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WHAP – Work, Health, Ambitions and Play

On my way to work today I indulged in a lovely walking meditation. After a while I began to think about goals, dreams and the meaning of life, you know, typical Monday morning stuff.

I thought about how I treat all objectives in the same way, rarely thinking about priority and importance – some things just need to get done. However when I missed my little brother’s birthday on Friday, I realised that categories and assigning priority to different goals and events in our lives, might be a good starting point for also achieving a balance between different goals.

So I thought about my categories and decided at this point in my life I would say they are:

  • Work
  • Health
  • Ambitions &
  • Play
… with the likelihood that family and charity or giving back will feature more prominently later in my life.
Thinking about these categories I also realised that two are more short term orientated (work and play) while the other two (health and ambitions) require a longer term approach.
All my ramblings aside, I think I have definitely seen a shift towards more play and work with my health and ambitions being largely ignored during the last few months. So as it is Monday, my weekly planning will start off with a view towards what I am going to do to get in shape and work towards some of my dreams and then fit in the work and play goals around.
I feel a catch phrase in the works here… Just WHAP it!?

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Automatic Tweets

In business we sometimes face moral dilemmas. In the digital business world however, knowing what is good or bad business practice is much harder to understand because of the complexity and speed of change we face.

Take black hat SEO for example

“Black Hat search engine optimization is customarily defined as techniques that are used to get higher search rankings in an unethical manner.” More on Black Hat SEO here.

You would think that it would always be obvious what such practices are, but actually, when I first used such tactics on my own sites, I had no idea there even was a morality issue behind SEO.

In comes Twitter and Social Networks and once again I’m faced with the same dilemma. I want to build a community of followers for the @ukstudent twitter profile. Obviously I want to do this as quickly as possible and herein comes my most recent on-line discovery. There are services that can genuinely help me, but, I think they may be violating twitter’s rules.

Here’s a quick breakdown of what you can do:

  1. You give one of these services access to post from your account
  2. You conduct a search of users who have said something specific. In my example, I wanted to find people who were talking about “Fresher’s Week”.
  3. The system sends them an @ message at regular time intervals with a call-to-action. In my example it was: “Going to Uni? @ukstudent will update you with the most awesome student news, deals, events and more… http://bit.ly/c3vzNz”
  4. People follow you and you didn’t even have to do anything – its all automatic once set up.
So, I suppose I risk nothing by trying it out, but I’m curious if anyone else has an opinion on blackhat Twitter usage or if this even classifies as that? 
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Football and Students – a formula for success?

I don’t have enough time to do much more than the regular routine stuff. I go to work, swim, travel as much as I can, party and go to the theatre and cinema. I started thinking about a small business on the side and it would have to be the kind that lets me work 2 or 3 hours a week, but with a return that justifies the effort.

So with some relevant experience, a partnership with a good friend and a quick website later, I introduce to you: Student Football Leagues

To begin with there will be 3 leagues, or a total of 18 teams in Manchester, but with a fantastic opportunity to go national if Gatorade get on board and provide me with the sponsorship agreement we are negotiating. So with the academic year around the corner, time to kick-off the footy season.