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Dancehop survey! Help us offer a better service, and you could win a gift certificate!

Eric — Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:55:10 +0000

It’s time for Dancehop to start looking seriously at what you, the dancer, actually need. To assist in this, we’ve put up a survey here:

Click Here for Dancehop survey

Participants will be placed in a drawing for $75 gift certificates to the Dancehop shoe store, where we’ll be rewarding 2 participants next Monday. Fill out a survey now, and help us to serve the dance community even better!

Dance community building with Clay Nelson

Eric — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 23:17:31 +0000

Portland stands as an example of how to run a successful dance community. Tango in Portland is arguably the most vibrant, cooperative, and inviting dance community in the US. Even blues dancers that I’ve talked to in Seattle are impressed. So what’s the secret to their success? Clay Nelson, founder of the Portland tango community, has written the ultimate guide to community building.

Synopsis and comments:
Clay lists the major qualities of a dance scene as: quantity, dance level, and cooperative spirit.

For quantity, Clay mentions recruiting. Recruiting includes classes, which he feels are easiest held at community centers, city park districts, and universities. He emphasizes that everyone should be involved in teaching, and I feel it’s fun and educational to teach, no matter your level. As my friend Wesley says, “If you know 50% more about a subject than someone, you’re the expert”

Extending Clay’s views on ads, I feel that free ads, flyers, and google adwords are the way to go.

In order to keep things going, new dancers need evening dances, and solid dj’ing. What’s the point in getting good at social dancing if you can’t go out and enjoy being social?

Clay gets very specific about tango in his section on how to help foster quality dancers. To generalize, it makes sense to teach dancers what they need to connect, and navigate on the floor, before a series of steps. Having weekend workshops can be a major motivational factor, and out of town teacher visiting can inject more excitement into a community.

In my opinion, his final section on cooperation is the most important one, particularly for existing dance communities. To start, its important to allow people to have a sense of contribution for their community. If they want to DJ, decorate, host people, or even become professional teachers, it should be encouraged. In my personal experience, one surefire way to make a community implode is to have fear of new teachers and infighting. It’s important to realize the bigger a scene gets, the more everyone benefits. It’s a positive feedback loop. As a side bonus, the longer you’ve been teaching, the more your reputation will help despite what fresh blood might do.

Everyone should be encouraged to participate, even in small ways. Clay’s example of students copying cd’s that a teacher brings to a class is a prime example. When people join the dance community, they don’t know the rules, so why not help foster cooperation from the beginning? Clay also talks about the importance of accepting people doing their own thing. Dance is a personal thing, and so if there’s a clique doing something “exclusive” it’s ok to tolerate and even encourage this.

A final and important point from Clay is to not accept toxic behavior. After reflection in a small group, find consensus. If that includes action, gently confront an individual’s behavior. If need be, more persistent and forceful over time, and shun as a last resort.

Something Clay discusses that’s part recuiting, and part cooperation is e-mail lists. E-mail is still THE best way to keep in touch, as long as people opt-in to your list. Weekly or monthly mailings of what you’re up to helps keep active. I fully expect Dancehop will help in this task. Something interesting he mentions: Sharing your e-mail list. I would agree the occasional guest e-mail or message in your e-mails will help tighten up the community. Remember, pay it forward.

Quoting Clay: “Keep in mind that although tango communities are extremely devisive in general, when I started in portland, no one else danced argentine tango. Thus I was starting from scratch–which is quite different then most cities with developed or existing communities.” Still, I think the principles he’s laid out are valid, and there are some great ideas here that community members may not have thought of yet.

Spending cash like it’s in style

Eric — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 19:07:23 +0000

A cup of friendship

I meet with a men’s group twice a month that practices the teachings of The Way of the Superior Man, by David Deida. One major focus is having a purpose, and making space for the purpose on one’s life.

When I talk about DanceHop to them, I always discuss how I want to help dancers. I’ve never once mentioned wanting to be wealthy, just having the freedom to be where I want, when I want, so I can dance with people everywhere, and get people connected.

