Incoming Email Subject Lines, Ranked

Most Email is terrible. But some emails are actually fun to receive. Some. So for your day off from work/school/whatever it is that you have to worry about tomorrow but you are trying not to think about today reading pleasure, I submit this incomplete, yet definitive ranking of Incoming Email Subject Lines.

Here we go...

15. 'Whitepaper: 5 Tips for Managing Gen Y'

14. 'REMINDER: 'Your credit card payment is due in 5 days.'

13. 'You may already be a winner!'

12. <Subject: Blank>

11. 'It's time to check-in for your flight tomorrow.'

10. 'New comment on 'Easter Candies, Ranked'.'

9. 'Steve, please add me to your LinkedIn network.'

8. 'Up to 70% off for the Brooks Brothers clearance sale!'

7. 'Your Amazon.com order has shipped!'

6. 'New price drop on Las Vegas Hotels!'

5. 'Out of the Office: I am out of the office today...'

4. 'This meeting has been canceled, and removed from your calendar.'

3. 'ALERT: A Direct Deposit has been received into your account.'

2. 'Your upgrade on Flight 239 has been confirmed.'

1. 'You have no scheduled events today.'

Have a great Monday and for folks in the USA, a nice Memorial Day. Thanks to all the brave men and women who gave their lives in defense and service.

What are you afraid of?

Note: This week on the blog I am trying out a little experiment - writing on the first five (or so) subjects that popped out at random from a cool little app called Writing Exercises. The app provides suggestions for topics, characters, first lines - that kind of thing. I tapped the 'Random Subject' button a few times and will (try) to come up with something for each subject I was presented. It may be good, it may stink - who knows? But whatever the topic, I am taking like 20 minutes tops to bang something out. So here goes...

Today's (and this little exercise's final) topic is a question: What are you afraid of?, and like yesterday's post, I am going to try and keep this more in a work/workplace/career context. I mean I am afraid of Sasquatch and the a guy sitting next to me on a plane who decides to take off his flip-flops and films with subtitles, but no one cares about that.

So what am I afraid of? Not sure I if I am still afraid of these things, but I probably was at one point or another (or should have been). Here goes...

1. Continuing to work with people that you don't trust - There is always a kind of weird and interesting dynamic in organizations and office politics where on the one hand if everyone succeeds then everyone is happy, but in most organizations 'everyone' isn't who or how we reward that success. Said differently, and hopefully in a way that makes sense, most organizations value team work and collaboration, but when come promotion and raise and bonus time it is literally every man and woman for themselves. Naturally these circumstances lend themselves often to people having to work in their own self-interests, and their self-interests are almost certainly not aligned with yours. Once you get the sense that the big, happy family of collaborating colleagues is actually a pack of loosely organized bloodthirsty pirates, you had better be able to either play the game to win or get yourself out of there. 

2. Staying too long in a job or at an organization that is making you unhappy - Similar to Item 1, I know that there has been a time in my career I lingered at a little too long at a place where I had ceased learning, developing, and being excited to be there. It was for all the usual reasons that I stayed - finances, location, family obligations, etc.  The same reasons you are probably gutting it out in a job you don't like either. But even though we can pretty effectively rationalize the 'stick it out' decision, in the longer term it is almost always one we will regret. 

3. Letting someone else (or expectations) manage your career choices. One of the things most folks should do, at least early in their careers, is take the time to experiment. I am talking about taking at least some time to try a few different roles/industries/kinds of jobs in order to figure out what you are actually good at doing. It is so easy to come out of college as say an accounting major and then take your first accounting job which leads to the next accounting job and so on and so on. Until 18 years later you are the Assistant Controller and you realize that you don't really like accounting. But your Dad told you to major in accounting because it 'Would be easy to get a job after you graduate' and so you did and then, well, you know the rest. So take some time to ty out some things when you are young and you only have to worry about supporting yourself. Finding something you actually enjoy and are good at will make you infinitely happier in the long run.

Ok, that is it from me for the week. And that is the end, (thankfully), of this week's Writing Exercises experiment. Thanks for indulging me. 

Have a great weekend!

If you could pass a new (workplace) law, what would it be?

Note: This week on the blog I am trying out a little experiment - writing on the first five (or so) subjects that popped out at random from a cool little app called Writing Exercises. The app provides suggestions for topics, characters, first lines - that kind of thing. I tapped the 'Random Subject' button a few times and will (try) to come up with something for each subject I was presented. It may be good, it may stink - who knows? But whatever the topic, I am taking like 20 minutes tops to bang something out. So here goes...

Today's topic: If you could pass a new (workplace) law, what would it be?

Quick disclaimer, the Writing Exercises app actually didn't include the work 'workplace' in the topic suggestion, but since I have been really running off the rails this week with these posts and I have no desire to wade into any kinds of issues that actually are important and that stir people up, I will keep my answers to this question limited to work and workplaces. I can think of three workplace 'laws' that I would enact once I am granted the title of Czar of Work. Here we go...

1. Email use would be subject to some strict conditions - I have an entire laundry list of edicts I would lay down with regards to workplace email use and practices. Just some of my proposals: No email on the weekend, designated 'email free' blocks of time during the week, and the auto-deletion of any incoming messages that you receive when you are out on vacation. And one more thing, any email that is flagged as 'Urgent' is immediately returned to sender with the question 'Really?' in the subject line. Under a Steve Boese administration, email would be dramatically different.

2. Meeting and Conference Call 'start' times would be taken much more seriously - Showing up late for a meeting or a Con Call would be just cause for termination. Maybe not on the first offense, but once a pattern of 'my time is much more important than your time' is established, then that person HAS TO GO. Show up on time, or decline the meeting in advance. Media outlets love to report on how much productivity is lost in workplaces from silly things like March Madness office pools. I bet the sums wasted on the combined amount of time people spend sitting around waiting for meetings and calls to start would dwarf whatever is wasted by workers chatting about their NCAA brackets.

