5 Ways to Extend Halloween to the Rest of the Year

Treats

Tonight’s Halloween (Great)! The favorite holiday of kids and adults alike (well, at least most adults), Halloween reminds us that dressing up, making a fool of yourself, and eating candy until you’re sick is definitely something you should do at least once a year. But what if we think about how to extend these lessons beyond October 31st?

Here are 5 things to think about doing the rest of the year:

1. Don’t take things too seriously.

Halloween is a playful day when we get to test boundaries, act in a “different” way, and generally have fun. Fun is good — just remember that the next time you’re working on a dreary project — and sometimes just trying to look at things differently can help.

2. Eat things that are bad for you (at least once in a while.)

Ugh. The morning after (or the night of) Halloween can be a bit of a disaster when we realize the vast volume of sugar and chocolate we’ve eaten, and you know what? It was worth it. Eating something that’s not good for you is a good metaphor for making sure that you do more of the things that you want some of the time. Obviously if you eat too much of the yummy stuff there will be consequences — but you have to indulge once in a while.

3. Dress up as someone you’re “not”.

Every kid wants to be an astronaut, ballerina, king, super hero, or cartoon. Halloween is an accepted time of the year to try on a new persona, at least for one night. We can use this as a metaphor to remind ourselves that trying on a new idea doesn’t mean that we’re stuck to that idea — and that we might find some great insights along the way — although it’s also good to remember that the punk costume you might have worn when you were 13 doesn’t quite fit the same way now.

Kids in Costumes!

 

4. Say hello to your neighbor.

Halloween, as done right in my opinion, is a porch-sitting, conversational, “get out and talk to people” holiday. It’s a time when regular people walk the streets in funny costumes and say hello to each other because they can. We can definitely say hello to each other more often, or make time to go see a friend “just because.”

5. Scare yourself (a little bit)

Halloween is a time when we get a small thrill from a pretend scare. It’s a good time to remind yourself of how scary things can be, and how much you can appreciate the things you have. (And also to enjoy the twisted and brilliant D.I.Y. that can result from people and pumpkins and Halloween joy.)

On Pumpkin Harvesting and Startups

Thoughtful sepia pumpkin

Originally uploaded by gregmeyer

This year, we decided to grow our own pumpkins. This isn’t quite true — it should read more like “we planted a few seeds, and then they took over the entire property” — and it’s satisfying to see the fruits of the harvest. Pumpkin growing makes me think about startups. There is little to show at the beginning except for hard work and fertilizer; some green shoots show up but it’s very hard to tell which ones will survive; and the end harvest is wonderful (and not always what you planted).

Hard work and fertilizer at the beginning: that sounds like the recipe for a successful startup. There is no shortage of either of these things at the beginning of any business venture (or any project, for that matter), and it can sometimes be a challenge to find the right thing to focus on and nurture. Here, as in gardening, having a plan, making some rows, and planting complimentary ideas can help in case of bad weather, blight, or rodents.

After the seeds are planted, green shoots come up. (In the case of our pumpkins, everywhere.) The initial success of business ventures often obscures the fragility and newness of the initial growth. Some of these green shoots won’t make it past the first hard rain or blinding sun. But some of them will, and careful weeding will improve their chances.

At the end of the process, you get to practice 20/20 hindsight. Of course you knew which green shoots would survive and make fantastic potential jack o’ lanterns — because those are the ones you harvested — and it’s easy to forget the blossoms that failed along the way. The key to this knowledge is to enjoy the harvest and not get hung up on the pumpkins (or ideas) that didn’t survive.

We found 31 pumpkins this year. That’s enough, probably, to forgo a trip to the local pumpkin patch. It should also provide us with enough raw material to make roasted pumpkin seeds and, of course, pie. May your pumpkin picking and your startups provide such sweet results.

