t waste my effort trying to do my habit. Half-hearted habits can quickly drain my resolve.

Instead, I prepare my environment and my psyche to restart on that date.

I like to start on significant days–even if the significance is arbitrary. The first day of the week, month or quarter resonates with me, or, as I’m discovering today, the 15th of the month, as the halfway point.

Finally, I set a lower bar when traveling or on vacation.

Setting a lower level of commitment allows me to maintain momentum and keep my habit going in some form, making it easier to ramp back up when I return home. I’m also starting to play with habits that only kick in while travelling.

In the end, habits are only habits if you do them regularly. All of my strategies aim to meet that one goal: do habits regularly.

What strategies do you use to recover from habit failure?

The post How to Recover From Habit Failure first appeared on Fast Fedora | Trevor Lohrbeer.

Whether you want to change your habits, clean out your basement, write a book or develop a revolutionary new product, learning techniques for starting can help.

Start With Awareness…Not Change

Become aware of your current state before changing it.

Write a word, a sentence, a paragraph. Think about where you are and where you’d like to be. The process of definition often leads to discovery.

Create a way of measuring what you want to change, then practice measuring it before you try to change it. It doesn’t have to be perfect. The more effort you put into measuring, the less effort you have to make the change.

Measuring can make a task feel manageable, and give you a way to track your progress–a critical element to maintaining motivation when you’re walking an unknown path.

This month I started the long process of cleaning out my basement. I have dozens of boxes with stacks of papers in them.

Before sorting, scanning, filing or shredding them, I’m measuring them with a ruler. I have 133″ of paper in 16 boxes and 1 filing cabinet to go through.

That’s a mountain of paperwork. But suddenly that mountain seems manageable. I can start focusing on chipping away at it slowly, one inch at a time.

Start Subjectively…Not Objectively

Don’t aim for a perfect, objective metric to track your progress. In the beginning, subjective measures work fine and require far less work to implement and track. After you gain momentum, you can work to make it more consistent and objective.

Writing 750 words a day may help you write a novel, but it can be daunting to start with. When objective measures seem daunting, start with subjective measures. Did you write a little, a decent amount or a lot?

This month I’m working on tracking my sleep so I can sleep better. I wear my FitBit to bed which tells me how often I was restless or woke up.

But the numbers haven’t helped me. I now rate my sleep on a scale from 1-5. It’s purely subjective, but gives me much better feedback on how I’m sleeping.

Start Coarsely…Not Granularly

Focus on big chunks first before breaking them down. Don’t spend too much time refining early; it’s often wasted effort. Learn first what makes sense to refine.

Aim for less accuracy and precision in the beginning. Start big. Don’t get caught up too early in the details, which may change.

This month to improve my dancing I’ve been taking balboa lessons. In the beginning, I started with large steps, aiming to get the steps however I could. As I’ve taught my body how to move within the dance, my steps have gotten smaller & more refined.

Start with Process…Not Results

Focus your early efforts on doing something, anything. Schedule blocks of time and commit to making an effort the entire time. Don’t worry if you’re doing it right or making progress. Gain momentum first.

Tracking where you are relative to your goal can be useful…later. In the beginning, track how much work you’ve put in. Deliberate effort will lead to results. Focusing too early on results can kill your motivation if you don’t progress fast enough.

This month I’ve been doing an Abs 40 Challenge, where I do a series of pilates exercises to strengthen my core. It takes 5 minutes to do.

In the beginning, I was horrible at the exercises. But slowly, day after day of doing the exercises for 5 minutes, I gained strength and could do the exercises right.

I’ve now moved on to the intermediate exercises and am back at the start again, learning how to do the exercises while gaining the strength to do them.

Start with Being Wrong…Not Right

In the end, to start you must let go of the desire to be right. You must do what you know is wrong, because you haven’t developed the skills or aptitude to do it right yet.

That’s okay.

After all, everyone sucks in the beginning. Everyone hits a wall at some point.

By focusing on your effort first, your progress second and your goal third, you build momentum, push through plateaus and get energized when you see the finish line.

Today I started writing blog posts again. Even though I’ve done it before, I’m using these same techniques to restart.This isn’t my best piece of writing, but all that matters is that I started. I hope you found it useful.

