How distracted are you really?

Hugh MacLeod

We give ourselves too much credit for being focussed. It takes about 24 minutes to refocus on the taks in hamd after an interruption. (23 minutes and 15 seconds, to be exact) according to Gloria Mark, who studies digital distraction at the University of California, Irvine. (23 Jul 2015).

Most of us have the attention span of a fly (if there’s even such a thing) and the concentration of a goldfish. I’m not trying to be rude to the fly and the goldfish, I’m merely trying to remind ourselves that we are so easily distracted these days that we are losing the art of being mindful.

So now you know why ‘Mindfulness’ is getting so much traction these days, most of us are actually realising that we need to re-program our brains to be more mindful, because we’ve lost the art of it.

I went to the Opticians, recently for my 2-yearly eyetest. Good news by the way, my left eye has improved eyesight. Yes it does happen, my wife and eye set an intention years ago that our eyesights would improve and they are actually improving year on year. True story.

Anyway, I was asked to sit in the waiting room and there wasn’t anyone there. Few magazines and newspapers on a table, out of date of course and posters on the wall, advertising stuff and a few people concentrating on their work. I decided to watch this one person who was fixing a pair of eyeglasses working with full concentration on fixing it. It was a marvel to watch her human mind trying to organise parts, screwdrivers and hand movements to remove screws from the eyeglasses, replacing them and getting the lenses back in. So interesting to watch.

Had I sat down and got my phone out, I would have missed all that.

Then a young couple walked in and sat down on the chairs beside me. First thing the male did was get out his phone and started looking at it. He needed the distraction of his phone to allow him to pass time I guess.

So sad to witness.

Whilst driving to the Opticians I ended up in stationary traffic. There was along quque and I noticed a woman behind me in her car with her head down. Ever so often she would look up in a panic, to make sure she didn’t miss the traffic moving on. She did this at least 6 times. It was so obvious that she was looking at her phone and probably texting on it.

Happy mobile watching!

Michael de Groot

Are you still receiving TOO MANY LinkedIn Emails?

On July 27, 2015, LinkedIn announced that they were reducing the amount of emails they would be sending to members. 

As a consequence they also stopped the daily email, which summarised Job Changes, Birthdays and Career Anniversaries. And in the months following all emails that are sent by LinkedIn have gone through a steady change in layout and branding. I have to say for the better. However I am still receiving lots of them each day and each week. How about you?

let’s have a closer look at this.

Below is a list of all the emails that LinkedIn currently sends to us (well, most of them that I received):

1. Invitation to connect, standard template invitation.

2. Invitation to connect, personalised invitation.

3. [Person's name], has accepted your invitation.

4. Invitation awaiting your response.

5. Email message notification.

6. Messages you've missed.

7. Unread messages.

8. Open profile messages.

9. [Person's name], mentions you.

10. What's new with your posts. Providing you are publishing on Pulse.

11. New endorsements waiting. These are endorsements extra to the ones you have already listed. (Note: Only click through if you wish to add them to your skills list).

12. Connections have endorsed you. These are against your existing skills list.

13. Your connections have been mentioned in the news.

14. Updates from Pulse. These would be based on your channel preferences, including posts by your connections.

15. Groups trending discussions. Based on how many groups you belong to, you could be receiving several each day/week, unless you have switched off the email digest setting for that group.

16. Congratulations on your new job.

17. Someone has commented on your photo.

18. Group comments in response to your discussion post.

19. Latest leads (Sales Navigator only).

20. Your account updates (Sales Navigator only)

Did I miss any?  Yes I probably did. Do please let me know if you have some that I didn't mention and send me a screenshot. Thank you!

LinkedIn Emails from Staying Alive (UK) Ltd

how you can reduce the amount of emails you're getting from LinkedIn.

This advice is only valid if you've got the LinkedIn app. Nowadays we interact most of our time on mobile inside our social networks and I highly recommend that you spend more time on the LinkedIn app and that way you can stay up to date without being bombarded by emails.

Please watch the video to fully appreciate the changes you need to make in your settings inside LinkedIn. You can make these changes either on the desktop or inside the LinkedIn app.

Here is the full list of push notification on mobile LinkedIn app (iOS iPhone and iPad). You will see that this will provide you with more that enough information on mobile, instead of receiving all those individual emails. Click on the image to enlarge it further, but better still just go on your app and view it me>settings>communications>push notifications.

If you have any questions at all, feel free to reach out via @stayingaliveuk

Are you using the new LinkedIn Contacts App?

Well you should!

Let me share with you what I discovered.

