Here at Granular, we’ve read countless articles and have had many heated discussions about who has the best French fries in Milwaukee. Being data-driven individuals, we always took issue with the methodologies we read about from other sources. So naturally, we had to take matters into our own hands and bring you the definitive list […]
Sometimes you get to the end of the day and say “I didn’t get anything done that I wanted to get done today!” Sometimes that’s unavoidable. Life happens. But I’d argue that most of the time, it IS avoidable.
To be as productive as you can be, you can’t just work your way down a list of to-dos and cross them off. While that might feel productive, it isn’t if you aren’t actually doing the right things. What are the “right” things? That’s what I’m going to talk about in this post.
Doing things other than those may feel productive in the short-term. But soon you’ll realize you did all that work and you’re not that much closer to what you were hoping to accomplish.
Therefore, a big part of this whole process of being more productive isn’t found just in the tasks you’re doing and how you organize them. It’s found in the quality of your project list and actions as it relates to the outcomes you’re hoping for. To be productive, you can’t just fill your project list with anything. They have to be things that will actually deliver the outcomes that you’re shooting for.
This is true productivity.
If you just accomplish a bunch of stuff, but the outcomes aren’t achieved, how productive were you really?
So, the key to maximum productivity is focusing in on the outcomes you desire first, then creating the ideas you believe will create the maximum value toward reaching those desired outcomes with a minimal expenditure of effort.
Paid search is basically the stock market. They both boil down to making investments to maximize return hopefully with a minimum amount of risk. By investing more time into important economic theories, we can better figure out how to optimize returns and lower overall risk. Modern Portfolio Theory is one of the most important and […]
“What is our competition doing right now?” “We don’t want to come off as tone-deaf or insensitive with our ads.” “We don’t want sales to tank, but orders are down due to COVID-19. I don’t think pausing all ads is the right thing to do, but we can’t keep spending what we were. What do […]
With the advent of machine learning & automated bidding, you may be wondering what tools merchants can use to push their products for relevant queries. Say for example, if every merchant is using automated bidding for a particular search query, how does Google choose who shows up and who gets their products shown first? It […]
If you work in digital marketing and create campaigns for Google, Facebook, Instagram, etc, you know that you can never check your work enough before launching campaigns. The worst feeling ever is thinking you may have forgotten to set your budgets or that you accidentally targeted the entire United States when you only meant to […]
If you manage Google Shopping ads and Google Merchant Center product feeds, especially for ecommerce websites that have price changes and dollar- or percent-off sales, then there is a good chance that you have ran into an issue where your Google Shopping Ads display the incorrect price. This can be frustrating if you are counting […]
Granular’s Remote Work Tools / Tech Stack At Granular we’ve been setup to work remotely since day one. While most of the team is in Milwaukee, we were built to have a flexible work schedule and be able to be plugged into work from remote places. PPC doesn’t sleep, weekends and holidays need coverage sometimes […]
Are you a work from home pro, or beginner? While more and more people are working from home, it’s important to remember that working from home can be very different from working in the office. Our office started to work from home this week, and while some of my coworkers are pros, some of us […]
Ad Customizers Part 2 In part one of this three-part blog post, I shared how Ad Customizers are superior to DKI. We are still waiting on statistically significant data to prove our point. In the meantime, below is some helpful information on how to implement. How to Implement To implement these in your own campaigns, […]
In the book Getting Things Done, David Allen shares this about the human mind…
The short-term memory part of your mind – the part that tends to hold all of the incomplete, undecided, and unorganized stuff – functions much like RAM on a computer. Your conscious mind, like the computer screen is a focusing tool, not a storage place. You can think about only two or three things at once. But the incomplete items are still being stored in the short-term-memory space. And as with RAM, there’s limited capacity; there’s only so much stuff you can store in there and still have that part of your brain function at a high level.
Most people walk around with their RAM bursting at the seams. Studies have demonstrated that our mental processes are hampered by the burden put on the mind to keep track of things we’re committed to finish, without a trusted plan or system in place to handle them. As soon as you tell yourself you might need to do something, and store it only in your head, there’s a part of you that thinks you should be doing that something all the time.
In the last post of this series, I talked about 3 quick questions that can get you being more productive right away. They were…
While these are tremendously helpful to refocus your mind in the moment, they have a limitation – they only focus on what’s most on your mind at that moment, which isn’t always the most important or urgent thing to do. What about the things you’ve forgotten about? Just because you’re not thinking about them right now doesn’t mean they’re not important. All of us have forgotten about things that were important and slipped our minds. We can’t just rely on our recall if we want to be as productive as we can be.
Do Google Gmail Ads Work for Restaurants? Most restaurants I’ve worked with seem to have tried Google Search Ads at some point, and although Search can be successful, common questions I hear are “what else can we do on Google?” and “how do we get new customers?” Surprisingly, I have found that most brands have […]