Julia Roy, A Digital Girl

Be Inspired to Do the Work

I have been working hard lately on streamlining my workflow and increasing my productivity and creative output. Now that I am my own boss working from home, I have found it incredibly hard to stay on task and focused. I've realized my online habits are working against me and keeping me from getting the important things done. The talk below by Tony Schwartz: The Myths of the Overworked Creative has been very helpful in guiding me towards a more productive and sustainable workday. I hope it serves as a piece of inspiration for you too!

  

In the spirit of inspiring a more productive workday, I've shared below a gallery of my favorite desktop backgrounds from MinimalWall. Download a your favorites and make them your backround to remind yourself everyday to focus on what's important and ship your work!

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Achieve Inbox Zero with Rules in Microsoft Outlook

Months back I spent almost an entire weekend hacking my Outlook email inbox to auto-archive itself. My reason for doing this is because I would constantly hear the wonders and benefits of maintaining "inbox zero," but I could never seem to achieve it on a daily basis. To me, having to manually file every email after I had read or responded to it was an annoying task and interruptive to my email workflow during a busy day. Once I figured out how Outlook Rules worked I set up an if this then that type of automated system using Rules, where after I had read an email I could hit a shortkey and it would be auto-filed into a designated folder.

This first requires categorizing your contacts into groups and then using Rules to associate groups with folders. For example, when someone I had categorized in my contacts as "Marketing Team" emailed me it would come into my inbox and, after I had read it or responded to it, I would hit ALT+A and the email would automatically be pulled from my inbox and filed in the "Marketing Team" folder. The Rules setup to achieve this looks something like: 

IF

1. Sender is in Group Category "Marketing Team" 
2. Message is Marked as Read

THEN

1. Move email to "Marketing Team" folder

I did leave the corporate world a few weeks back to start my own consultancy and since then have moved from Outlook to Gmail to manage my inbox, however I wanted to share the Presi I created below to help other Outlook users understand the Rules technique. If you take the upfront time to categorize your contacts and set up Rules, you will find yourself with an email system that is automatically organized to fit your needs, easy to search and much easier to manage.

Hacking My Outlook Inbox with Rules on Prezi

Technological Singularity

In April I went to a pre-screening of Transcendent Man, not knowing what to expect or how it would changes my beliefs on what the future will bring. 

Transcendent Man is a documentary of Ray Kurzweil, a serial inventor and freakishly accurate futurist. What I experienced while watching the film cannot be put into words. I was speechless myself. When the film was over, the lights came up and all I could mutter was..."holy shit." Previously, I had no idea who Ray was but after seeing his film I looked him up on Wikipedia and wondered how I had never heard of him. Many call him the modern day Tomas Edison for all his incredible inventions (flat bed scanner, reading machine for the blind, etc, etc) and he has an amazing talent–predicting the future of technology.

The basis of Ray's work today is grounded in singularity theory and exponential growth. I've pulled the definition from Wikipedia below. 

Singularity Theory

... is the study of the failure of manifold structure. A loop of string can serve as an example of a one-dimensional manifold, if one neglects its width. What is meant by a singularity can be seen by dropping it on the floor. Probably there will appear a number of double points, at which the string crosses itself in an approximate 'X' shape. These are the simplest kinds of singularity. Perhaps the string will also touch itself, coming into contact with itself without crossing, like an underlined 'U'. This is another kind of singularity. Unlike the double point, it is not stable, in the sense that a small push will lift the bottom of the 'U' away from the 'underline'.

Exponential Growth

... occurs when the growth rate of a mathematical function is proportional to the function's current value. In the case of a discrete domain of definition with equal intervals it is also called geometric growth or geometric decay (the function values form a geometric progression).The exponential growth model is also known as the Malthusian growth model. US scholar Albert Bartlett pointed out the difficulty to grasp ramifications of exponential growth, stating: "The greatest shortcoming of the human race is our inability to understand the exponential function."

Not being a stellar math or science student, it was very confusing to me at first to understand the math and science behind it all. How I have come to understand it, singularity is the point at which a given mathematical object can no longer be defined; and exponential studies how growth is not linear or constant, but rather it accelerates as it advances. We have been experiencing exponential growth in biology, economics, physics and computer technology for decades and we are at a point in the growth curve where we are going to start to see rapid advancement in all fields. Singularity theory suggests that we will reach a point where the technology we have created will transcend our own human intelligence and capability. We will then have the opportunity to merge our biological bodies with technology, making us infinitely smarter and stronger. Ray predicts this point of singularity will begin in year 2045. 

All this blows my mind and I have to say... I believe it. 

I attended recently the Singuarity Summit in NYC, a 2-day event that brought in speakers from all over the world to discuss all kinds of future intelligence studies and ideas. I'm not ashamed to say (OK, maybe a bit) that as an attendee I've never questioned my own IQ so much, as many of the speakers talked mostly over my head. Still, my takeaway is that the singularity is very real. We are living in a time where technological advancements in areas like neuroscience, robotics, nano tech, computer tech, biology, physics, etc. are growing at a rate that is so fast, sooner than most of us can imagine, we will be merging ourselves with technologies that will make us half human and half AI. 

