Gary Vaynerchuk is the host of Wine Library TV (with over 80,000 viewers a day) and Director of Operations at his family’s company, Wine Library, in Springfield, NJ. He grew that business from $4 million to $60 million in only five years, and is now the co-founder of VaynerMedia and a consultant for Fortune 100 companies. An in-demand public speaker, Vaynerchuk has keynoted at events such as FOWA and South by Southwest, and also appeared on many television shows such as “Ellen DeGeneres”, “Late Night With Conan O’Brien”, “The Today Show”, and CNBC’s “Mad Money With Jim Cramer”. Vaynerchuk’s second book, “Crush It!“, came out earlier this month.
I sat down with Gary at LessConf in Jacksonville, Fla., to talk about working hard and building brands. Read the rest of this entry »
First, Twitter announced it would be bringing a new Lists feature online to build groups right into the popular social networking site. Now it’s going a step further towards making the service more professionally relevant by introducing a Twitter Labs feature, according to The Next Web.
Like Google Labs and Facebook Prototypes before it, Twitter Labs will allow developers to test out new features for the site with a voluntary beta community prior to their official release. Not only that, but Labs would allow outside developers to create and work on add-ons and other features that could then become deeply integrated with Twitter itself, instead of just being relegated to external clients that use the API. Read the rest of this entry »
With the U.S. tech conference season – TED, ETech & SXSW – behind us, the European scene is starting to warm up for spring with the Futuresonic festival, Thinking Digital, Future of Web Design and, more immediately, Amsterdam’s The Next Web.
The Next Web is now in its fourth year and will open with a day of unconference events as a lead-in to two days of scheduled keynotes, startup demos, awards and an expo hall. Speakers include Google’s Bradley Horowitz, CSS expert Eric Meyer and Andrew Keen, author of “Cult of the Amateur”.
We’ve got a special 20 percent discount for WebWorkerDaily readers wishing to attend The Next Web. Simply register here to claim your discount.
A couple of weeks ago, the White African blog discussed the need for coworking spaces in African cities, driven by the needs of emerging tech communities in some of the continent’s major cities.
Writer Erik Hersman argues the case for communities that are part coworking communities, part startup incubator and part VC/investor hubs. Establishing a coworking space isn’t trivial or easy, requiring some time for a healthy community culture to emerge; developing and leasing the physical space is relatively straightforward.
Hersman cites a couple of interesting African coworking options, such as the Regus-owned Habitatz (more like a serviced office than coworking), but it’s uncertain whether they see the same need to conflate investment, coworking and incubation. Read the rest of this entry »
Whether it’s vacuuming your keyboard, taking a long walk, or making a pot of coffee, you probably have a routine that you do before you get started with work. This routine seems so mundane and simple, yet, without it, you can’t get started.
Many artists and writers have their own rituals before working. Carson McCullers reportedly made sure to wear her lucky sweater before writing, while W. Somerset Maugham would read Voltaire’s Candide. Henry James has a longer ritual that starts at breakfast and ends after lunch, with occasional interruptions in the afternoon. Despite half his day devoted to these rituals, James penned 23 novels during his career, plus several other shorter works.
Whether you clean your office or have a more elaborate routine, pre-work rituals are an essential part of your workday. Here are some ways in which they help:
Read the rest of this entry »
Morning: so full of promise and potential. While the night owls sleep, early birds get out of bed and write about morning routines.
Read the rest of this entry »
Ranking resumes — TalentSpring launched this week with a resume marketplace using ranking instead of search to help employers find potential new hires.
In order to have your resume included in their database, you must rank 12 other resumes using pairwise comparisons (i.e., do you like Jane or Joe better? Jane or Elizabeth? Joe or Elizabeth? and so forth). Then the system uses various algorithms to control for potential ranking misbehavior, like downgrading people who might compete with you for the same job.
Instead of subjecting yourself to that ranking — and having to rank resumes yourself — why not use a blog as your resume? [TalentSpring via TechCrunch]
Get creative with your business cards — Metallic, translucent, folded… you’ll find tons of ideas in this gallery of fun designs. [creativebits]
Sendmail for arseholes — From the author of The No Asshole Rule comes the ArseMail page, for helping your coworkers and friends deal with difficult people or for apologizing for the difficult person you’ve been. [ArseMail]
More online mind mapping — Comapping offers real-time collaboration web-based mind mapping with auto-layout. Want to read about other options? Check the Daily Iteration’s review of web and Windows-based mind mapping software including mindmeister, bubbl.us, Freemind, and others. [Comapping via jkOnTheRun]
More online lists — Listigator lets you make lists. Online. Then share them, either read-only or editable. [Listigator]
In/out board for virtual teams — Use a chat room so team members can say when they’re “in” and what they’re working on. Ryan Carson’s team uses their chat room for daily check-ins, weekly check-ins, and virtual over-the-cube conversations. [Carsonified]
Simple strategy for getting things done. “Every day, I grab about 10 things off my “This Week” list and put them on my “Today” list. Then (and this is the key) before I even open my email program, I try to knock at least two things off my Today list.”
Zirr.us: Tag clouds meets To Do lists. Zirr.us could have been number 21 on our list of 20 ways to manage your to dos. Do a braindump. Put near-term tasks on the Now list. Tag your items. Set due date and priority. View as a task cloud.
18 Ways to Stay Focused at Work. Lots of great tips, including this one: “5. Do not check personal email in the morning. Checking personal emails can be very distracting even with filters setup.”
Workflow for New Year’s Resolutions. A reminder for GTD disciples: “you should find a way to create the next task for any task you complete. This is where the process breaks for even the most disciplined among us, for two reasons: First, we usually do not know in advance the full sequence of tasks that will lead us to the completion of a relatively abstract goal. Second, the tools we are using to track the completion of tasks do a pretty bad job at suggesting follow-up action items.”
Web Work 101: How To Escape The Cubicle