What are your strategies for starting when you’re unsure how?

The post How To Start Anything, When You’re Unsure How first appeared on Fast Fedora | Trevor Lohrbeer.

When I wrote the post, I thought I’d use a formula: say hi, give them some useful piece of information and ask them one question. I rarely did that.

Some people I wrote long e-mails to, some I wrote short e-mails. Sometimes I gave them an update on my life first, sometimes I just asked a question. Every e-mail wound up being customized and personal.

It depended on who I was writing, what our relationship was and what I was feeling in the moment. I aimed for an authentic connection first and foremost.

The experiment succeeded. I haven’t mastered the art of staying in touch, but I’m encouraged by my initial results.

The Numbers

During the experiment, I reached out to 10 people I had met previously, but failed to stay in touch with. Six people responded, resulting in:

• 2 awesome conversations
• 2 good conversations
• 2 pleasant responses

Most e-mails took 10-15 minutes to write. The longest took 28 minutes (and resulted in a great conversation!). On average, including followup conversations, I spend 22 minutes per day doing the experiment.

(I do 24/7 time-tracking—a topic for a separate post—which is where these numbers come from.)

Extrapolating, if I contact 200 people a year, I’ll have 40 awesome conversations, 40 good conversations and 40 others I stay in touch with. That’s 120 people I don’t talk to now.

The Relationships

Numbers don’t tell the real story though. Sure, I got responses from 60% of the people I contacted. But even if only one person responded and I had an awesome, amazing conversation with that person, it would have been worth it.

As it was, I had two awesome conversations–conversations where we connected strongly, shared each other’s challenges and successes, and inspired each other with ideas.

With two people, we had a brief back-and-forth, caught up with each other and wished each other luck in the future. Two others sent pleasant responses that didn’t evolve into a conversation, but helped maintain our prior relationship and kept us in touch.

The best result of the experiment? I had fun doing it. Every contact I thoroughly enjoyed.

The more I put myself out there, the better relationships I develop. I’m learning how to care about and help others in new ways, which is incredibly fulfilling.

And it’s getting easier. I feel more comfortable with each new person I contact.

The Stumbles

My experiment wasn’t perfect. I decided to skip weekends, so that pushed the experiment out to 14 days. Then I missed two weekdays, making it take 16 days total to finish my experiment.

Last week I traveled to the Bay Area. I met several new people and reconnected with others in person, but I completely failed to continue the experiment that week.

But I’ll heed Hermione’s comment from my kick-off post:

Like all habits, there are days (weeks) when it gets drowned out, and I expect that might happen to you, too. But I always go back to it, because the human connection makes me feel good.

This week I plan to start again.

The Techniques

I learned a few things during my experiment.

If I don’t have any idea who I’m going to contact on a given day, I either don’t contact anyone at all or I spend too much time figuring out who to contact.

To solve this, I now have a list of people in Excel to contact. By reducing the effort required, I’m far more likely to create a habit out of this. I’m also more inspired in my connections, since I can choose the person based on my mood that day.

I don’t always use the list. The LinkedIn Connected app on my phone tells me key events in my contact’s lives. When an update inspires me to reconnect, I go with that inspiration.

On my desktop, I use the Keep In Touch on the Connections menu in LinkedIn to see people’s updates. Contact reminders also get shown here. I haven’t had much success with those in the past, but may try experimenting with those again.

When writing e-mails, I try to share information about myself and to ask questions about the person I’m contacting. I sometimes share links or other insights that I’ve learned recently that I think might be relevant.

The Future

I plan to continue the experiment and make it part of my daily rituals. I’ve proven to myself that it doesn’t take much time.

When re-connections happen, they can be so powerful and fulfilling. If you take the time to care about other people and connect with them, they’ll do the same for you.

I encourage you to try the experiment for yourself.

Spend 20 minutes to identify 10 people to contact, then spend 22 minutes a day over the next 10 days contacting and replying to people.

You’ll be amazed what those 4 hours do for your relationships and your own personal happiness.

Interested in re-connecting? Shoot me an e-mail or comment below. 

The post The Results: 10 Days of Keeping in Touch first appeared on Fast Fedora | Trevor Lohrbeer.