First I tidied up my address book on my iPhone/iPad/Mac (iCloud). It took a while but I did a few letters of the alphabet each day, which made the job less daunting, but still delivered a great result. I removed about 2000 contacts, phew! How ever did I manage to accumulate those? I have no idea! Also make sure you remove sensitive data. You don't want this going up onto a server do you? Instead move those somewhere else.

***DATA HEALTH WARNING***

You MUST do this task first, as otherwise you end up with all the rubbish inside your LinkedIn contacts and you really want to avoid this.

If you do this task first you will thank me for it and it is about time you did this and when I share with you below what you can achieve, you will be delighted...no ecstatic!

Step 1

Download the LinkedIn contacts app

(***DO NOT OPEN IT AFTER DOWNLOADING***).

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/linkedin-contacts/id635424128?mt=8

Step 2

I am assuming you have the standard LinkedIn iPhone app, but if you haven't please make sure that this is downloaded too.

https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/linkedin/id288429040

You can open that one and ensure you are logged in. Providing you have set 'download connections' to ON inside this app, (if not click on the IN in top left corner to reveal the setting cog wheel top right. Click on the wheel>download connections and activate this. It will download all your LinkedIn connections on to your iPhone and keep them updated too. This is an important step to complete before going on.

Step 3

On your iPhone, go to settings>privacy>contacts and make sure the contacts app button is switched to on/green. If you forget this step, no worries the app will remind you to do this.

Step 4

Open the LinkedIn contacts app on your iPhone, it will import with lightening speed all your iPhone contacts, find them on LinkedIn, and pull in all the data, plus send all the data to LinkedIn too.

Pretty impressive actually how fast this goes.

NOTE: I don't have my Facebook connections in my address book any longer. I ended up with too many duplications and then had to link those together, which was a real pain. As I only want to have my LinkedIn connections in my address book, I don't want to disturb things. And I highly recommend excluding Facebook. Remember each contact on your iPhone will be uploaded to LinkedIn.

To switch Facebook off for your address book, go to settings>facbeook> and switch the contacts switch to off/white.

Step 5

Check that everything has worked. Search inside the app for a contact, anyone will do. Make sure the data from your address book has been pulled across.

Check on the LinkedIn website and go to network>contacts and then filter by source>iPhone and check if the number of contacts agrees with your iPhone.

NOTE: Don't expect numbers to agree 100%. Mine are out by about 10, but I know that is because previously I had some contacts that were linked with Facebook and messed things up. If it is there or thereabouts, then happy days it has worked.

That's it job done!

But now for the magic, this is where you will be very grateful for using this app.

First let me share with you how people tend to work on LinkedIn. Most people will only share their personal emails address and no phone number.

So when you have someone's business card, look them up on LinkedIn, send an invite to connect and they accept, you will see that the email address that they have on LinkedIn is their personal one. Usually no phone number.

This means you need to add their business email and phone number details. Well firstly LinkedIn has a bug on phone number formats, which means it will not accept a European format, only USA formats. Which is a real shame and yes I have had a dialogue with their support and no fix is imminent either.

But have no fear here is the solution.

Now that you have the LinkedIn Contacts app, your problem is solved.

Step 1

After someone has accepted your invite to connect or you have accepted their invite, you need to go to the standard LinkedIn iPhone app and open it up from time to time, to make sure that LinkedIn downloads these contacts to your iPhone. This makes sure that you don't have to manually enter their details in your address book. i.e. LinkedIn does it for you. However you will more than likely only have their personal email address.

So once per week, I go into my address book iPhone/IPad or Mac (iCloud), with my business cards handy, I look up those people, that I know I have sent invites to and update their record with their business email and their mobile. I don't usually bother with their land line number. If they move in the future that will change and their mobile often stays the same. (unless they have give you their business mobile only).

Step 2

Once you've updated the address record on your device, go to the LinkedIn contacts app and open up the alphabetical view (doesn't matter which view you are on) and then pull down the page, which will then start an update process and a spinning circle appears. You have to see the spinning circle, so make sure of that.

***THIS IS WHERE THE MAGIC HAPPENS*** The LinkedIn contacts app drags the information from your address book, with your latest updates and pushes it to LinkedIn.

Now your contact record on LinkedIn, has updated the business email address, as well as the mobile phone number.

This is pretty amazing actually, because also the phone number format bug inside LinkedIn has been overcome by adding the phone details in this way.

Now you have the correct contact details sitting inside LinkedIn as well.

What this means in fact, that as well as downloading data from LinkedIn onto your iPhone, with the standard LinkedIn app, you can also push data to LinkedIn.

I felt this was such an amazing discovery, I just had to share it.

