Editor’s note: This is a guest post from Sid Savara of Analysis Driven Personal Development.

In my life I’ve gone through periods of intense, driven productivity – months where everything fell into place, and my goals almost seemed to accomplish themselves. At the other extreme, there have been times in my life where I was completely overwhelmed, burdened by my different projects and responsibilities – and frustrated because so many of them not only challenged me, but didn’t matter to me. There were days when I asked myself how did I end up here? How did I end up working on all these things that aren’t who I am, and that don’t represent where I am going?

Some of our projects are extremely important to us, some matter a little – and some simply don’t matter to us at all. In this guide I’d like to discuss how to define and focus on what truly matters – and then discuss some strategies for making time for them.

Breaking It Down
Here are a few question to help you focus on what truly matters – and cut from your life items that don’t.

1. What does my life look like ten years from now? I love projecting into the future and imagining my life: mentally time traveling to picture where I want to be. The power of this exercise is even more apparent when you consider that you are the product of where you came from. Think of your favorite memories, people and events from your past and you’ll see things that have shaped you into the person you are today. Similarly, looking ten years down the road and imagining what I want helps me focus my energies today to make it happen tomorrow. If my future daydream is filled with thoughts of spending time with my family and celebrating with friends – then that tells me I need to focus on maintaining those relationships today.
2. What is my purpose? Leo has previously discussed his life’s purpose and tips for finding your own life’s mission. If you have determined your life’s mission, that provides a foundation for where you should be spending your time – along with the activities, and ends, you should be focusing on. This is sometimes difficult because we may believe our life’s purpose is not in line with a “practical career” – but I disagree. There is no contradiction in using a “practical career” to pull yourself out of debt so you can be free for adventure, or perhaps to send your children to college. The disconnect occurs however, when your “practical career” is padding your bank account with money which means little to you – and you wish you were out living your true purpose instead.
3. What excites me? Sometimes we are scared to admit to ourselves what we really want to do, and who we really want to be because it’s not popular, or because it’s not as secure as the job we have. Deep down however, we know what excites us. We know what gets our heart pumping, and what gets us excited to jump out of bed in the morning.
4. What can I let slide? There are never enough hours in the day to do everything, absolutely everything, that I have some interest in doing. There is, however, enough time in the day to do everything that I am truly interested in, and that truly matters. Find what you can let slide -and then let it.
5. Do the consequences have meaning Every task and project has outcomes and consequences – but consequences don’t matter in and of themselves. What matters is how much those consequences mean to us. Sometimes we fight, claw and struggle towards down a path because other people want us to have the rewards at the end, or because the ends sound impressive – but if they don’t have meaning to us, then we will not be satisfied with the accomplishment. In other cases we may have initially pursued a goal, but our interests and purpose changed. If something doesn’t mean anything to you, then regardless of how important it is to others, how impressive it may be or how important it may have been in the past, it may be time to let it go.

Making Time
You may already know what truly matters in your life – but are finding it difficult to make time for it, and to focus on it. Here are some tips to help you make time for what truly matters:

1. Do it first. In Zen To Done Leo suggests picking your 3 Most Important Tasks (MITs) and doing them first thing in the morning. Similarly, once you find what truly matters, try to take care of it first before spending time on tasks that matter less to you. Some people have experienced significant increases in productivity when writing, working out, or meditating early in the morning. I personally believe in paying myself first with my time, and live it every day. I work on my personal goals first thing in the morning, before I do anything else. This way every day begins positively and in line with my future.
2. Schedule it in. I’m very busy, and so is m family. My parents and I want to make time for each other however, so I literally schedule dinner in on my Google Calendar. I treat that appointment with the same seriousness as anything else in my life. It’s a commitment to my future and what truly matters.
3. Treat it as an emergency. My life is booked back to back with work, appointments and various commitments – but when I had to go into surgery for appendicitis, none of the little boxes in my task list got checked off that day. Instead, my routine came to a halt as I dealt with my medical emergency. If you’re having trouble letting things slide, or aren’t sure where you can make time, then consider treating your life mission as an emergency. Clear important, but unnecessary items off your schedule for a day – and let them go. Every day that you spend on tasks that don’t matter is a day you can never recover – and that, to me, is an emergency.

What Truly Matters, Matters
We all know deep down there are different things that drive us – hobbies that excite us, passions that we wish we had more time to explore, people we wish could spend more time with. I believe that identifying, focusing on, and spending time on what matters to us, is not simply a thought exercise.

Focusing on what truly matters, truly matters.

Find out what drives and truly matters to Sid Savara at his blog, Analysis Driven Personal Development. Sign up for his email newsletter and get a free copy of The Little Book Of Big Motivational Quotes.

