I send out ~40k emails every morning through mailchimp to our subscribers and for the past three years or so have fairly regularly gotten low 40's% open rates every weekday. Then last Wednesday, it dropped to low 30's. Our format hasn't changed, our content hasn't changed. Mailchimp doesn't see anything wrong. We can't figure out what might have caused the drop. (Did anything happen that I...
I can't figure out the math behind all of these smallish marketing agencies. In my city there are at least a dozen of them; 10-20 employees, very nice offices, they typically have one or two Fortune 1000 clients, some smaller clients, and a few local clients. They seem to launch one or maybe two projects a month. Projects are usually some mix of creative video and photography, a microsite,...
It's really hard for me to self-motivate. I get into slumps where I don't make progress on anything, then I spend a lot of time feeling bad and thinking about what to do, and then loop back to not doing anything.
If you look at Maslow's Hierarchy of needs, 'esteem' needs is right below self-actualization and what you and I do is bounce between these two levels. When you work alone and can't self-motivate, how do you satisfy the need for a sense of accomplishment, for power and prestige, for respect so you can self actualize?
Sometimes all I need is a goal. The right goal can kickstart my desire to do things and progress makes me feel accomplished, but these goals are hard to find.
Sometimes all I need is a checklist. Checking things off as done is a great motivator for me but it requires having things I need or want to do.
When I don't have a goal or a checklist, I hop on hackerrank and do practice problems. The ranking system is an ok motivator, I get the sense of progress and accomplishment when I complete a problem and I don't feel like I'm wasting time like when I get that from a video game.
After a while, I realize hackerrank isn't really doing much and I want to get out of the loop. This is when I start planning every half hour of the day. I write it out for the next day at the end of the day, set alarms and do whatever the schedule says. It's no longer up to me, I have to follow the schedule. When I'm writing the schedule, I think about things I might be interested in, things that would help others, things that would bring me health, wealth and happiness. I consider how much and what I could get done in half an hour, write it down and do it. Eventually I find something I like and it starts filling my schedule. After some time, I stop scheduling because I'm doing that all day. Then I usually get bored and start the whole loop over again.
Every 100 days I have a reset day (it's in my calendar) to stop and identify what brought joy and accomplishment and try to stay out of the feel bad loop.
I was watching the network logs as I logged into my credit union and saw that they attempt to request favicons from lots of third parties including dropbox, accounts.google.com, stackoverflow.com, squareup.com, instagram.com, skype.com, tumblr.com, expedia.de, pinterest.com, de.foursquare.com, eu.battle.net, store.steampowered.com, reddit.com.The favicons are usually loaded from the login page...
SubmitHub has a similar setup and reports using Braintree (Paypal). I wonder if he only uses that for one side of the marketplace though, because holding payments is where I'm stuck. Maybe cutting checks manually to the producer solves everything? I can't find a clear answer.