One of the men called me on this, saying that the point of going into business is to make money. He suggested a practice:
In order to get right with the fact that I enjoy wealth, I must spend $100 cash every day, beyond normal bills, for the next two weeks.

My poor Jewish heart! I balked, but eventually agreed that it makes sense for me to feel what it would be like to be even more successful than I am right now. So here’s my offer to you, dear reader: come help me spend this by letting me buy you dinner I firmly believe that spending can be an act of creation, and in this case I want to feed the relationship with dancers like you.

Last evening I put this into action by having dinner at Zoe in Belltown with my friend Rachel, who I haven’t seen in the last couple months. She has a great mind for marketing and design, and is an awesome networker. Even though I had just planned to have a great dinner and nothing more, she has already come back to me with some great value. Hmm, this experiment reminds me of Keith Farazzi’s Never Eat Alone, a great book with a ton of tips on building relationships.

Loving the recession, goals

admin — Sun, 22 Mar 2009 23:38:55 +0000

I found a good article, Loving The Recession, on Biznik.com last week.
It’s surprising, Steven pretty much takes ideas that I’ve had, and distills them into a potent brew. He talks about 4 questions which are important when moving forward in life:

What are your core values?

What your vision for yourself?

What steps are needed to meet that vision?

What support do you need to pursue that vision?

When I talk to anyone, I try to get to know them through their core values. As an example, I find that really good tango dancing brings joy into my life. When I tried to figure out why, I found that I enjoyed the connection, creativity, and personal growth associated with the dance. Bear in mind this took a week for me to work this out.

Often we are hypercritical of ourselves. In a way, it’s a form of egoism. Why are we so special that we need to be better than everyone else? We’re stuck in this point of view, whereas if we were looking at anyone else with the exact same circumstances, we’d be much more constructive. If we’re able to be more objective, and work our goals incrementally, it’s possible to have a lot of progress.

Looking specifically at my personal productivity project, I’ve made some changes. First off, tracking each individual task while I’m doing it is a pain. I’ve been using Rescuetime instead to get a view of how much I actually work. I’ve also added the habit of journaling 3 times a week to track how I’m doing in relationship to my goals. I hope that this change will help me be more effective in creating a really good product for dancers.

Personal Productivity Overhaul

admin — Sun, 08 Mar 2009 21:21:42 +0000

Bridge to the future, Photo by fotopakismo

I found out recently that I’d be particularly at risk if my group were to have layoffs (still unlikely). In order to mitigate some of this risk, in terms of getting rave reviews for people inside and outside the company. I propose to increase my productivity by 5x in the next 3 months. It sounds ridiculous, I know. I might as well say I want to become a kajillion times more productive than I am now, but I firmly believe it’s achievable. I actually am shooting to surpass it.

I have fairly selfish goals involved in this. First off, I want to see if I can do it, since it affects my entire life and personal success. How amazing would it be to get so much done during a day? Would that free up time to allow me to do whatever it is that I’ve been putting off, such as vacationing, or side projects?

Secondly, I can see myself becoming a productivity expert, using myself as the case study. For full disclosure, I have this crazy image of myself consulting with other groups, and being a guest speaker who receives the adoration of thousands of people whose quality of life I improve. Obviously this is an unlikely scenario, but it’s still motivating.

One major factor of productivity is delivering useful objectives, not only completing work or appearing busy. It’s time to make the challenging decisions that I would be putting off for later, not doing work for work’s sake.

Getting to brass tacks:
Velocity is the degree of difficulty for a completed task. Points are estimated as hours to complete a story which directly meets program objectives, from 0-3. Any larger is difficult to manage. Chores and bug fixes for my code do not count towards velocity, since they don’t meet program objectives.

I’m going to aim for at least a 5x velocity increase in three months. I chose 4 habits to starting the Friday before last, and can add 1 habit per week, on Friday. At the end of the experiment, I keep at least 8 habits. Typically it’s possible to start habit change at about 1 habit a week, so this is agressive.