Finding “Flow” in an Always-Connected World

Wikipedia defines Flow as “the mental state of operation in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and success in the process of the activity.” Mihály Csíkszentmihályi proposed this definition more than 30 years ago, and it’s a popular way to describe the way you feel when you’re really engaged in something. The age of always connectedness and multi-tasking is antithetical to Flow and may damage our brains. Paul Graham writes about the Maker’s Schedule as being fundamentally different than the Manager’s Schedule. Help, you say — this stuff all sounds great but I can’t seem to fit it into my everyday schedule and excuse me, my boss is calling and I have an email on my phone — how can I get closer to applying this concept in real life? The steps are annoyingly simple (and elusive): Take Care of Yourself, Find Focus and Ask for Prioritization, and Share and Learn.

The first rule of finding Flow in an always-connected world should be obvious: Take Care of Yourself. This varies from person to person, but the standard corollaries of Get Enough Sleep, Eat Well, and Exercise make a huge difference in your ability to function, let alone achieve a state of flow. Just ask yourself whether that plan of sleeping “when you can”, eating well “when you can”, and exercising “when you can” is working for you. Yes, just about as well as it’s worked for me in the past when I haven’t been at my best. Entrepreneurs are noticing that hard work is not always good work and I can speak personally for the improvements that simple diet changes and some exercise (no, you don’t have to be an Ironman, just get out and walk more everyday) makes for your ability to Focus and Get Stuff Done.

Finding focus and asking for prioritization are key concepts in finding the Flow state. I have a list by my desk of the 10 (or [n]) things I know I have to get done, so that whenever I don’t know what to do, I can look at that list and find something of value without having to think about what I should do next. If the item on that list keeps showing up, it must be important to someone. If I put my iPhone on silent and close my email, I can spend 30-60 minutes only doing the one task I need to get done at the moment. Headphones with classical music also help this focus. But focus alone doesn’t get me to the right things — if I’m focused on an irrelevant task, that can be wasted effort — I also ping my peers and my manager for prioritization so that I know that I’m spending my time on the right things for that moment.

I just got lost in another thought (lost my Flow), and that tells me I’m on to the third point — share and learn. For me that involves one of several activities: get up from your desk and walk around; visit and information “graze” on new information from blogs, Twitter, or other sources; and/or talk to friends through email, phone, text, or IM. Ignoring this impulse is like trying to stop water: if you try to turn it off, it will eventually leak out somewhere else. For information sharing and learning, the best way I’ve found to be effective is to spend a few blocks of time (beginning of the day, mid-day, end of day, and 1 hour at night) in intense email triage, Twitter management, having coffee/conversation with a friend, or just picking up the phone and saying hello. I can’t sit at a desk and code for 12 hours straight: I have varied interests and need to try some of those every day.

Finally, the bonus suggestion for achieving Flow is to Try Something Else Different. For me, that’s drawing, painting, or another artistic activity. On another day, it might be the temporary sensory deprivation I get from swimming. Engaging someone in conversation and helping to solve a different problem than the one you’re working on can also sometimes trigger a breakthrough. When all else fails, just go to bed. It will be better tomorrow and your brain will have had some time to recover from your latest episode of multi-tasking and trying to do something on a conference call when you should just be listening. If that conference call isn’t for you, try next time to politely decline and go back to focusing on the thing you really wanted to be doing at that moment. In the meanwhile, take some time for yourself, focus your attention on the things you need to get done, and make sure you get up once in a while to see what’s going on around you (figuratively or literally).

How mobile data anywhere changes behavior

I’m writing this post from the comfort of an armchair. I could be anywhere, and that fact is fundamentally changing my behavior by allowing me to get more done from anywhere (even when there is no data). The enabling device? The iPhone.

Big deal, you say. You could make and take calls from almost anywhere before, and mobile data allowed you to use the web on a BlackBerry. So what’s different? First, the iPhone makes me smarter everywhere I go. Second, even though it’s a portal that allows me to buy instantly, the iPhone allows me to hold off on impulse purchases in person. And finally, this mobile computer is future-proofed by the ability to download an application for almost anything.

iPhone makes me smarter, and not only because it gives me instant access to the tools I normally find on my desktop. When I need to know the answers to simple questions (what’s the weather? Where’s my bus?) I get actionable information, updated on the fly. When I need to know information about a colleague or new contact, Gist or LinkedIn is only a few clicks away. I don’t have to worry about keeping 5-7 items in my short-term memory, and can better focus on learning new things.

