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  • How To Organize Your Tasks For Maximum Productivity

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    In the field of analytics, the great Avinash Kaushik has said “data in aggregate is crap.” Why did he say this? Because when you aggregate numbers, things become blurry. To say your website got a million visits last month might mean something to you, but breaking it down into how that is spread out among channels and sources better allows you to see what’s truly going on.  Take the simple difference between these for example…

     

    This same principle of segmentation applies to day-to-day productivity as well. How a person organizes their workflow management makes a huge difference in their ability to both have a big-picture overview of everything that’s on the horizon, as well as focus on what should be done at any given moment.

    Avoid continuous scanning and sorting

    Without segmenting your tasks and workflow, you’ll find yourself continuously scanning and sorting your list of 100 things to do to make sure you’re not missing anything and you’re prioritizing correctly. This puts undue focus and stress on you that doesn’t need to be there.

    Here’s how David Allen puts it in his book Getting Things Done…

    It takes more energy than most people realize to unhook out of one set of behaviors and get into another kind of rhythm and toolset.  Most undermining of the effectiveness of many workflow systems I see is the fact that all the stuff of one type is kept in one list, even though different kinds of actions may be required on each one. 

    If our stuff loses its edges and begins to blend, much of the value of organizing will be lost.  If you neglect this categorization, and allow things of different meanings into the same visual or mental grouping, you will tend to go psychologically numb to the contents.

    Basically, he’s saying we can’t keep too much stuff in one place. We need a way of separating or filtering like things from like things so that we can focus on a reasonable amount of items at one time when making decisions about what to do with our time, money, energy and attention.

     

  • Google Call Ads

    Google Changes “Call-Only” Ads to “Call” Ads – Allows for Addition of Website Link

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    This past week, Google has introduced a change to their call-only ads. Previously, a call-only campaign would show on a mobile device with the only option being to call the business directly from the ad. With this change, while the primary action in the headline is still calling the business, there is now an additional […]

  • google sheets featured

    Google Sheets: An Apology

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    For too long, I disregarded Google Sheets as a poor man’s Excel. I’d grown up with excel – from making tables in 5th grade to learning advanced linear programming in my Supply Chain degree courses. Google Sheets didn’t have the processing power, the features, the familiarity. And in some respects, it still doesn’t. There’s no […]

  • Best of MKE french fries

    The Definitive Ranking of Milwaukee’s Best French Fries

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    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 […]

  • How To Plan To Be Productive: 5 Steps To Doing What Matters Each Day

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    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.

  • MPT for paid search

    Using the Modern Portfolio Theory for Paid Search

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    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 […]

  • PPC Agency's role duringn pandemic-3 Thoughts

    What is a PPC Agency’s Role During a Pandemic? Three Thoughts.

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    “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 […]

  • Optimizing Your Google Shopping Feed in 2020

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    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 […]

  • why are my google shopping ad prices wrong?

    Why are my Google Shopping Ads Showing the Wrong Price?

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    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 […]

  • Remote Working Tools Granular Uses

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    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 […]