can go a long way. I’ve experienced this twice over the past two weeks.
My secondary school was attempting to reach out to all its alumni for a silver jubilee presentation. Their efforts were not going anywhere and they had an email out to a few of the alumni whose email addresses were on their books. When I met with the Principal, my first thought was to create a Google Form for alumni to enter their data. This way, the school would find all the information it needed in one place. The next problem was to reach out to as many alumni as possible. My thought was to email a whole bunch of them and have these emails forwarded. But, a friend had a smarter idea – start a Facebook group. Within 3 weeks, the Facebook group has gathered 761 alumni – that’s about 70 per cent of the total number – and alumni sign ups on the Google form. The next problem was picture upload and that was solved by sharing a public Google Drive link.
All of a sudden, the fuzzy task of reaching out to as many alumni as possible and gathering alumni information was changed to 3 concrete steps –
1. Get alumni on the Facebook group
2. Ensure alumni of Facebook group fill up the form and upload their photo
3. Stay in touch with the alumni and ensure future participation for various programs (hey, that’s a bonus!)
In the second case, we’ve just moved continents and are in the process of getting settled. I had to stack clothes within a bunch of drawers. I began doing the conventional fold + stack when my wife suggested I do it differently. Her method involved folding them as usual, rolling them (this helps avoid creases as well), and then placing them one after another. This looks like this –
This has so many advantages – you know exactly what you have available and you can even create a system which ensures you wear all the options before repeating one (of course, Steve Jobs wouldn’t appreciate that as much). In both cases, all it took was a bit of thinking and organization. And, in both cases, it went a long way..
A Learning a Day 