Relaxing Habits: Free Your Mind and the Rest Will Follow

Are work problems making it hard to relax when you finally get out of the office?

That’s not good, but there are ways to help calm the busy mind. Speaking to Inc.com contributor Christina DesMarais  (opens in a new tab), consultant and former psychotherapist Peter Shallard suggests you can solve this problem.

“If you’re coming home from work [with a lot] on your mind, and it takes you a half an hour to work it out, and then you solve problems and feel great, maybe that’s your way of processing,” Shallard says. “But if you’re up all night stressing, then something needs to change.”

Shallard offers a variety of tips, including getting a hobby, proactively working to change your mood before leaving work, and leaving shop talk at the office.

Of course, if that’s not enough, don’t be afraid to bug a mentor or counselor, he adds.

When More is Less

Think you send too much email? See how one association tackled http://t.co/mfnjEoRTOv  (opens in a new tab) @informz  (opens in a new tab) #emailmarketing  (opens in a new tab) #assnchat  (opens in a new tab)

— Lori Ely (@LoriatInformz) June 26, 2014  (opens in a new tab)

Are you overloading your newsletters with content?

Nonprofit EDUCAUSE had this very problem. During an audit of the newsletter for its flagship magazine, EDUCAUSE Review Online  (opens in a new tab), the association spotted a problem: The newsletter had a ton of content, but readers weren’t clicking on much of it.

“Our newsletter contained a lot of articles and multimedia—sometimes up to 26 different items—so we thought we might be presenting too much content and the items were competing against each other,” the organization’s Cathy Hafkus explained to Informz’s Alex Mastrianni. “While many marketing experts talk about decreasing the amount of email we send, we believed that for magazine newsletters, increasing our email frequency might be the right approach.”

So it asked its members for feedback, and it tested its messaging. Ultimately, it came up with a weekly approach, messing with the wording (“New Content Alert” was a champ) and style of the newsletters (descriptive headlines won out over blurbs), and in the end, it came up with a successful approach.

Read more on the Informz blog  (opens in a new tab).

Other good reads

“I believe it is our responsibility as association professionals to intentionally think about where the language and images we use are holding us back, rather than propelling us forward.” Shelly Alcorn, CAE, talks up how a proposed replacement for the traditional “handicapped” symbol shows how small changes can lead to big ones  (opens in a new tab).

If you’re looking for a painless way to keep your social feed filled up, take a glance at Daily, a new iOS app from Buffer  (opens in a new tab) that offers shareable info bites in card format.

Content marketing is big business, and here’s proof: The Content Marketing Institute—whose founder, Joe Pulizzi, spoke recently at ASAE’s Marketing, Membership, and Communications Conference—just acquired a competing event  (opens in a new tab), the Intelligent Content Conference (ICC). That’s a lot of content.