‘The best party of the season’ — put it on your calendar

I’m not the party-going type, so when I tell you I’m hitting the circuit, it means something. I’ve had a blast attending past Sarasota Magazine parties at Marie Selby Botanical Gardens, and I expect this year’s, scheduled for Tuesday, April 23, to be no exception.

Dubbed Glamour in the Garden, the soirée is being promoted as the “best party of the season,” and I believe it. Past events have brought out a who’s-who of local bigwigs and celebrities, and you can’t top the setting: Selby at sunset.

Click on the image below for more details about the event, and to snag your tickets. Tell ’em M.C. sent you:

The power of video

I’m sharing this Easter worship video I developed as part of my P.R. and marketing work for my client, the Church of the Redeemer. I project-managed and provided editorial oversight, and was lucky to work with a fantastic local production team. I particularly enjoyed the final editing process.

Whether video has a more formal feel, like this one, or a quicker, more casual, guerrilla style — the medium is one of the most compelling ways for organizations to share their message, especially on social media.

Check it out:

Anne-Marie Slaughter headlines this year’s Renaissance Luncheon

If you’re unaware of the myriad offerings of the Women’s Resource Center, a great opportunity to learn more is coming up quickly: On Tues., March 12, the Center hosts its biggest fundraising event of the year — the Renaissance Luncheon — at the Ritz-Carlton.

“For our donors, [the luncheon] lets them know the good programs and services their money is supporting,” Executive Director Janice Zarro explained to me last year. It’s “an opportunity to showcase our values and the impact we are having on our community.”

And that impact is significant.

Each year, nearly 13,000 women take advantage of the Center’s varied programs, which include everything from peer referral counseling, finance education and Excel spreadsheet training to lessons on starting and managing a business. On the personal side, they offer classes in navigating life as a widow, learning yoga, handling divorce, bouncing back from adversity and creating the life you desire – just to name a few.

The Renaissance Luncheon is a cornerstone in helping the Center continue to do what it does for the women of our community and has developed into a can’t-miss event — attracting close to 600 men and women who want to support the Center and draw insights from the outstanding keynote speakers.  The theme for this year’s luncheon is “Redefining Balance,” and the keynote speaker is Anne-Marie Slaughter, the author of the much-discussed and controversial 2012 Atlantic essay, “Why Women Still Can’t Have it All.”

The event begins with boutique shopping at 10:30 a.m., followed at noon by lunch and Slaughter’s talk. It also includes drawings for prizes and a silent auction — some of the goodies include a five-course meal for eight, courtesy of Zest! of Sarasota catering.

A ticket for the luncheon will run you $95; you can purchase one online by clicking here.

Longtime client merges with national energy consulting firm

EYP Energy — a division of EYP, Inc., my longest-term client (based in New York) — has announced a strategic merger with The Weidt Group, one of the nation’s premier building energy consulting firms, currently headquartered in Minnesota, with additional offices in Colorado, Iowa and Wisconsin.

Woo-hoo! Looking forward to helping my client communicate via their Intranet with all these new EYP team members across the country!

Two joyful ‘wHoops’ for Theresa Rose’s TEDxSarasota video

Wishing for “a life lived in the land of enough”? Yeah, me too. That’s why I encourage you to watch this very unique and gently inspiring video by Theresa Rose, who gave a talk in December at the TEDxSarasota event. Talking about her theory of joyful movement, struggles with body image, how to get unstuck and “the marriage of joy and peace” that produces grace, she hoola-hoops almost throughout.

I give her talk, this video and her messages (which are many and one at the same time) a hearty — and joyful-esque — “wHoop! wHoop!”

Watch the TEDx clip here:

How I learned to ‘Get Things Done’

I’m usually a nose-to-the-grindstone kind of gal — I rarely take lunches out of the (home) office, tend to avoid schmooze fests (no matter how good for business they might be) and am usually too busy earning a living the hard way to take the time to learn how to earn a living the smart way.

Not so smart, I know!

But yesterday, I was fortunate enough to hear international “Get Things Done” guy David Allen speak at New College.  It was a four-hour affair, and that’s a pretty big commitment for someone with four press releases going out and a to-do list of 42 items to be crossed off before 7 p.m. But still… the whole “work smarter, not harder/longer/forever” dynamic appealed to me way back in November when I registered, and miraculously, today, no client emergencies (or cat or Mom emergencies) arose before I left the house at 7:45 a.m., and so I was scooted into my free seat by 8:15 a.m., courtesy of the lovely Zonta Club of Sarasota, and the club’s just-as-lovely partners and sponsors who made the whole thing happen.

In the crowd, I saw Susan Burns, editor of Biz(941); Janice Zarro of the Women’s Resource Center; Veronica Brandon Miller of Goodwill Manasota; the Rev. Fredrick A. Robinson, rector at the Church of the Redeemer (one of my longest-term clients in Sarasota); Ann Fowler of Westcoast Black Theatre Troupe; and a whole host of other folks in town who work for nonprofits and related organizations. Could it be they all too felt in need of a little (or a lot) fine-tuning in the seemingly never-ending game of Can I Get This Done Not Just By Deadline But By the End of This Century?

So, what did I learn?

