Kaleidoscope Comment

Is your customer service perfect? Really?

I had a big disappointment this week – an excellent value customer service course, run by a prestigious city institution and delivered by recognised experts, was cancelled due to lack of interest.

That is, it cost just over £100 for the day, it would have been hosted by the University of York and facilitated by Jo North from the Big Bang Partnership.

I have a question for the businesses of York – what’s wrong with everyone?

Networking - how do you know when you've given enough?

Last week I wrote about how successful networking depends on what you give.

If you forget about ‘getting’ and concentrate on giving, more benefits come back to you in the end.

However, sometimes you have to draw a line. When I started out as a Virtual Assistant I collaborated with another start-up. I gave her pretty much all the knowledge I had, plus the legal contracts I’d had drawn up for Kaleidoscope.

The day I handed those over to her was the last time I saw her.

Networking – why you shouldn't worry about getting burned

Networking should never be a hard sell. It’s about forming good relationships over the long term. You get back what you give– so give plenty and reap the rewards.

The way to form good relationships with people is to literally care and share. By caring I mean paying attention to your networking colleagues and listening to them.

By sharing I mean a good networker shares their knowledge, skills and contacts. It’s not always about finding new clients – sometimes you end up making a new friend or meeting a supplier who can help you in your life and business. I love the advice of Tim Sanders in Love is the Killer App for this, which I reviewed on the blog about a year ago.

What’s stopping you? The fear that someone will take advantage. The truth is that will happen. But it’s all right to take that hit from time to time. You won’t be hurt badly, or for long.

How NOT to make your life simpler and easier

I’ve written a lot lately about choosing simplicity, aiming to do a bit less and choosing time and space over constant activity.

So I was happy to receive the transcript of an interview Leo Babauta did for an online marketing group called Third Tribe.

Leo is the very successful author of the ZenHabits blog, which covers personal productivity matters, minimalism and simplifying home and work life.

He recommend mindfulness in working life, refusing to be caught up too much in the online world (hear hear) and reducing the stress in your life by gradually cutting down on commitments and learning to say ‘no’.

Book review: In Praise of Slow, by Carl Honore

Sit back, put your hands behind your head, take some deep breaths, and relax.

I’d like to take this opportunity, in a leisurely fashion, to tell you about a lovely book I’ve just read: In Praise of Slow, by Carl Honore.

He’s a family man, and the idea for the book – and the talks – came to him when he came across a ‘one-minute bedtime story’ for harried parents. His first thought was that it was a good idea. His second thought was that something was going seriously wrong.

Technology cannot keep us organised

Highly organised Virtual Assistant that I am, the headline of this blog caught my eye: Tip for Getting More Organized: Don’t.

The writer, Michael Schrage, gives a salutary warning that I would endorse wholeheartedly “The personal productivity issue knowledge workers and effective executives need to ponder is whether habits of efficiency that once improved performance have decayed into mindless ruts that delay or undermine desired outcomes.”

Too true. You can end up organising yourself and your business to death, and we’ve all wasted a ton of time tidying and filing, to no purpose whatsoever.