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If you liked this guide, please bookmark it on Delicious or share on Twitter. Comments? @zen_habits me.

As "Government 2.0" becomes more and more popular, especially here in the Washington area, there seem to be an increasing number of people calling themselves social media or "Gov 2.0" consultants. As such, I've also seen a small increase in the number of people who are only interested in hawking their wares because social media is the current buzzword and who will move on to the next buzzword as soon as social media loses its luster. Now, consider this blog post a public service announcement for all you consultants and contractors out there (including all you Booz Allen guys too!) - I don't want you to become the next Gov 2.0 carpetbagger.

So here's what I'm going to do - I'm going to let you in on the secret and tell you how you can BE a good consultant in this world and add value to the Gov 2.0 community (it's not all that hard!):

1. BE helpful - Always always try to provide some value. Read other people's blog posts, wiki edits, forum questions, and tweets and help out if you can - even if it's just sending a helpful link, providing a good point of contact, or giving a restaurant suggestion to someone in a different city. Not everything is a marketing opportunity - just try to be a helpful person whom others can rely on. For the most part, everyone involved in Gov 2.0 is incredibly helpful to one another and we all want each other to succeed. Those who aren't stick out like sore thumbs.

2. BE honest - If you don't know something, say it. If you suddenly start promoting another organization's wares, disclose that you have a relationship of some sort with them. If you're interested in conducting a marketing call, say that's what you're doing. Nothing's worse than thinking that you're going to have a lunch with someone you met on Twitter and they lug in a PowerPoint presentation and start running their capabilities briefings.

3. BE responsive - If someone emails you, email them back. If someone comments on your blog, comment back. If you comment on someone else's blog and they reply to you, continue in the conversation. You have no idea how much people appreciate a simple, timely response to a question, until you deal with someone who isn't. Don't be that guy.

4. BE realistic - Don't promise the world. Don't promise your client thousands of Twitter followers in two weeks. Don't say that social media is going to solve all their problems - it won't. Just because you've helped one organization use social media doesn't mean that the next one is going to work the same way. Each organization and each organization's mission is different - their results in using social media will be too.

5. BE around - Social media is all about openness and transparency and authenticity. You have to take part in the conversation if you ever hope to influence it. Don't proclaim yourself a Twitter expert if you've been on Twitter for two weeks. Use the tools that you're advocating your clients use. Be active within the social media and Gov 2.0 communities, both online AND offline. Go out and meet the people with whom you're talking online. Out of sight, out of mind - you have to be be around, both physically and virtually.

6. BE passionate - Please please please, believe in what you're selling. Is Gov 2.0 what you do for your job or is it something you're passionate about? Don't tell me - talk with me for about ten minutes and I'll be able to tell right away. I don't know about you, but I'll take a passionate person who cares deeply about my mission over someone with a slick Powerpoint presentation any day.

7. BE authentic – Just be a human being, please? Talk like a human being, not a living, breathing, walking product or service offering pitch. Be able to have an entire conversation with someone and connect with them as a person. Build a real relationship instead of a sales lead. It will be more valuable in the long run.

8. Be knowledgeable - Know what you're talking about and back it up. Don't speak only in marketing-y consultant-ese. Get to know your companies strengths and weaknesses, and be honest about them. Stay on top of current Gov 2.0 events and demonstrate your knowledge through consistent engagement. Get to know the mission and unique processes and policies of the people you're talking to. Try to imagine the challenges that they're dealing with and think about how you can help them overcome them.

9. BE humble - You're going to be wrong, and you're going to mess up. That's just the nature of this business. Admit your mistakes and move on. Don't blame someone else or make excuses - say you messed up and you'll do better and if you've been all of these other things, people will forgive you.

10. And lastly, but maybe most importantly, BE assertive - As Tom Webster points out in this fantastic post, I can tell you to BE all of these things, but unless you've got the internal support of your management, it's going to be difficult to put these tips into action. Be assertive with your management team and make the business case that there's value in building and maintaining these human relationships instead of the traditional fire hose approach to marketing.

If you do these things, I promise you that you will BE a better consultant, add more value to the community...and BE a much more likable person too!

In my travels around the world the most frequently asked question is: “What’s your favorite web analytics report? “

A close second is: “How can I improve my web pages with high bounce / low conversion rates?”

Or “I have done all I can and I don’t know how else to improve my webpage, ideas?”

If you think about it for a moment it is not a very hard question.

I believe the insights for improvement exist at the intersection of customer intent and the webpage’s purpose.

Let me explain.

The Customer Intent – Webpage Purpose Gap

There is a very simple reason many websites and web pages have a very high bounce rate, and in turn very low conversions…

There is no connection between why the customer came to the page and what the page exists for.

