Work/Life Balance: 5 Ways to Relieve Work Stress
In today’s fast-paced, always connected world it seems we often live in a constant state of high stress. Everyone has a different level of tolerance for stress, and everyone has different ways of coping with stress, too. Throughout my career, my colleagues and I have come across many ways to relieve stress.
Here are a few of those simple stress relievers you could try, so your stress level doesn’t go off the charts:
1. Practice mindful meditation. An acupuncturist introduced me to the concept of mindful meditation. Mindful meditation has been featured on Dr. Oz, and according to the UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center, mindful meditation (or awareness) is “paying attention to present moment experiences with openness, curiosity, and a willingness to be with what is. It is an excellent antidote to the stresses of modern times. It invites us to stop, breathe, observe, and connect with one’s inner experience.”
To get started with mindful meditation, download the UCLA research center’s free guided meditations on iTunes. These podcasts, which range from three to 19 minutes, can fit into any busy schedule.
2. Walk away. No, I don’t mean walk out on your job. Simply walk away from your desk for a few minutes to de-stress and recharge. Walk around your building or if you’re lucky enough to work on a college campus, take a quick walk around campus.
3. Dream of another job. A workplace mental health counselor once told my colleagues and me that one way of coping with high-stress situations in your current job is to start looking for another job. Even if you don’t plan to leave your current job, the act of looking at a few online job boards may help ease stress because it helps to know there are other options out there if the demands of your current job become too much to handle.
4. Laugh it off. A former colleague of mine used her incredible sense of humor to ease her and her co-workers’ stress. Periodically throughout the year, the co-worker (who was an experienced writer) put pen to paper to create a fake newsletter. It used made-up headlines and stories to poke fun at stressful situations experienced throughout the year. Writing the “newsletter” was therapeutic for the co-worker, and it eased the stress of other trusted coworkers who read it. If writing isn’t your talent, though, find a way to introduce laughter into each day.
5. Turn off your devices. We’re constantly connected to gadgets today, but the constant buzz or glow of a smartphone or tablet can be a stressor, and it may impact your sleep as well. Research shows that the glow from device screens may keep you awake and contribute to other health issues. So turn off your devices after you get home for at least an hour or two before you go to bed to ease stress and get a better night’s sleep.
Image credit: Salvatore Vuono/FreeDigitalPhotos.net; Modified by Dana’s Creative Services
About Dana’s Creative Services
Dana’s Creative Services is a writing and editing services company that helps businesses communicate better with their target audiences. Dana McCullough, owner of Dana’s Creative Services, writes and edits copy for brochures, newsletters, websites, blogs, magazines, and books. Her clients include universities, nonprofit organizations, magazine publishers, and book publishers nationwide. Dana has a bachelor’s degree in journalism and frequently writes and edits copy on higher education, genealogy/family history, health, and business topics.
For Mother’s Day: Lessons Learned From My Grandmother
My grandmother as a young girl.
Grandmas are the best. At least my grandma was. She died last year after a brief, unexpected illness. Until the day she died, she was full of spirit and was physically fit enough she could touch the floor with the palm of her hands while standing with her legs straight.
I think my grandma is the person I admire most and I am grateful to have spent time with her to get to know her and her stories. So in honor of Mother’s Day this weekend, I’d like to share with you the top three lessons I’ve learned from my grandma:
1. Tell your family you love them. Even though Grandma was 90, her death was still a bit sudden. She had fallen sick only the day before, and then the illness spread rapidly. I had been intending to call Grandma to chat for at least a week before, but things kept getting in the way. Then one evening as I was drifting off to sleep a voice came to me and said, “Call your grandmother, in case something happens.” The next day I called her and we talked briefly, only for about 10-15 minutes. The following morning, my mom called and told me Grandma had died. I’m so happy I called her, because I got to tell her I loved her and hear her laughter one last time. This also taught me a lesson: Tell your family and other people in your life that you love them often. And talk to your family often. You never know when it might be the last time.
2. Don’t work so hard. Grandma told this to my sisters and me frequently. In our last conversation, she again gave me this advice. Grandma was dedicated to her family, so her saying this helped me remember life is more than work. Life is also about spending time with family and friends, enjoying a special hobby, and having fun.
3. Even if bad things happen, you can still have a positive attitude. My grandma lost two husbands. The first time, she became a single mother and had to find a job to support her family. The second time (after many happy years together) she watched her second husband slowly get weaker due to cancer. With these and other hardships she experienced in her life, it would have been easy for her to be bitter. Instead, she chose to embrace life and to have a positive attitude. In her final years, she often told us how blessed she felt to have had two great loves of her life and wonderful children and grandchildren who made her proud.