I learned that I’m actually doing pretty good on the time/information/project management continuum. What I’m horrible at, it seems, is a) responding promptly to emails that aren’t strictly about work or business; b) allowing myself to be too easily interrupted during the workday by people who think the word “freelancer” means I basically sit around watching Katie, Oz and The Chew all day in between waiting for the opportunity to work for someone for free (oh, and a couple of cats who think I only work at home in order to serve their whim for cat treats and litter box scooping); and c) not following the two-minute rule.

The two-minute rule is basic: If you receive an email, phone call, snail mail, etc., or have an item on your to-do list, any of which could be accomplished in two minutes or less, do it right then and be done with it and move on. I’ve always tended to read an email when it comes in, no matter what I’m doing, and then respond later (I’m sure my friends would say sometimes never). Nu-uh, says Allen. E-peeping is a big no-no when you’re supposed to be working!

First of all, don’t interrupt your own work by checking what that ding-dong email that just arrived has to tell you (unless you’re on fire waiting for that final jpeg to send out with the press release). Then, set aside dedicated time periodically (however often needed for your own business/personal comfort level) for actually reading and dealing with your emails — which requires always, always, doing one of the following: 1. delete whenever you can; 2. respond immediately if the response takes two minutes or less; 3. file it into an email folder with perhaps a note on your to-do list to take specific action at some future point (which may be an hour or a year from now); or in some rare cases, 4. print out the email and put it in your physical inbox!

Um, I don’t even have a physical inbox! Or at least I didn’t until I returned home and carved out a shelf next to my desk that will henceforth be known as “Place de la Naïveté.” Wish me luck with that. But Allen says it’s an essential component of the Get it Done ethos.

Anyway, after clearing a space for an actual inbox, I cleared my calendar of all non-urgent to-dos, and spent the next two hours (yes, unbelievably, it took that long) — clearing out both of my email inboxes. Allen calls it “zeroing out.” And, it’s a shockingly good feeling to see NO EMAILS IN MY INBOX — personal and professional. And, seriously, I’m going to try to keep it that way. I’ve made a list of all the projects and to-dos that resulted from the e-box sweep, and I had a lot of fun deleting stuff I truly didn’t need for any reason. I also now have a massively long list of personal contacts to whom I owe apologies for my delinquent ways!

I SWEAR I’m going to respond to those two folders marked “Personal Emails I Must Respond to Before My Friends Write Me Off Entirely” in a timely fashion. Well, timely is subjective, I know. So I’ve got those folders on my to-do list — something that never occurred to me to do before, and one thing I know about me — when it comes to my to-do list, I “Get it Done” Allen-style, every day, pretty much no matter what.

Let the “art of stress-free productivity” begin!

More Joy in January

Sitting at my desk, immersed in updating content for a client website, all doors and windows open, and outside a bird singing one of the sweetest songs. So sweet, so soft, so near; it draws me away to the doorway and I search the surrounding bushes for the source of that singing. I finally spot a female cardinal, deep in the bush very near. She falls silent when I reach the door. I go back to my desk and realize I can see her easily from here.

She’s hasn’t resumed her singing, but I know she will. And as corny as this sounds, I realize this is joy. “Our truest life is when we are dreams awake.” Henry David Thoreau

EYP client sweeps Zweig Letter marketing awards

EYP Architecture & Engineering (my longest-term client) just swept a series of marketing awards handed out by The Zweig Letter, a weekly publication dedicated to the architecture/engineering industry. Very cool!

EYP placed first in three different categories: External Newsletter, Integrated Market Campaign and Target Marketing. One of the publication’s judges called EYP’s marketing program “very creative” and praised its “eye-opening execution.”

I’m a freelance component of the company’s marketing team, and have been working with EYP since 2004. In 2010, I was part of the design and content development team that won first place in that year’s National Communications Awards program of the Society for Marketing Professional Services, helping create a dynamic news and resource-sharing Intranet to help the firm’s 350-plus staffers stay connected across seven nationwide offices.

I’m super proud of EYP and its marketing staff for their recent Zweig awards — they deserve every accolade!

Path Financial Facebook blog dedicated to good economic news

We’re so inundated with economic news each day — good news, bad news, who’s up, who’s down — my tendency is to sometimes just ignore the whole shebang, but one of my clients is trying to help folks zero in on the important positive news out there.

Path Financial (whom I’m very proud to call a client) just launched a new Facebook page called the Better News Blog, where the company is plucking out and highlighting important positive stories from around the web. Here’s how Better News defines its mission:

The purpose of the Better News Blog is to share smart, well-sourced, and solidly-researched news articles and stories that stress the positive side of things. While we mostly focus on economic and market issues, we also provide links to general interest stories that we find inspiring or noteworthy.

News outfits, talking heads and high-drama pundits are dedicated to selling “bad” news. The Better News Blog wants to share with you good news you can use instead.

If you’re as in to sharing good news and focusing our energies in positive ways as much as I am (or at least as much as possible!), help me spread the word for my client’s new page by “liking” it on Facebook: Click here and “Like” — and read the positive news coming your way!

Joy joy joy

Yesterday and this morning, feeling pretty awful on a personal basis and then, sullenly checking in with facebook, saw this and my world changed. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kbJcQYVtZMo