I hope it works for you and if you have any questions, just let me know.

***DATA HEALTH WARNING***

When dealing with contact information in the cloud, it is possible to create duplicate records. This has happened to me in the past, so please take each step carefully and check your records regularly.

The steps above worked for me without any issues, but I can't take any responsibility for your records and the way that you upload/download from the cloud.

Wishing you success always!

The PC is dead, long live the iPad

I've had a life long ambition to operate in a paperless office. And my ambition has finally become a reality. My career using computers covers a short 30 years. But they were never able to deliver a truly paperless office for me. I still had to sort through mountains of paperwork in addition to using computers.

But as this decade can now officially be named the ’decade of mobile computing’, it means that I am able to declare my office ’virtually’ paperless.

The only paper I still receive are a few bills and of course receipts from shopping.

And now that every large tech company is moving towards tablet computing, it's probably highly likely that they will increasingly dominate our personal and business lives.

For me it's the one tech product I've been waiting for all my career.

And you will probably gasp now when I say that I can't remember the last time I wrote down notes with my pen!

I just don't need to anymore. I do remember the days when I had to take written notes to only transfer these to my computer.

Now I use mind map software on my iPad and take brief notes to jog my memory of the meeting, which can be typed up if needed, in my writer software. But very often I will send a mind map of the meeting and most people are delighted because its on one piece of paper and a fast summary, nobody has time these days to read even one page of notes, let alone 2 or 3.

If you haven't tried it yet or are sitting on the fence, I highly recommend that you explore what it can do for your personal and business lives.

Typing this article on my iPad, whilst Clair is watching ’strictly come dancing’, would have been unthinkable a few years ago. I don't have a laptop, but even if I did, it would have drawn so much attention to what I was doing by bringing out the laptop. The typing would have been noisy and having the screen open a distraction to anyone else in the room too.

And if I do need to watch some training videos on youtube or watch another TV channel, I can just open up the catch-up channels apps and stick my headphones on!

Try it out!

Success!

Customer Service in Social Media

I am sharing with you my own personal experience of the impact of social media in customer service. Now my experience of conventional customer service was very poor, but via social media it was excellent.

Firstly a little bit of background.

I am a T-Mobile customer and have been a customer of theirs for about 6 years, when I decided to purchase my very first blackberry, when the Blackberry Pearl was released. I was with Orange ever since I became a mobile phone user, so it took a lot of convincing for me to move to another network.

The service I had received from Orange was superb.

Anyway I made the jump and that was it. I was equally impressed with T-Mobile's service and their agents did an excellent job. So it all worked out for me. I was a very late adopter in the Blackberry market, but felt with the smaller phone my wait was justified.

Now fast forward to September 2010 and for my Birthday I treated myself to an iPhone 4, and had an early contract upgrade, which was a real gift.

All seemed to be well and my first bill was a bit of a mess coming out of one contract and starting a new one. Anyway I decided to leave it for a few months and review it again to make sure all was well. I don't get paper bills, so I get a monthly text to let me know that the bill is ready online. I don't know about you but when I get that message I don't immediately jump online and check my bill so I ignored it for a few months. I did notice that although I am not a huge user, the bill appeared high so decided to investigate further.

I then discovered they had been overcharging me ever since my changeover for Blackberry Booster, which of course I did not need or indeed use on my iPhone! So I decided to call.

I will just summarise this quickly as I want to get on to the social media bit.

I initially phoned their customer services and connected with the Philippines and it was not a pleasant experience at all. Basically I could not hear them properly because of the line quality and on top of that the agent would not allow me to speak and if I did speak she would repeat back what I had said to make sure she understood what I had just said. This meant a lot of wasted 'yes that is correct' sentences on my part.

After a long while, when she finally realised she could not solve my problem, she ended the call by saying she would send my account for re-calculation.

I decided to share my frustration on twitter and I received a nice response from T-Mobile.

In the end I had to email T-Mobile to get them in the UK to call me to sort it, which in fairness they did quickly.

My bill should now be showing the correct figures. OK when I did check a few days later, surprise, surprise it did not. Better still they had given me an early termination penalty for cancelling my Blackberry booster. I have not had a Blackberry for 4 months now! After sorting that with the Philippines again, they confirmed all should be well. However my bill online was still incorrect, so I resorted to Twitter.

What I received from T-Mobile via twitter was a very fast and satisfactory conversation that was resolved to my satisfaction, whereas the initial telephone conversation I had was far from resolved.

For me it shows that Social Media can work and have significant impact on the Brand, providing it is done well and T-Mobile have done this very well on this occasion.