Writing Productivity Tip #7: Work Your Quirks We’ve all got writing quirks and mannerisms. Writing quirks include grammatical errors, spelling mistakes, or little things you do that readers could find annoying. For example: While writing quickly, you make the wrong choice between its and it’s, or your and you’re. Awkward sentences suddenly appear in your drafts like unwelcome houseguests. You […]
Subscriptions Are Eating Software
In an essay published in the Wall Street Journal in 2011, Marc Andreeson famously described the path of the technology industry with the phrase “Software is eating the world.” (Read the original article here.) In short, software is disrupting the technology industry, sector by sector. Everything that a technology sector does is eventually absorbed into software. There’s […]
Revision Is All About the Reader
Writing Productivity Tip #6: Revise for the Reader’s Productivity The previous posts in this series have been about finding ways write more fluidly and easily. The revision process is your chance to extend this same courtesy to the reader. Put in the effort to make the experience of reading as fluid as possible. It’s a matter of scalability. There’s […]
Writing: Rest Before Revising
Writing Productivity Tip #5: Give the Draft Room to Breathe You’ve dismissed the inner editor and created the first draft of your blog post, report, book chapter, whatever. You’re on a roll – what next? Now walk away. Give it some breathing room. Writing and revising are separate disciplines, and don’t work well when they crowd […]
Write for Flow, Not Perfection
Writing Productivity Tip #4: Give Your Inner Editor the Day Off You’re ready to start drafting something – a blog post, report, short story, or chapter of a nonfiction book. Do you write swiftly and efficiently? Or do you spend time struggling over word choice and sentence structure? The best possible case is to achieve a state of […]
Marketing and the Subscription Economy: A Zuora Video
At the Subscribed conference in San Francisco last May, I sat down to talk with Zuora about marketing in the subscription economy. Here’s a transcript; the video is below. In the traditional marketing environment, a lot of marketers only keep their eye on the ball up to the point of the sale. They think about customer retention, […]