About Dana’s Creative Services
Dana’s Creative Services is a writing and editing services company that helps businesses communicate better with their target audiences. Dana McCullough, owner of Dana’s Creative Services, writes and edits copy for brochures, newsletters, websites, blogs, magazines, and books. Her clients include universities, nonprofit organizations, magazine publishers, and book publishers nationwide. Dana has a bachelor’s degree in journalism and frequently writes and edits copy on higher education, genealogy/family history, health, and business topics.
College Marketing: How to Make a Case for Increasing Your Marketing Budget
Budgets. You can’t live with them, and you can’t live without them. Most higher education marketing professionals lament about limited marketing budgets, but somehow university magazines still need to be printed and mailed, marketing brochures still need to get produced, websites need updating or redesigning, and ads still need to be placed across multiple media platforms.
What’s a marketing professional to do to get more money in the budget? Here’s the approach I took at a university I previously worked for to get more advertising and marketing dollars for recruitment marketing. The approach took time, but it was well worth it when the extra dollars showed up on the budget lines.
Step 1: Save. No, we don’t necessarily mean save money. Save information you receive on places where you’d like to advertise or types of marketing materials you’d like to create. The information will come in handy in Steps 4 and 5.
Step 2: Track. Tracking results of marketing campaigns can sometimes be challenging, especially for small or understaffed communications and marketing departments, but track as much impact as you can. Use whatever data are available—event attendance; enrollment inquiries, applications, and deposits; donation increases; email opens and/or click throughs; web analytics; and more.
Step 3: Analyze. Using the tracking data, look critically at the current places you’re spending money and then ask these questions:
- Do the things you spend money on have an impact?
- Is the impact worth the cost?
- Could you get a bigger impact by adjusting your approach or redirecting the money for a different use?
Also, look at costs for producing existing marketing pieces—consider graphic design, printing, and mailing costs. Ask these questions:
- Can any printing projects be combined to save costs?
- Could you adjust marketing piece sizes to reduce mailing and/or printing costs?
- Could you create a template for certain recurring materials so future design costs are reduced?
Step 4: Plan. Take out the information you saved in Step 1 and use that with the information gained during Step 3 to determine which marketing opportunities (current and new) make the most sense for your institution and your goals. Use Excel to create a “wish list” of opportunities you want to pursue and their annual estimated costs. Be sure to include costs for marketing projects you do every year. For advertisements, remember to include the placement and the ad design and copywriting costs. For any printed materials, don’t forget to include estimated writing, editing, design, printing, and mailing costs.
Step 5: Show the numbers. Once you’ve got your “wish list” completed, use a little Excel magic to automatically add the annual totals. Then, compare it to what your current budget is. If it’s more than your current budget (hey, we can all dream!), can you make a strong case for those costs? What benefit will they provide the university? How will it increase brand awareness, impact recruitment, or increase donations?
If you can justify all the expenses on your wish list, you’re ready to present your budget plan to the administration. Start with your direct supervisor, make any adjustments as necessary, and then meet with a VP or decision maker about the budget in your department. Make sure you present the plan at the appropriate time of year (for example, before budgets are set for the following year, not right after).
Worst-case scenario is the administration will say no to a budget increase, but in the best-case scenario, your detailed plan will show them exactly what they’re going to get for their money and may increase the likelihood they’ll find some extra money to add to your budget. Happy budget planning!
Image credit: digitalart/FreeDigitalPhotos.net
About Dana’s Creative Services
Dana’s Creative Services is a writing and editing services company that helps businesses communicate better with their target audiences. Dana McCullough, owner of Dana’s Creative Services, writes and edits copy for brochures, newsletters, websites, blogs, magazines, and books. Her clients include universities, nonprofit organizations, magazine publishers, and book publishers nationwide. Dana has a bachelor’s degree in journalism and frequently writes and edits copy on higher education, genealogy/family history, health, and business topics.
Editor’s Perspective: 3 Common and Easily Correctable Writing Mistakes
A large portion of the work that Dana’s Creative Services does involves editing other people’s writing. Through editing work for various clients over the years, Dana has noticed many common mistakes that writers at all organizations make. Whether it’s a book project or a marketing brochure, the same mistakes occur.
A quick proofread of the initial draft is all most clients need to correct these common errors (and possibly reduce editing time and cost). So to help clients improve their first drafts, Dana is sharing the three most common writing mistakes and how to easily look for and correct those errors:
Spelling errors. This may sound like the most obvious mistake—even too obvious—but Dana sees spelling errors all the time. Run a spell check of your document before submitting it to an editor. Because spell check isn’t 100 percent accurate, Dana also recommends quickly scanning the document to catch any glaring spelling errors that spell check doesn’t catch.