This could be someone typing in vegetarian shoes into Bing and landing on your web page for swim suits (as happened to me recently).

This could be me visiting www.couponcabin.com and clicking on a $10 off a $35 coupon link to Snapfish and landing on a page for “great new gifts” or, the other day, landing on a page that said “Get a free deck of cards”. What! Where’s the scent?

Never let your campaigns write chq’s that your website can’t cash.

Fix that, your outcomes (revenue, leads, donations…) will improve.

The second type of problem is a lot more common…

There is some overlap between what your customers want and what your web page exists to do. But the overlap is not very much, only the most dedicated (say your mom) will put up with the pain required to complete the task.

I land on your site to buy QuickBooks Simple Start but you have it very well hidden because you want me to buy the $400 QuickBooks Premier product.

This could be an email campaign you sent me and the landing page does not have a one click checkout link, though it does have a ton of irrelevant content.

This is every site with a painful flash intro, this is pretty much every site ever created by every big CPG company, this is Propel Water’s website where the only reason for your existence is to be impressed by a slow site with a dancing water bunny that hops!

What rarely happens, and what we should all aspire for, is this…

Not only is there a large overlap between Customer Intent and Webpage Purpose, the company’s own objectives are subservient to customer needs.

That’s how you get to nirvana. That’s how you get to low bounce rates. That’s how you get to higher conversion. That’s how you get to the kind of magic with your website visitors that will make your competitors green with jealousy!

Here’s an example, it is extremely rare for me to do a Google search and get a result from Amazon (PPC or SEO) that is not magnificently relevant.

It is rare for me to shop at www.crutchfield.com and not feel that the entire company exists to make me happy. From recommendations that start with Budget Friendly first (rather than most expensive) to humongous product pictures to all kinds of shopping guarantees to bonus stickers and custom helpful manuals that are in the box when I get the product.

They understand my intent (worry free quick shopping to install process) and they have done their best to have web pages whose purpose is to meet that intent.

Moral Of The Story

If you want to have high performing web pages make sure that you:

Glory will be yours!

Tips For Improving Web Pages (Understanding Customer Intent)

We know what needs to get done, right? I think so.

With each tip below my hope is to share with you how I try to glean customer intent (2a and 2b above) so that I can improve the pages (accomplish #3 above).

Uno: Insights from Sources (URL’s, Keywords, Campaigns)

One of the obvious sources for understanding customer intent is to use the sources that drove traffic to your website. In your analytics tool this is all available in one nice window where links are just waiting to be clicked!

You are looking for the Entrance Paths, Sources (referring websites / url’s) and Keywords.

To the left of that screenshot, from Google Analytics, you’ll also see a segmentation drill down that you can click to see Medium, Campaign, Ad Content etc, all great ways to understand intent for Visitors that arrived via campaigns.

This concatenated screenshot shows the analysis that I end up doing…

In this case the high bounce rate is now easier to understand.

9 out 10 keywords referring traffic to the website are not about the purpose of this page. This page is about web analytics career planning, and only keyword number 6 is remotely related to that. No wonder people bounce.

Now I have several actions I can take. I can either do better SEO so it ranks for the right words. I can add this line to the top of the page: “Hey if you are here to learn about Avinash or about the Occam’s Razor then go here and there“.

For my other websites I also click on the referring url’s and go back and visit those sites and see what they are writing about this page when they link to it. They are saying “get discounts on iPods” and linking to my site. But my webpage is about the ZuneHD! Well I can contact that site and get that fixed or add a promotion on my Zune page for the iPod discounts. Both will help meet customer intent.

Ditto with your campaigns, see what campaigns drive people to the site and what promises you made on those campaigns (content, discounts, calls to action) and make sure the web page reflects those promises.

If you do the first part well then this is how your webpage entrance keywords report should look…

Every single referring keyword is a perfect match for the content on the site. It reflects my hard work with SEO and a perfect match with customer intent.

Dos: Insights from Mis-matched Calls to Action

I think this is the biggest miss when it comes to why webpages stink. The customer wants to do x on the page and you are pushing y.

Take a look at this example from www.frys.com (click on the image for a higher resolution, you know you want to!)…

What is the call to action on this page?

There are three layers of tabs on top, a dysfunctional left navigation (still with lots of choices), a link on top that says Disable Menus (I clicked, nothing happens, hmm…), two sets of searches, DVD deals, Blueray something, category links, ….. lots more.

I know this is a category page, but what’s the call to action Fry’s wants me to follow? How does that reflect what I might want to do as a customer?

How about some clarity?

Another example. What is the call to action here…

OMG!

