I get emails from 99U the “education” arm of Bēhance so when an offer to pre-order their new book landed in my inbox on May 10, I pounced and waited patiently for May 21. I mean, who could not resist a title like “Manage Your Day-to-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus, and Sharpen Your Creative Mind”? I couldn’t. If there’s one thing that’s been bugging me lately, it’s the feeling that my schedule and priorities are running me and not the other way around. Cue hair pulling and gnashing of teeth.

At midnight this morning, my email announced that my book was ready to be downloaded. I sighed and squealed.

Yay!

(I was so inspired I opened up GoodReads and immediately added it to my Currently-Reading shelf. And promptly got distracted and added short reviews to the last three books I read: Henry Cloud’s “Integrity” and “Boundaries,” and Patrick Lencioni’s “Death By Meeting.” Of course, I had to add “The Advantage” to my Currently-Reading shelf, too, because we’re doing a book duel at the office where two teams each take on a book and share their insights every week in a big group discussion.)

Here’s a quick excerpt from “Manage Your Day-to-Day:”

….99U’s Manage Your Day-to-Day assembles insights around four key skill sets you must master to succeed: building a rock-solid daily routine, taming your tools (before they tame you), finding focus in a distracted world, and sharpening your creative mind.

I am stoked! My socks are rocking off! I am falling off my chair!

Here’s part of the book description from Amazon:

Are you over-extended, over-distracted, and overwhelmed? Do you work at a breakneck pace all day, only to find that you haven’t accomplished the most important things on your agenda when you leave the office?

It’s only 211 pages, too, so I should be able to breeze through it. Should.

I saw a post on the Social Media Group I’m part of on Facebook inviting people to check out an event at E|SPACES in Cool Springs. Since it was at 7:30am, which is before work, I figured I’d check it out.

What I thought would be a social networking event turned out to be an author talk from Joe Calloway on his book, “Be the Best at What Matters Most: The Only Strategy You will Ever Need.” He was joined by Nashville company bites of knowledge’s, Julie May and Gary Hornbuckle. Bites of Knowledge is the case study featured in the book.

Here are the takeaways I took home, I mean, to work:

• Check-in with clients and team, contact clients proactively, communicate for accountability, repeat
• Good connecting includes frequent: asset managing, issue managing, project managing
• Understand what the business or need is first before trying to resolve issues
• Reward performance and incentivize behavior of employees
• Clarity and accountability go hand in hand
• Value reliability first before “singing on the plane like Southwest”

What creates real value for customers, or in our case at our organization, for missionaries and pastors?

“High accountability equals high employee morale because everyone knows what’s expected.” Joe Calloway, Be the Best at What Matters Most

In my four years here, I’ve learned that these are what they value and what we strive to meet. These are in no particular order and really just flying off the top of my head from a purely communications department perspective:

• Excellent level of service from the Nashville administrative staff. When a question is asked, a response is expected within a decent turnaround time. (I personally try to reply ASAP because I’m always on a mobile device be it a phone or a tablet.)
• Information about our major events and initiatives, including pricing and promo materials like graphics and videos.
• Consistent communication on how we are reaching our vision: “(Every Nation) exists to honor God by planting Christ-centered, Spirit-empowered, socially responsible churches and campus ministries in every nation.” How many churches do we have around the world? In North America? How many campus ministries? Missionaries?
• Careful attention to the questions or comments from Ministry partners regarding their financial giving.

We look at these interactions, and everything we do here, through the lens of our Office Values:

• Christlike Character — Are we demonstrating Christ in our response to an issue or situation? Meaning, are we showing grace, truth, mercy, compassion, love, and all that good stuff?
• Relational Unity — Is preserving our relationship evident as the ultimate goal of our correspondence?
• Craftsmanship — Are we going to the next level in our craft and in the service we provide, i.e. gift processing, communications, information technology, etc.?
• Innovation — Are we discovering and utilizing the latest, greatest tools to make our service more effective?

I think having Core Values has been the driving factor that helps all of us at the Nashville office get things done. They’ve definitely bailed me out when I’ve been in situations where I want to throw something against a wall.

Is this being Christlike, Thelma? Am I building relationship by this reaction? Do I stick with snail mail or do I explore jumping on the social network bandwagon? (Umm, this last one is actually NOT an issue for me. Just sayin’.) Do I stick with an online template, or do I design something from scratch?

You get the picture.

Are your office values the standard to live by or just the pretty sign tacked on a wall?

Boss: “We’re to go to the hurting, empty streets.” — How can streets hurt, and, if they’re empty, why would we go there? Needs a little rewrite…

Me: Yes, streets can hurt… because they’re empty and want to be walked on! Did you not take a poetry class in college?!

Coming down from a roller coaster of a weekend. I gave my daughter away at her wedding on Saturday. It was a small, relaxed event with close friends and family. I’ll be blogging more about it on my Tumblr but I wanted to share this video I made here on WordPress.

We felt awkward about doing a mother-daughter dance so I made a video instead. I had a band in college called Angel Witch and we used to do a cover of a Guns N’ Roses song. My daughter found a cover by Taken By Trees which I was going to sing. I decided to use it as the backdrop of photos from our life, her life.

I finished it on Saturday night and she finally got to see the secret I was putting together after the wedding.

My life is in transition! I’m looking forward to whatever is on the horizon for me.

On my recent call with our HubSpot consultant, I got pointers on how to make an old post better. We took something my assistant wrote in November from our old staff blog, “The God Test in Seattle,” and gave it a makeover.