The app store allows me to buy songs, movies, and applications immediately. So how could it paradoxically allow me to put off an impulse purchase as well? By allowing me to take my current behaviors and maximize them. I like using the King County Library System because I can read recent books for free. But I don’t always know what the newest, most topical books are without subscribing to an e-book list or reading book reviews. Enter iPhone to change my habits: I can now spend an hour at the local Barnes & Noble, finding books and adding them to my holds list on the KCLS web site. Before mobile browsing, I would have bought some of these books and not had an alternate way to try before I buy. A similar analogy happens with hard goods, where I can look up the price of an item while I am in the store and save a trip to another store (true mall lovers may argue this point disrupts the ideal shopping experience, but I beg to differ).

Finally, the iPhone is future-proofed. I’m carrying around a computer with me, and the App Store tells me when I have updates to existing applications. I also get to tap into the collective efforts of thousands of developers who are optimizing applications for the mobile platform, and specifically for the design experience and multi-touch features of the iPhone.

The iPhone has changed my behavior and enables me to do more from everywhere. Fanboy, you say — why is iPhone any better than the other data-enabled smartphone — and why does it matter? I say it matters because my friends and colleagues who don’t use new web applications because it takes a lot of effort to learn new things are trying new things on the iPhone, from new places. The design metaphor and learning style that iPhone suggests also provides Apple with a clear competitive advantage when launching new products. iTablet, here we come.

The Internet Elephant: Your One-Time “Promotion” and its Persistence

We are used to the world of internet communication as an ephemeral, “one-time” communication. Send your email or IM communication and it disappears, without a sound, into the ether. But at least some of those communications are permanently cached and indexed. We’re seeing this today in product placement and promotion, and in the future will likely see similar behavior with tweets, statuses, and emails. The internet is an Elephant with a long memory.

Take the 2006 Jones Soda Thanksgiving Pack as an example that may shed some light on our future consumption of personal communication. Jones creates a limited-edition soda pack every year to drive buzz. In the olden (pre-Internet, 20th century) days, marketers would create limited edition packages that most people might forget. The 6 pack of Thanksgiving Meal flavored sodas was one of a string of innovative and attention-getting soda packs from Jones that emphasized the Jones brand: irreverent, sugared (instead of corn-syrup sweetened, and fun). This was supposed to be a limited-time phenomenon. But almost three years later, the Jones Soda photograph referenced above and a blog post I made in early 2009 are some of my most widely hit posts/photos.

What’s the message to be gained? The internet is an Elephant with a cyclical memory. Search engines and site such as Flickr and Facebook allow consumers to show their support for limited editions, ask for cancelled products to be returned, and even (in the extreme case) campaign for fake products to be made real (think of “Email n’ Walk”, the iPhone app that started out as an April Fool’s joke. The web archive allows you to see cached versions of prior web sites and see the web as it was a few days, months, or years ago. Yet this “memory” or “nostalgia” is not easy to parse. Who published it? What was the original intent? These questions become less relevant when the content is separated from the original marketing campaign.

So what can we learn from the persistence of the Jones Soda Thanksgiving promotion? One-time promotions for products Jones are easy to find: the Internet makes it possible to search among user-generated content and official information. We should apply the same principles to the way that we find information about people and companies with whom we communicate. The ability to verify the communication as “authentic” and to build critical thinking abilities will be crucial in the future for users to validate these communications, improve the ability of marketers to get their message out in the blogosphere/real-time search world, and for consumers to find the products and services they want (not just the ones they find). What does that mean for the Internet Elephant? It will continue to remember, so ensure that the communications you’re placing out there in the world are ones you want it to share days, months, and years from now.