The job of this page seems to be to get me to attend MONEYFest. That’s the most important thing for this company because that’s the only call to action that stands out.

But should it?

Here’s one final example to hammer this concept home.

I just searched for Color Laserjet Printer in Google and clicked on three ppc ads.

The Dell ad takes me to a page that asks me to choose if I want Home & Home Office Printers or Small Business Printers. What? I just want a printer. I also don’t want to be conned into a expensive price, yet I feel one of those two links will do that. Why should I have to put up with this simply because Dell’s business is organized into two divisions? Dell’s revenue, analytics tools and number of analytics people is not an issue – all quite large. So why not land campaigns on pages where I get what I want, a printer / netbook / music player with no prices. As a customer I am satisfied, then when I click Show Me Price make me choose Small Biz or Home. Why not?

[ Oh and for the record click on Small Biz, offers were $10 cheaper than Home and Home Office. How mean!]

The HP ad takes me to a page where half of the page is taken up with the menu, dancing promo, best deals of the week link (which sells computers) and at the bottom of the page, almost below the fold is every printer they sell in all categories. I just want a color laserjet printer.

The Xerox ad takes me here:

No crappy menus. No crappy promotions. No home or small business choices. Just a printer. Just a color laserjet printer.

Perfect match between customer intent, content and call to action.

And it compares it to the direct competitor and tells me that with HP I would not only pay more ($749 to $1,299) but the HP printer would cost me $320 more to operate!

I see you think this is all too ecommerce centric. Ok look at www.flickr.com.

When I land on the site I see three links above and beyond all else. Your Photostream. Upload Photos & Video. Your Contacts. That is what I want to do 90% of the time on that page/site. For the other 10% of the times the other calls to action are there, unobtrusive and yet always there.

Look at your web pages. Identify what are the one or two jobs they are supposed to do. Eliminate every thing else. Focus your calls to action.

Tres: Insights from Website Visitors

Why guess how to improve your webpage? Why not just ask them? You know, them. The customers? : )

For site level surveys free onexit survey tools like 4Q from iPerceptions are a good choice.

But for for feedback from pages I prefer specialist page level surveys like the one from Kamplye.

The survey invite sits nicely at one corner of the page and provides localized feedback from visitors about that particular page. What they liked, what they did not, what could be done better.

[The screen-shot above is from my buddy Brian Clifton's excellent analytics blog: Measuring Success.]

Page level surveys won’t get too many responses, and are more likely to contain negative responses. But both of those things are quite ok, and you do want all the negative responses. I know that because you have a strong ego!

You can also easily build one on your own (embrace your IT person and get her/him a case of red bull). The benefit is that you can deeply customize it.

Here’s the page level survey from the Turbotax Support website… on the left of every page is a floating Yes or No box, and depending on which one you click on you get a short custom survey…

So nice! Try it on this page: What If TurboTax Is Updated after I File?

Both the answers (Yes or No) and the open text VOC (”Let us know how we can improve“) will be perfect places to glean clues as to how you can improve your page to deliver against customer intent.

While both these things are easy to do, you should expect to assign atleast part of an Analysis Ninja’s time to go through the data and find insights. I know that seems obvious, but I do want to reiterate that.

Cuatro: Insights from Site Overlay

Another excellent way to get into the heads of your customer is to step out of your MS Excel world of rows, columns and pivots. Again! :)

I have always been, and remain, a fan of the Site Overlay report. What better way to infer what customers might have wanted than to look at a visual distribution of visitor clicks on a live page?

I have created this blog with the express purpose of getting people to follow me on twitter (not!!) and by looking at the click density I can see that only 1.5% of the people are doing that. How terrible!

Site Overlay does not always work in Google Analytics so if you are using GA on your site you’ll have to look for alternatives.

My love for ClickTracks has been quite clear since day one of this blog, one of the reasons is the site overlay report in CT, it is wonderful, it just works. More wonderfully in CT the right “frame” shows all the key metrics for the page that provide key context, and the bottom “frame” shows Traffic From and Traffic To which is very helpful.

Another tool that is quite good (though it does not have the two contexts mentioned for CT) is CrazyEgg. You can get the heatmap view which is quite good in helping you understand the difference between web page purpose and customer intent as identified by the website visitor clicks (if they did not hit Add To Cart then what are they clicking? why?)

The thing I absolutely adore about CrazyEgg though is the confetti view…

To the best of my knowledge it is unique amongst web Analytics tool, and it is super insightful.

As you can see for a given time period it shows me the click density (clusters of dots), a la heat map. That is cool but not very useful (remember all data in aggregate is crap!).

What is delightful is that it shows the clusters of clicks by top 15 referrers (segmentation baby!).