Here’s what it was before:

Our consultant reminded me of a crucial point. “Who is the post about?”

Us.

Her recommendation was to revamp it into something that would be an answer to someone’s potential question. She suggested changing the title and the content to, “Five Ways to Get Involved in Campus Ministry.”

I spent half of my afternoon rewriting the entire post and making it less about us, and more about helping someone find information on getting involved in campus ministry.

Hello, Google Search. Come find it.

Here’s what it is now:

Not only is it a more engaging post, but it actually offers five tips for anyone looking for information on campus ministry. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not saying that it was easy putting this together. Without our consultant’s advice, I wouldn’t have been able to turn this post into something people will hopefully find useful.

Now, to come up with seventy-five more posts like this that potentially help people find answers to their questions.

It’s the sweet gestures from the unexpected that make today special.

Our organization joined HubSpot this year to help us whip our inbound marketing strategy into a well-oiled machine. While other, more experienced internet marketers organically understand SEO (search engine optimization), Google Analytics, and keywords, I haven’t had the luxury of giving inbound marketing my full concentration. We’re doing a decent job with our social networking presence but I know we’re only scratching the surface of our full potential.

It’s symptomatic of small nonprofits, particularly small nonprofit Christian ministries. Limited staff are outnumbered by responsibilities. So you make the best use of your time, work more than the recommended forty hours per week, and focus on putting out fires or almost erupting blazes. (When my department assistant came on board, she would ask me, “How did you do all these things by yourself?!”)

I digress.

Critics have said that HubSpot is an unnecessary luxury because inbound marketing doesn’t require all the bells and whistles HubSpot offers. I disagree. For now at least. Here’s why:

HubSpot Academy has great trainers who are very adept at online adult learning techniques. Coming from a training background with customer contact centers in the Philippines where I developed curriculum and trained associates on American accent training, I can spot a great learning experience a mile away.

If you’re new to HubSpot, attending their classes on “Goal Setting,” “Blogging,” “Keywords,” and “Page Performance” are a must. They offer live and archived sessions of recorded trainings and numerous resources to download as homework and research.

Our dedicated consultant, Rachel Sebell, has been extremely helpful in my HubSpot learning process. She has a solid understanding of edu’s and orgs and what strategies each of her clients needs. I’m challenged after our consultation calls and feel like I’m in college again with my assignments.

HubSpot Tech Support rocks. There’s no other way to put it. Not only are they friendly and helpful, they’re not patronizing, which means a lot to me. They understood I’m not a newbie to CMS so they didn’t bother wasting both our time by walking me through diagnostics I didn’t need. We jumped right into my issues.

I will say that depending on the time of day you call, their call hold times can be painful. On two separate occasions, I had to wait for twenty and then forty-five minutes. But it was worth it. I knew that when I finally got through, I would be in the hands of an expert and my issue would be solved.

Communications and IT need to work closely together for inbound marketing to be successful. My biggest challenge so far has been discovering that we’ve lost opportunities on maximizing our SEO because of how our domains are structured across the globe. I can’t fix this issue by myself but with IT, we can make search happen.

Am I confident we will not need to renew our contract with HubSpot next year? I know I can be successful in HubSpot using all of their tools but I don’t know if it will be worth not using their software and venturing out on our own.

I’d like to think I’ll be an SEO rockstar next year. Whether that’s still with HubSpot or not, only time — and our communications budget — will tell.

If you don’t know anything about internet marketing, then I highly recommend giving HubSpot a look. If you know an SEO ninja, bring one on board as a consultant but be prepared to get your hands dirty. If you have the money to spend on hiring ninjas to do everything for you, by all means, hire one or two.

I’ve decided to use this space exclusively for my professional life so almost all traces of my personal life, including single parenting my daughter, are now on my Tumblr. This blog gets found for searches on “geddy lee daughter,” “kyera bowlen,” and “zack and joey nu,” among other things, so I figured I’d let everyone know where you can find my other, more private stuff these days.

I still have old posts here on radio and earlier posts from 2007 but hereon in, I’m keeping it focused on communications.

I’d love to see you on Tumblr! I post music and my insights on faith there, and a bunch of other things that just don’t fit here anymore.

My oldest Tumblr is from 2007. I don’t know what to do with it at the moment but you’re welcome to poke around. My not-so-secret fitness Tumblr is Fat Lady Working Out.

Compartmentalizing is good. Keeps everything separate.

We have a major conference happening this year in Orlando, Florida, at Walt Disney World Resort. North America will be hosting the Every Nation 2013 World Conference, and yes, we’re expecting delegates from around the world to be joining us at the happiest place on earth this summer.

Here’s the current promo video we pushed out to raise the excitement bar on registration.

Script: Thelma Bowlen
Editing: Jay Kim

There’s still time to take advantage of our Early Bird Rate! Register by March 31 to qualify for our iPad mini raffle!

In a recent department heads strategic meeting, my colleagues discovered just how many plates I spin at work: social strategy, internal communications, video production, regional news site, quarterly partner newsletter, monthly partner thank-you receipts, global coordination, writing, editing, events promotions, and a myriad of other things.

My boss made a comment that summarized our discussion as we identified the opportunity costs of a new organizational effort I am leading:

“You’re the best one for the job, but these jobs are not the best use of your time.”

It got me thinking about the importance of finding balance and focusing on tasks that are the most productive use of my time.

What other things have I been struggling to make happen that I should not even be working on in the first place? How does one transition from doer to manager to director in a traditional office setting?