3. Where, when, and how people work would be (mostly) up to them - Saving the obvious occupations (ER nurse, elementary school teacher, NBA point guard), who have to work at a specific place at a specific time, under Czar Steve's benevolent rule, most employees would be granted the flexibility to work where, when, and how they feel the most productive. We would stop 'asking' to work from home on Tuesday since the plumber is coming to the house or if could we pretty please have a couple of hours off on Thursday to see little Joey in the school concert. Workers would be free to make choices, like adults, and be held responsible for their performance and outcomes, (like they are anyway). 

Ok, that's it. Those are Czar of Work Steve's three new workplace laws. What laws for the workplace would you enact if you had the chance? 

Loss

Note: This week on the blog I am trying out a little experiment - writing on the first five (or so) subjects that popped out at random from a cool little app called Writing Exercises. The app provides suggestions for topics, characters, first lines - that kind of thing. I tapped the 'Random Subject' button a few times and will (try) to come up with something for each subject I was presented. It may be good, it may stink - who knows? But whatever the topic, I am taking like 20 minutes tops to bang something out. So here goes...

Today's subject: Loss

Wow, the fun never ends with these random subjects. Check the earlier posts on Regret and Fear. Is seems like the Writing Exercises app wants to make sure I stay in a funk all week. Ok, well I committed to this nonsense and today's post gets me over the hump for the week so carry on we must. But I am not going to get too heavy on Loss, as no one needs to be bummed out any further, especially on a Wednesday.

When was the last time you lost something really important to you? I am not talking about misplacing a set of keys for ten minutes or not being able to find your favorite T-shirt on a Saturday morning, but rather actually losing, (gone, disappeared, never coming back...), something you truly cared about or even loved?

It probably doesn't happen all that much, as we usually do eventually track down most of the things that mysteriously go missing. Maybe your roommate or one of your kids borrowed the thing and didn't tell you or didn't return it to its normal place. Or maybe you're simply getting old and more forgetful yourself and then all of a sudden - Oh, now I remember I left my lucky sweatpants back at the tailgate last weekend (illustrative purposes only, I assure you).

Well, I know I have lost a few things over the years that I still am pretty peeved about.  Here are the three things I wish I still had, please feel free to share yours (lost or just moved on from), in the comments:

1. My Camel Saddle Seat - Yes, I once had a camel saddle seat and yes it was exceptionally cool. I acquired it while working in Saudi Arabia a lifetime ago and after about 20 years and a dozen moves somehow I no longer have the saddle seat. And that stinks.

2. My 1976 Buick Century - This car was slow, unwieldy, ugly, with ponderous driving characteristics and I loved it. I didn't so much lose it as it just went missing. I think. I actually don't really remember what happened to it. But I might have to get another one. 

3. My Superstar Baseball Board Game - Superstar Baseball was a kind of strat-o-matic style board game that essentially kept my core group of 10 - 13 year old kids busy on summer nights in the late 70s. This was basically Fantasy Baseball before anyone had dreamed up the term Fantasy Baseball. Nothing better than watching two 7th graders argue over whether trading Arky Vaughan straight up for Pie Traynor was a fair swap. Where is my game today? Who knows.

So that is my take on Loss. What have you lost that you would love to get back?

WEBINAR: HR Analytics for Everyday HR and Talent Pros

So by now someone in your organization, maybe even you, is going on and on about data and Big Data and analytics and maybe even predictive analytics being the future of HR and talent management. Seven out of ten surveys say as much, so it must be true, right? A quick Google search of "HR analytics' turns up just north of 14 million results. So it seems like everyone in HR has or will be talking about how important analytics are to the functions.

But in the words of the immortal Al Czervik in Caddyshack, 'So what?' 

What does the HR analytics revolution mean for you, the average, working, front-line HR/Talent pro?

Well glad you, or really I asked. Because my friends over at Fistful of Talent are there to help answer this and many more questions on HR Analytics with the next installment of the FREE FOT Webinar entitled The New HR Math: Dumbing Down HR Analytics for Everyday HR and Talent Pros, (sponsored by HireVue, a company that gets predictive analytics at a whole other level) on May 27, 2015 at 2PM ET.

The smarty-pants geek kids over at FOT will hit you up with the following:

 - 5 HR and Talent Analytics you should stop measuring immediately! You know what looks really bad to your leadership? When HR is using the old math, and everyone else is using the new math!

 - 5 HR and Talent Analytics you should start measuring immediately! Don’t be that parent fighting the good fight, ostracizing your kid from society by not allowing them to use the new math skills! We have the new cool measures you really need to be using in HR and recruiting today

 - 3 Best Practices every HR and Talent Acquisition shop can do right now with their analytics. You now know what the numbers are, but what the heck are you supposed to do with them? Fear not, Tim and Kris watched every YouTube video possible on the new math, they can show you the way!

 - A primer on what’s next once you start using these Predictive Analytics. Since you specialize in people, you naturally understand the move to using analytics that helps you predict the future is only half the battle—you have to have a plan once the predictions are made. We’ll help you understand the natural applications for using your predicitive analytical data as both a hammer and a hug—to get people who need to change moving, and to embrace those that truly want your help as a partner. 

You’re a quality HR pro who knows how to get things done. Join FOT on May 27th at 2pm ET for The New HR Math: Dumbing Down HR Analytics for Everyday HR and Talent Pros,  and we’ll help you understand how to deploy the "new-math" principles in HR that allow you to use predictive analytics to position yourself as the expert you are.