So, for example, I can see that very few people from amazon and analytics.blogspot.com care to search on my blog or click on links to my podcasts and videos (why?).

Visitors that come from Google and the Direct traffic click a lot on internal site search. Why? What are they looking for? Segment!.

And Visitors from amazon, grokdotcom and my book’s site click a lot on the About link.

I can get even greater detail by hovering my computer mouse over one of the dots, which shows more details about that particular visitor (see bottom of the above image, someone who came on keyword “avinash kaushik” took 30 seconds to click through, and hopefully, buy my book, yea!!).

As you do this for your own website you are starting to not just understand the overall clicks (heatmap) but you are actually starting to understand segments / clusters of visitors and what they want and how it is differentiated. What is the job you want your webpage to do, what customers actually do.

They have cheaper plans as well, but most expensive plan for CrazyEgg is $99 per month. That is such a cheap price to pay for the kinds of insights you’ll get. If you are running a website with more than 10,000 visitors I don’t know why you would not pay this. It might actually be a crime!

[ Note: I am not affiliated in any way with ClickTracks or CrazyEgg, once you install and use them you'll see why I am so fond of both.]

Cinco: Insights from Experimentation & Testing

Did you think I would forget this one? Not likely! My slogan is: Experiment or die!

Seriously though, I can’t think of a better way to improve your web pages then to ask your customers what tasks they want to complete and then come up with ideas for how to make your pages better and testing them.

Let me make the point about the power of testing by showcasing a test Christian Watson, from True Games Interactive, wrote about recently.

This was the original landing page…

Pretty darn cool right?

It evokes passion, it is sexy cool, and it does not hurt at all that the calls to action are very clear, you can’t miss the Download & Play Now and Sign Up For A Free Account links.

The conversions were good but Christian writes that Marketing (!!) wanted to try something new. To quote him:

The goal of the second landing page was to brighten the page up a little, move more content up above the fold, and remove any non-conversion-related links from the main content area.

Here’s “version B” of the page:

Not too shabby, right?

Result?

Again Christian:

I thought we achieved this pretty well; however, the landing page performed very slightly worse than the original.

Before reading the result my first impression was that the second page, smaller and more direct with the video as more prominent, would do better.

Not really said the people who matter: Potential Customers.

At this point most people give up.

Not the people at True Games!

They went back and tried a version that not everyone was totally psyched about…

Dramatically different.

Slightly risky to go with just one call to action (Join Now For Free). No text (About and Features information both gone).

Results?

Once again Christian:

I’ll be honest; I wasn’t a fan of this design at all. The white background felt too stark to me and it removed the content which highlighted the key features of the game.

The great thing about using an A/B testing tool to optimize your designs is that you get a definitive answer as to which works better. The only thing you have to invest is the time spent developing the variations.

It took less than a day of A/B testing against the original design to show that this new version dramatically outperformed it. It’s a good job I didn’t listen to myself.

That in a nutshell is the power of testing. Trying different ideas to simplify the purpose of the page, trying things you don’t think will work, all to make sure the page’s purpose is aligned with what the customers want.

Do a lot of this.

Oh and if you are impressed with what they did go sign up for a free trial of Warrior Epic!

Seis: Insights from First Impressions

This is more of a bonus tip, something I have started to leverage recently.

There are a huge number of wonderful sites that have made traditional user centric design principles more accessible. One such site is Fivesecondtest.

The idea is simple.

You have a page. You are not sure how well it works. Or you are sure the page is God’s gift to humanity, yet no one else seems to believe you (especially not your website Visitors :).

Take a image of your page. Go to fivesecondtest.com and upload it. Send the resulting link to people (tweet it or send it to your friends or send it to a focus group / panel you have or send it to your co-workers or post it on a forum where your future customers might exist).

Here is the process they’ll go through:

At the end of the process you get a sweet report that lists the first impressions of people who looked at your pages.

For free!

Fivesecondtest will not be your be all and end all for improving your web pages, but for me it has been a great source of very rapid feedback that then provokes discussions with the Usability, Design, UI, IA, Analytics teams.

The output will be ideas for tests, dumb things we should stop doing, key calls to action that no one notices that we should make more prominent etc etc.

The Epilogue

Six simple ideas that you can execute on tomorrow, most for free and just one that costs any money.

There is one cost that few people are willing to bear, the cost of actually doing this analytical / listening work.

I hate to end on this note but many of us believe that just by implementing Omniture or WebTrends or a tool we’ll have God herself whisper the insights to us. We tend to be frustrated when tables and rows don’t scream out things we should fix.

It is very difficult for many of us to close the gap between webpage purpose and customer intent because we are unwilling or unable to put in the blood, sweat and tears required.

