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Freelancer Work-Life Balance: Designing Your Days in Tiny Moments

9/20/2019

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Photo Credit: Kevin Ku
Of all the pros and cons in the freelance life, one of the most gratifying aspects is not having to run out the door every morning to a rush hour commute. Yet no matter how busy or how open our schedules may be, by the end of the day it’s not uncommon to feel that we’ve missed out on important opportunities — for self-care, to keep clutter from piling up around us, not accomplishing as much as we’d hoped when the morning began.

Willpower is the hard way
Maybe you have plenty of work but find that you’re not managing to exercise and that your fridge is full of Grubhub deliveries. Maybe you’re juggling professional life and a family. When the day is yours to plan, it’s up to you to get the most out of it.

So does changing our habits simply require more willpower, gritting our teeth and starting an ambitious new regimen? Anyone who’s made New Years resolutions has probably noticed a much shorter list of intended behaviors by springtime. It can be done by sheer will…but it’s not easy…and there’s a more effective, less painful way: habit design.

Tiny Habits are easier
Stanford University’s BJ Fogg has developed a methodology for crafting behaviors that create real and lasting change. By beginning with very small steps and adjusting our environments to support our goals, we can make our desired behaviors more automatic. He calls this Tiny Habits.

And instead of relying on willpower, it leverages the way our brains make habits. So if you aren’t getting around to flossing your teeth, floss just one tooth. Not making it to the gym the way you planned? Put your shoes near the door. Don’t worry about actually getting out of the house in the beginning but be sure to CELEBRATE your new action. Our brains look for a reward when creating new habits and a fist pump or simply saying “yes!!” provide that emotion.

Where to begin
Start by deciding on which new behaviors matter most to you and where in your day you might be successful at making these changes. Even during the busiest days there should be a few moments to insert a new habit; Tiny Habits are defined as taking 30 seconds or less. And linking the habit to an action or behavior you already practice makes success more likely.

Working for yourself, deciding when and where to get things done can feel wonderful. Leveraging behavior design to find time for the things that keep life in balance can make freelancing even more satisfying.

Why this post on a content strategy website?
If you're wondering about a habit design post on my website, it's because in addition to being a freelance content marketing strategist, I’ve practiced Tiny Habits for over 7 years. Just this year I became certified as a Tiny Habits coach. If you’d like to know more about Tiny Habits and behavior design, feel free to reach out to me: info@coherentcommunicationstrategies.com


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Herta Herzog: Godmother of Customer Voice

2/25/2016

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In the very first episode of Mad Men, Don Draper dismisses a Viennese market researcher by dumping her report on smoking and death wishes into the wastebasket. Her dour and heavily accented response: “I’m sure your meeting vill be a qvick vun.”

The inspiration for that character, however, had a career which was anything but quick. Dr. Herta Herzog — who died on this date in 2010 at age 99 — pioneered marketing techniques in customer behavior.  One of the only women in advertising during its Golden Age, she was still investigating media and motivation into her 80s. With the start of Women’s History Month a few days away, it seems fitting to recognize the work of this professional whose ideas continue to resonate in marketing today.

After immigrating to the US in 1935, Herzog became a pioneer in radio marketing research, beginning with female soap opera audiences. She is credited with developing modern focus group methodology. As McCann Erickson's Director of Research and a Senior Vice President at J. Walter Thompson, Herzog climbed the corporate ladder during the 1950s and ‘60s, when most women in advertising had few options and little professional credibility. Think Mad Men’s Peggy and Joan…

With a dissertation surveying the then-new medium of radio, Herzog was the first to identify motivations for engaging with mass media: emotional needs, wishful thinking or a desire to learn new things. Her work helped introduce the concept of product “image” — the totality of product impressions a consumer might receive from many sources — along with a paradigm for “uses and gratifications” to investigate engagement from a social psychology perspective.

Early advertising gurus like Edward Bernays (Sigmund Freud’s nephew) and Claude Hopkins are often remembered for their large campaigns to convince the American public to eat bananas or use toothpaste. These advertising initiatives tended to be paternalistic; Bernays even referred to his as “propaganda.” But Herzog cared about consumer perception and input. She created the technique known as “focused interviewing” to listen to and analyze feedback. Malcolm Gladwell had this to say about her:

“… she wouldn’t ask about hair-color products in order to find out about you, the way a psychoanalyst might; she would ask about you in order to learn about hair-color products. … the products and the commercial messages with which we surround ourselves are as much a part of the psychological furniture of our lives as the relationships and emotions and experiences that are normally the subject of psychoanalytic inquiry.” (http://gladwell.com/true-colors/)

From early radio soaps to German viewers of the TV show Dallas, Herzog explored and quantified the motivations, the aspirations of the 20th Century. A caricature of the Teutonic ad researcher makes an entertaining foil for Draper-like inventiveness. But nothing takes the place of understanding customers and valuing their input. Working on personas today? Take a moment to remember Herta Herzog.

Check out a BBC interview with her:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p009jd1g










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