Part of the current challenge is relating velocity to real work done. I’m wondering if I need to relate velocity to the same complexity, not estimated time. Eg: A 3 star story currently takes me 3 hours, should it later? Or should it be a 1 star story if the complexity is the same and I’m 3 times as productive?

My current useful habits:
Arrive by 9:30 AM (consistent in the last two weeks)
Reading on the bus
List three most important tasks at the start of the day
Drinking up to 3 Liters of water a day
Bi-monthly journaling and men’s group

First 4 habits:
1. Use headphones only for music, at most 2 hours a day, lock them up otherwise
2. Start tracking velocities and stories, and add daily productivity notes into the file on specific tasks
3. Use internet only around noon for up to half an hour, unless absolutely needed to complete a task. E-mail may be checked when arriving as well as during noon.
4. Read books useful for work on the bus (currently a C book)

Pool of possible habits to add, some of these may seem off the wall:
1. Eat only whole foods, excepting protein powder
2. Set up weekly meetings with superiors tracking what I’m learning and how, relate it to program goals
3. Weekly read of productivity blogs such as Zen Habits (using RSS of course) for ideas of what to add
4. Daily meditation, including visualization of best positive (possibly long term) outcomes relating to specific important tasks.
5. Complete media fast for a week every month: 1 hour of fiction per day, and 1 non fiction book, MAX
6. Select habits from Getting Things Done (eg: 43 folders (tickler file); workflow process: collect, process, organize, review, do; levels of focus: current actions, current projects, areas of responsibility, yearly goals, 5 years, life goals)
7. Work virtually so that I have a distraction free environment, and get a change of environment to avoid burnout
8. Nicely correct people who distract me from work
9. Keep a daily journal, relating to productivity, habits, and life goals. Question myself: “Did I work hard?”, “Did I work smart?”
10. Exercise 4 times a week for 45 minutes
11. Single task for an hour at a time, including a 5 minute break. Avoid multi tasking and context switching wherever possible.
12. Keep desk decluttered, spend 15 minutes a week on this
13. Declutter house for 15 minutes a day
14. Stick to 5 sentence limit for e-mails
15. Use a program like RescueTime to track how I use my computer
16. Eat 5 small meals a day, have a free day where I eat whatever
17. Skip meetings when possible and get a review later, or do other work during meetings (this is extreme, but often meetings produce very little real work product)
18. Blog weekly (or more) about the experience and get outside feedback

From last Friday:

So far, the main challenge of this task to limit interrupting web surfing. Even a few minutes of it causes a costly context switch. I’m picking a habit here which will make it catalyze my other habits. I’m choosing: Daily meditation, including visualization of best positive (possibly long term) outcomes relating to specific important tasks.
I’ll meditate for 15 minutes a day, either after waking up or before going to bed.

Bad web advertising ethics?

admin — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 07:29:57 +0000

I noticed some banner ads around the web on a variety of sites such as facebook, digg, and other places, and became curious about how this campaign that became successful really quickly. The first banner I ever saw showed two different stomach pics, trying to show weight loss of some random gal. Along with the somewhat shocking images, and the word “Obey” prominently displayed, along with text such as, “as seen on Rachel Ray”.

I checked out the stats on jennysdietblog.com, and noted that the traffic shot up from no visitors in November to 250,000 in January. I started clicking on other ads, and found nichollesweightloss.com. Here’s a pic showing both sites:

I wonder if the person pictured actually used the products that they’re selling, and if she did it in the time period of 3 months like they claim. What concerns me about this campaign is that they are using credibility indicators such as certain TV shows (where they show the product in question, although it’s implied that this woman was on), pictures of some person’s change, and they attempt to create a feeling of a relationship with what seems like a fictitious person on these shell blogs that are really just a means of doing an affiliate offer. What do you think, is this woman real? Is this campaign ethical?