I hope you’ll choose otherwise. Ideas are cheap. Action is not.

Good luck!

Your turn now. Care to share your ideas on how you improve your bouncy / low conversion pages? How do you close the purpose vs intent gap? What was the last thing you did that had a dramatic impact?

Please share.

PS:
Couple other related posts you might find interesting:

• Standard Metrics Revisited: #2: Top Exit Pages
• Experimentation and Testing: A Primer
• Path Analysis: A Good Use of Time? No!
• Lab Usability Testing: What, Why, How Much
• Excellent Analytics Tip#5: Conversion Rate Basics & Best Practices

Six Tips For Improving High Bounce / Low Conversion Web Pages is a post from: Occam's Razor by Avinash Kaushik

“Our culture lies. They say they want to encourage and reward individuality and creativity, but in practice they try to hammer down the pointy parts, and shame off the different parts.” – Sandra Dodd

Post written by Leo Babauta. Follow me on Twitter.

Going through the traditional school system (in California, Washington and Guam) was never my favorite thing as a kid, but as a parent, I’ve grown to realize that the whole system is upside down.

Not the system of any particular state or nation, but system of education as a concept.

Traditionally, schools use this model:

1. Decide on what kids need to know to prepare them for adulthood.
2. Prepare a curriculum based on this.
3. Give students a schedule based on this curriculum.
4. Have educated teachers hand them the info they need, and drill them in skills.
5. The student reads, memorizes the info, learns the skills, and becomes prepared.
6. Students must follow all rules or be punished. This is actually more important than the info and skills, although it’s never said that way.

Unfortunately, this isn’t a great model. Mostly because it’s based on the idea that there is a small group of people in authority, who will tell you what to do and what you need to know, and you must follow this obediently, like robots. And you must not think for yourself, or try to do what you want to do. This will be met with severe punishment.

This is ideal if you’re going to be a corporate employee, and need certain skills in order to work for the corporation — mostly skills of obedience, actually. This isn’t ideal for the workplace of the coming decade, when people are less likely to be employed by a large corporation, and more likely to work for themselves. And have to think for themselves. And figure out, for themselves, what they want to do. And learn new things for themselves, without a teacher.

Things are changing faster than ever before. Every month, new technology is announced that alters the way people work, or will work in the future, and we need to be able to learn and adapt to this ever-changing landscape.

How are we to do that, or how are our children to learn that, if they have no authority telling them what they need to know, or how to learn, or what to do?

People often grow up to be competent learners, and achieve great things, after going through the traditional school system. But this is in spite of the system, not because of it. We are pretty adaptable people, inherently curious, and we can learn without an authority, but the current school system tries to beat this down. It usually fails to some degree, but to the degree it succeeds, it harms people.

Schools fail not because they don’t impart knowledge or skills, but because they kill curiosity, smother excitement for learning, club down with a furious brutality our desires to be independent, to think for ourselves, to learn about things that actually interest us.

“I suppose it is because nearly all children go to school nowadays, and have things arranged for them, that they seem so forlornly unable to produce their own ideas.” - Agatha Christie

But Teachers are Great
Yes, I agree, they are. My wife was a middle school teacher, of English, and she worked tirelessly with her students’ interests at heart. She really wanted to teach them to love reading, and did everything in her power to do so. Unfortunately, she was frustrated by the authoritarian nature of school administration, and left. She now homeschools our kids, and is trying to give them the freedom to learn on their own.

My grandmother was a teacher for decades. My aunt is a teacher, first of elementary and middle schools, now of children in a juvenile detention center, and is wonderful at getting kids to love reading. My father is an artist teaching others to love art, and to do it well. I love teachers, and have the highest respect for them.

I just think they’re in a system that doesn’t work. That cannot work, given the nature of what the world has become.

How can we prepare children for a future we cannot foresee? How do we know what skills they will need, what knowledge will be important, in 10 years, or 15? We have no idea what the world will be like then. I sure don’t. Do you? Does anyone know how people will be working 15 years from now?

I submit this is impossible. And what’s more, it always has been impossible. The workplace now is vastly different than it was when I was a lad in shortpants three decades ago running around in the schoolyard, wiping snot from my nose and learning about the Cold War. People then didn’t have computers in the workplace, at least not most of them, and those who did have computers didn’t have anything resembling what we have today. Most people used electric typewriters, and fax machines weren’t in offices yet. Fax machines.

So yes, I love teachers, and think they are incredible at what they do. What I think they need to do, though, is not be teachers, but facilitators.