I know this is a wild (and pretty freaky) idea to grasp, but some of the predictions for the future include mind uploading, immortality and omnipresence. The technology we are creating today will continue to build upon itself and will outpace our own capabilities, which will create a dilemma–either merge with artificial intelligence or become irrelevant. There is of course optimistic and pessimistic views of what this kind of technology means for the future. If we can download Google to our brains, manipulate and change our own DNA, reverse the aging process, etc., we will become in effect super-humans. What will we do with this power? Also, if we build and bring to life AI robots that have intelligence beyond human capability, what will they do with that power?

It is inevitable that humans will use the advanced technology we've created to evolve. Think about today versus 40 years ago. The most advanced computer was a $1M machine that was the size of a city block with little computing power and today the smartphone that fits in your pocket is thousands of times more capable and affordable. Now remember exponential growth. Is it really so hard to believe that what fits in our pocket today could be the size of a blood cell and implanted in our body 10 or 20 years from now? I don't think so. 

The Great Unknown

Right now I'm sitting at the table in my living room and writing this post thinking OMG!

Friday was my last day as VP of Marketing at Manilla, and today marks the first day of my new adventure. I've left the full-time employee with benefits world to start two initiatives:

1. my own marketing consultancy helping brands with digital and social strategy, and 
2. launching WorkHacks, a startup business that aligns with one of my true passions- lifehacking and productivity

With the experience of helping build and launch a  startup (Manilla), and with the incredible support of friends, family and mentors, I find myself thinking about this new life and what I am going to make of it. 

I've wanted to make this leap to career independence for a few years now, but I lacked the strength, confidence and guts to pull the trigger. I finally found it within myself to believe in my own potential and, as I sit here contemplating what my to-do list for today should be, I have to embrace the excitement, fear and uncertainty I feel. I've jumped into the great unknown, where my fate no longer rests on meeting the expectations of my job title, but rather my ability to sell, (over)deliver and scale great work as a consultant and bring my vision for WorkHacks to life.  

The realization that I am now my own CEO, boss and direct report is overwhelming and a bit terrifying. Since I joined the workforce with my first job at 16 years old, I've been taught to take direction, do what I'm told and always try to overdeliver on my bosses expectations to make them look good to their boss and prove my value. That imposed structure is gone and it's my responsibility to set the business objectives and goals and of course deliver against them everyday. 

Big challenges lie ahead as I work to pave my own path, but I'm guided by a determination to shape my own future and destiny. I can't even express how excited I am to have woken up in this new world. Up, up and away...

Why I Check my Voicemail

Is this true for you? It is for me. I dread listening to voicemails, seriously dread it. Send me a text message or email and I will read your message almost instantly, versus a voicemail where it's often days after your message before I remember to listen to it. The plain truth is, if you send me a text or email I will likely be reading your message within the hour. Leave me a voicemail, and I will likely be leaving it for later. 

For a long time, my voicemail message read– Hello, you have reached Julia Roy. Feel free to leave a message, but for a quicker response send a text. Nobody listened, still leaving me voice messages I would put off and often forget about. So I enabled Google voice on my mobile, which didn't really help much. Google transcribed messages were 90% of the time delivered to me as total gibberish that I could not make any sense of. GVoice did make me feel like I "got" the message, even if the transcription gave me hardly any understanding of what the voicemail actually said. During my usage of GVoice, I rarely went to go listen to the actual voicemail.

Do these feelings toward voicemail make any sense? When someone calls instead of sending an email, the message content could likely be importance and even urgent. I should make a better effort to check my voice messages, but instead I almost always put it off. Right or wrong, irresponsible or not, I continue to neglect incoming phone calls and messages like the plague. For a girl who–in high school and college loved spending hours on the phone chatting with girlfriends, boyfriends and family–now avoids the phone to no avail, makes me realize voice-to-voice communication is dead for me.

For those friends and family too far away to meetup in person–let's Skype! For those new business call pitches–let's GoToMeeting! Anyone else out there feel the same way? 

("Why I Check my Voicemail" Infographic found on digg.)

Intel Museum of Me via Facebook Connect

Great Facebook Connect play by Intel called Museum of Me. So much fun, try it!

Boo Lands a Book Deal

Have you heard of a little boy named Boo? He loves Oprah, the color pink, chicken, cheese and looks great in t-shirts. Don't be fooled, although Boo may be small in size he is a pretty big deal (probably cooler than you) and he is a dog. But not just any dog, a dog with 1.2 MILLION "Likes" on Facebook.

Chronicle Books, the San Francisco based publishing company, recently announced they will be coming out with Boo’s debut book this fall called Boo, The Life of the World's Cutest Dog. The mother of this pooch should of course get all the credit, and her success story started by simply sharing the love she has of this dog with the world. 

Now that's one lucky dawg!