THE FIX provides thousands of readers with three problem-solving fixes, allowing them to harvest the benefits of my 1 + 1 + 1 = 10x formula. I hope by sending you this newsletter I can help shift your focus from reactive to proactive. Enjoy! – Alex
THE FOUNDER’S FIX
Start Here . . .
I believe strongly in a good dashboard – having one place to see all the things important about your day, your week, your key relationships, your KPI’s, your net worth.
I’m not talking about the dashboards for your business, like Salesforce or Hubspot for client relationships, or Asana or Trello for task management, or a financial dashboard, or one of the other countless apps out there. I’m talking about personal dashboards, the ones that automate the display and collection of the critical parts of your life so you don’t have to remember anything when you start each day. Throw in some inspirational quotes and images and you’ve got a great Dashboard.
Three recommendations for that:
- Evernote, which I’ve used for about 10 years now (and freaking love), has recently created a “Home” feature where all of your most important notes and data points can be assembled onto one screen.
- Momentum, which sits on your Google Chrome browser (it also works with Firefox and Microsoft Edge, I believe), opens every time you launch your browser so it’s always right there when you need it. This one’s really cool for a lot of reasons. Aside from ToDo’s and Metrics, it comes up against a new, stunning nature scene as your background for the day, along with a cool mantra (today’s was “Illuminate the Beauty of Others”) and an inspirational quote (today’s was from Maya Angelou, “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use, the more you have.”)
- A more basic mechanism is to create a recurring event in your calendar app for the beginning of each day (maybe call it “Start Here”), and then create hyperlinks to the data you have in other places, like QuickBooks or your bank account or whatever).
The point is, true growth comes from simplicity, automation and impact, among other things. I don’t trust my memory for any of that. I trust my Dashboard though.
THE LEGAL FIX
Cover Your Ass(ets) . . .
Your company has both tangible assets and intangible ones, like goodwill (branding and customer relationships) and intellectual property (trademarks, copyrights and patents). The intangible assets may actually be your company’s most valuable assets—a recent study indicates that 90% of the value of S&P 500 companies is a result of their intangible assets.
But intangibles can provide far more to your company than just an increased valuation. They are also a potential source of additional revenue through a sale, licensing arrangement, or enforcement. Are you doing enough to protect and monetize the time and resources your company has invested in developing your intellectual property? Here’s how.
THE RANDOM FIX
No Regrets . . .
From author Daniel Pink, I came across this crazy website called The World Regret Survey. Basically, the author collected regrets from surveys of people all over the world. When you click on a state or country, a person’s regret pops up from that area. I spent about five minutes today with it and got totally re-inspired on some prioritization projects and bucket list action items. Fascinating stuff.
