Doug Theis Leave your comfort zone.

A few years ago, my to-do list was an endless source of frustration. At the end of every day, it seemed like it had more items on it than when I started. I never seemed to get it all done.

So, in an effort to understand what was going on, I began to track how I was spending my time and saw some interesting patterns emerge. As I learned more, I started applying a productivity-changing principle to my daily “get it done” list: time-blocking.

Time-blocking is essentially organizing your day in a series of time slots. Instead of writing a list of tasks that take as long as they take, with a time-blocked approach, each of these time periods is devoted to a task or tasks. It immediately lets you see where you’re being unrealistic about your time and keep yourself focused on what you’re supposed to be doing.

More of the Fast Company article from Gwen Moran

U.S. pollsters got quite a surprise in the early morning hours of November 9, 2016.

That’s when it became apparent that their sophisticated voter research had completely failed to predict the outcome of the U.S. Presidential election. Longtime Republican political strategist Mike Murphy went so far as to assert that “data died” that night.

Yes, the 2016 U.S. Presidential election was a highly visible casualty for data-driven research, but far from the only one.

In 1985, Coca-Cola announced the rollout of “New Coke,” an updated formulation of the venerable soft drink, designed to appeal to changing consumer tastes.

More of the Customer Think article from Jon Picoult

You are probably already familiar with the Net Promoter Score (NPS), a metric used to gauge the health of the customer relationship. Although it is widely used by companies, most people don’t know that it actually has three serious problems. First, the “research” behind the NPS claims is flawed. Second, the calculation of the metric (a difference score) results in an ambiguous score that is difficult to interpret. Third, the NPS is insufficient in measuring the multidimensional nature of customer loyalty.

NPS Backgrounder

In 2003, the Net Promoter Score (NPS) was formally introduced by Fred Reichheld, and, today, it is used by many of today’s top businesses to monitor and manage customer relationships. Fred Reichheld and his co-developers of the NPS say that a single survey question, “How likely are you to recommend Company Name to a friend or colleague?”, is the only loyalty metric companies need to grow their company.

More of the Customer Think post from Bob Hayes

This new science tells us that the universe is constantly conspiring to make biological life, whenever and wherever it can. In any given area of the universe, these hidden microgravitational waves will begin gathering atoms and molecules together to create DNA, and thus, life.

One strand of DNA from one single cell contains enough information to clone an entire organism. Obviously, understanding DNA allows us to understand much about life and the universe around us. A deeper understanding of the new science tell us that DNA beings not as a molecule, but as a wave form. Even more interestingly, this wave form exists as a pattern within time and space and is coded throughout the entire universe.

We are surrounded by pulsating waves of invisible genetic information, whose waves create microscopic gravitational forces that pull in atoms and molecules from their surrounding environment to construct DNA.

One scientist who caught these microgravitational forces in their action is Dr. Sergey Leikin. In 2008, Leikin put different types of DNA in regular salt water and marked each type with a different fluorescent color and the DNA molecules were then scattered throughout the water. In the experiment’s major surprise, matching DNA molecules were found pairing together. After a short time, entire clusters of the same colored DNA molecules had formed. Leikin believes some sort of electromagnetic charge allowed the same colored molecules to cluster. However, other experiments show that this is not the case. That it is most likely to be gravity. Let us explain.

More of the Waking Times post

Sloppy grammar, sounding like you just woke up, ending statements with a slight uptick in pitch, called “uptalk” or “Valley girl speak,” have all been proven to undermine a person’s success.

But how does the listener break down information when both a man and a woman are saying the exact same thing? According to research, the voice itself is the source of unconscious bias for the listener, and women are interpreted differently as a result.

“GENDERED LISTENING”
Meghan Sumner, an associate professor of linguistics at Stanford University, stumbled into the unconscious bias realm after years of investigating how listeners extract information from voices, and how the pieces of information are stored in our memory. Study after study, she found that we all listen differently based on where we’re from and our feelings toward different accents. It’s not a conscious choice, but the result of social biases that form unconscious stereotyping which then influences that way we listen.

More of the Fast Company article from Vivian Giang