Don’t direct learning, because when students grow up they won’t be directed in their learning, they’ll be self-taught. Think about it: when you learn things today, as an adult, do you learn from a teacher, or do you learn things on your own? And isn’t learning on your own more fun? Don’t you love learning new things? Doesn’t that make the learning stick with you for longer than when you had to memorize things in school?

What we learn in school isn’t nearly as important as how we learn, because how to learn is the lesson of school.

“The founding fathers in their wisdom decided that children were an unnatural strain on their parents. So they provided jails called school, equipped with tortures called education.” - John Updike

How to Learn
And the way we’re taught to learn is as receivers of information, non-thinkers. Follow the rules. Read pages 100-132. Do the exercises. Memorize the information. Spit it out in a test. Do this project, because we tell you to, not because it’s fun or interesting.

The way we need to be taught to learn is completely different. It’s this: learn about what interests you, gets you curious, gets you excited. Figure out where to get the information you need. Read about it, talk to someone about it, find out about it. Try it. Do it, make mistakes. Figure out how to correct the mistakes. Figure out how to solve the problems you encounter. Repeat.

In other words, find problems that interest you, and figure out how to solve them.

Sometimes, you’ll have to solve problems that aren’t so interesting, just to solve problems that do interest you. That’s OK. That’s how things work.

And here’s a secret: we already know how to do this. From birth. This method of learning is innate in all of us. It’s built in.

When a toddler wants to do something, like get a stash of chocolate you’ve hidden on top of the fridge, he’ll figure it out. He’ll find ways to move a chair to the fridge, or climb up onto a counter near the fridge, in order to get the candy. Along the way he’ll learn a thing or two about cabinet doors and fridge doors and why you shouldn’t lean too far in one direction on a chair if you don’t want to fall and get bruises.

When a kid wants to play a video game, she’ll learn things like how to set up and turn on the PS3, how to navigate menus, how to get started with the game, how to convince mother that she’ll clean her room later and that her homework is pretty much all done so that she can play the game now.

Kids know how to solve problems, when they want to do something.

We don’t need to teach them to learn. We need to get out of their damn way.

And that’s the problem with schools. They can’t motivate kids to learn, because they’re forcing it. They’re trying to impart on them a rigid system of authority that kids naturally rebel against. In fact, this is the main problem kids face, and they come up with all kinds of incredibly creative ways to solve it, from skipping school and smoking pot to drawing incredible doodles in notebooks instead of listening to a history lecture to finding ingenius ways to communicate with peers, through technologies like texting and iPhones and through old technologies like passing notes and so on.

Creativity isn’t dead in our kids. It’s alive, but it’s being marshaled to beat the forces that are beating them down.

“No use to shout at them to pay attention. If the situations, the materials, the problems before the child do not interest him, his attention will slip off to what does interest him, and no amount of exhortation of threats will bring it back.” - John Holt

Turn Education on Its Head
So how to prepare our kids for tomorrow? Better people than I have written on this. Look up Unschooling — it’s already been invented, and it’s what I’d recommend.

It’s pretty much just getting out of the way of kids. Let them learn about what they want to learn about, and you know what? They’ll actually care about what they’re learning, because they chose it themselves. They’ll get excited about things, something schools usually fail to achieve.

They’ll learn how to deal with the delicious problem of freedom, a problem most kids don’t have these days. They’ll get some hands-on, down-and-dirty experience with autonomy, something they’ll have in spades as adults.

But what if they watch TV or play video games all day? What if they aren’t interested in math or science and never learn them? What if they’re totally unprepared for the workplace?

These are newbie questions in the world of unschooling, and I won’t answer them all here. You’ll have more, in the comments, I’m sure. I’m not the guy to answer those questions. Google unschooling and read up, because many smarter people have answered all your questions and more.

I’ll just say a couple things. One, we need to relax and not look at childhood as a time when every minute needs to be filled up with rigid rules and learning. It’s a time that should be enjoyed, and kids should play, and in playing they’ll learn. They’ll learn to play well and work well with each other. They’ll learn how to figure things out for themselves. They’ll learn to love the lovely freedom and its associates, autonomy and responsibility and choice and time management and, yes, passion.

Two, remember what we talked about above: we have no idea what the workplace of the future will be, so stop worrying about preparing them for that. In fact, stop worrying so much. Let kids learn how to learn, and learn how to be excited about things. That will prepare them for the future.

Three, also realize that we don’t need to be hands-off. We can be hands-on, if we’re facilitators instead of directors or dictators. We can help kids find things they’re interested in, expose them to worlds of fun (like science and math), teach them games that they might like, help them solve problems so they’ll learn how to do it on their own, guide them to resources and people who will give them mountains of information. Be there for them, as guides.

This is a huge topic, and one that I can’t adequately cover in one post. I’ll do another post sometime, talking about homeschooling and unschooling, and how we do it and how to make it work for you. But for today, I just wanted to throw out some thoughts on schooling, and get you riled up a bit perhaps. We could all use some good riling now and then, I think.

“To trust children we must first learn to trust ourselves…and most of us were taught as children that we could not be trusted.” - John Holt

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"On Easter Sunday in a small mountain town, the intentionally playful actions of two employees quickly became a worldwide marketing nightmare for a large company franchise. A slow workday at Domino’s Pizza in Conover, N.C. prompted this duo to create videos showing a male sticking cheese up his nose and then putting it on a sandwich that was to be delivered to a customer. His cohort also filmed him partaking in other unsanitary acts with the food and uploaded the videos to YouTube."

So begins a must-read article, "Domino’s delivers. . . after a vulgar video goes viral," published at PR Tactics and The Strategist Online (by the Public Relations Society of America).

(While the original video has been pulled from YouTube, you can watch a news report that captures the lowlights.)

What does this bad-PR day for a pizza company have to do with government? Possibly, quite a lot.

First, I worry that some government employees/leaders who may already be resistant to the use of social media may find Domino's "Bored Employee/Nose Cheese Sandwich" viral video proof that we must keep our employees a safe distance from all social media. That would be very unfortunate indeed, because the spread of social media use among government employees is well beyond containment. To paraphrase the Borg: "Resistance to social media is futile." We will never put that genie back in the bottle. And besides, the potential for positive effect on citizen engagement via social media far outweighs the risks.

Today, we can no more ignore YouTube than that we can CNN. A much more important takeaway from the Domino's experience is this: Will we in government be ready when something similar happens to us?

And while a prank video by a couple bored employees is unlikely, it is possible. Of greater likelihood is a video by a vindictive employee who was fired, or something inappropriate from a disgruntled employee, perhaps a release of "sensitive" information, or a hoax by someone impersonating a public employee. As one of the Domino's management officials warned, "Anyone with a camera and an Internet link can cause a lot of damage."

Additional obvious lessons include:

1. Agencies need expertise in all the media people use, especially social media, and they need it yesterday. Domino's was caught flatfooted. When the crisis happened, they were still developing their social media strategy, and they hired a social media specialist only after the crisis was over. (Sound familiar?)

2. Don't wait to build and maintain an agency presence on key social media platforms, because in the event of a communication crisis we will need already well-developed communications channels to help dispel misinformation. To get our two cents in, we must be part of the conversation. If faced with a problem similar to Domino's, will we only use the communication tools in the legacy toolbox (news releases and media interviews)? Or will we be positioned to respond immediately using YouTube (can we currently produce a video in a less than 12 hours?), Twitter (how many follow us?), Facebook (do we have any "friends?"). And, for use during crises at least, every agency should have a public-facing blog with commenting enabled and moderated round the clock.

3. Fight fire with fire -- use social media, not just (or mainly) legacy media to counter misinformation spread by social media. We should recognize there is often little or no audience crossover between social and legacy media. YouTubers are probably not watching tonight's NewsHour with Jim Lehrer. To get the message to all audiences, we must use the media each audience prefers. We have to respond across all major social media platforms or we will not only miss important constituent segments, we may be seen as stodgy and old-fashioned, not to mention ineffectual.

4. Give employees reasonable guidelines for use of social media that encourages constructive engagement inside AND outside the agency -- enough rules to deter this kind of video from being uploaded, but not so many rules that we kill creativity or eliminate meaningful, authentic engagement with citizens.

When this type of crisis happens to a government agency -- and we should expect it to happen some time in the future -- will we be ready to begin "counter-viral" communication operations immediately? Do our national press offices have the capability to produce a video in a few hours and get it uploaded to YouTube? It took Domino's 48 hours to get their video response on YouTube, but by that time nearly a million people had already seen the hoax video. It was already too late to perform damage control.

Before this kind of communication crisis happens in government, perhaps agencies should prepare now. Some agencies with public health and safety or national security responsibilities may consider creating a "Viral Video Response Team." (OK, we may not call it that, but you get the idea.) At the very least, every agency with video production capacity should know who those video production employees are and how to reach them after hours or on weekends. If the agency doesn't already have dedicated social media specialists, a) get some, or b) identify social media-savvy volunteers. A simple plan will be helpful, but keep it simple and don't overdo it -- the crisis might happen before you finish it.

Again, perhaps most importantly, don't delay development of agency presence across social media, because if we are absent from today's conversations on key social media platforms, it will be way too late to join when a crisis occurs. And if that happens, we won't just see our pizza sales suffer, we'll see public trust plummet.