Too many spaces. Most editorial styles usually require one or two spaces between sentences, but Dana often sees two or more spaces between sentences or even extra spaces at the beginning of paragraphs. These extra spaces can easily creep in, but it’s simple to remove them, too. Just do a Find and Replace in a Microsoft Word document. In the Edit menu, select Find, then Advanced Find and Replace. Insert spaces into the Find field, and then put the correct number of spaces in the Replace field.
Comma placement. AP style omits the comma before the word “and,” while Chicago Manual of Style retains the comma before “and” in a series. If you know your organization’s style, you can do a Find and Replace for , and if you want to remove it, or a space and the word and ( and) to find instances where it may need to be added.
Of course, any editor (including Dana’s Creative Services) is happy to correct these mistakes for you—and also help you perfect your copy to best speak to your target audience.
Image credit: digitalart/FreeDigitalPhotos.net
About Dana’s Creative Services
Dana’s Creative Services is a writing and editing services company that helps businesses communicate better with their target audiences. Dana McCullough, owner of Dana’s Creative Services, writes and edits copy for brochures, newsletters, websites, blogs, magazines, and books. Her clients include universities, nonprofit organizations, magazine publishers, and book publishers nationwide. Dana has a bachelor’s degree in journalism and frequently writes and edits copy on higher education, genealogy/family history, health, and business topics.
Exploring Health Care Degrees
Health care careers today involve not only patient care, but administration, technology development, research, and more. And college graduates with majors in health care-related fields are in high demand.
At the University of the Sciences (USciences) in Pennsylvania, for example, 94 percent of graduates seeking jobs are employed within six months of graduation, and students in some areas (such as occupational therapy, physical therapy, and pharmacy) are averaging two job offers upon graduation, according to Shawn P. Curtin, interim associate vice president for enrollment management at USciences.
With jobs in health care ranging from nursing and dietetics to medicine and athletic training, there are plenty of options for high school students (or adults going back to school) to find a career that matches their interests.
In the latest My College Guide Junior Edition, my article on health care degrees explores some of these career options, provides advice for choosing a college, and offers tips for things students can do in high school to prepare for majoring in a health care field.
See more of my writing on higher education topics.
Impressive Iowa Businesses
Each time I write newsletter articles for Iowa State University’s Center for Industrial Research and Service (CIRAS), I am constantly impressed by the work being done at Iowa companies and by CIRAS.
In the latest issue, I had the opportunity to talk with a door and lock company that continues to grow after more than 100 years in business, a deicing product company that’s working on a revolutionary product, three companies that are improving their online presence after attending an internet marketing boot camp, and Lean business leaders who have created an organization to support each other in developing and implementing Lean processes and practices.
Check out the amazing work by CIRAS and Iowa companies in the recently published winter edition of CIRAS News. (See my articles on the cover and on pages 4, 7, 12 and 13).
New Hope for Young Cancer Patients
Dr. Nicole Longo, internist and onco-fertility point person at the Cancer Treatment Centers of America (CTCA) in Philadelphia, says throughout her career she has started to see a new trend: her patients are getting younger and the kinds of cancers they have are more aggressive.
Each year more than 100,000 people under age 45 are diagnosed with cancer in the United States. The National Cancer Institute estimates that there are nearly a half-million cancer survivors of reproductive-age. As the cancer patients doctors treat become younger, there is a growing concern about what a cancer diagnosis means for the patients’ future ability to have a family and a normal life after cancer.
Because of this, CTCA is now implementing a program to proactively help these young patients not only cope with their cancer diagnosis, but also to discuss how treatments will impact their future fertility.
Learn more about this new program in “Giving New Hope to Young Cancer Patients” from the February 2014 Wisconsin Woman magazine.
Web Browser Plug-ins to Help Protect Your Privacy Online
Did you know that hundreds of advertising, marketing, and other companies may be tracking your every online move? These can be beneficial when advertisers show you ads customized specifically to you, but it can be creepy, too.
While researching information for an online privacy web course and quick guide for Family Tree Magazine, I came across several resources that can help show you who’s tracking you, as well as tools to block organizations from tracking your online movements. I was surprised to find that 114 companies were tracking my online surfing, and began using one of the tools I learned about to block some of the trackers.
Check out my “Web Browser Plug-ins for Privacy” quick guide in Family Tree Magazine‘s January/February 2014 issue for information on several tools to help you retain some of your online surfing privacy.
What’s New With This Year’s FAFSA and Financial Aid
For a recent higher education blog post on My College Guide, I had the pleasure of interviewing financial aid and admissions professionals at several universities, including Carthage College, The University of Tulsa, Agnes Scott College, and Indiana Tech. These professionals provided some great advice about changes to this year’s Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA) and applying for financial aid.
Filing the FAFSA as early as possible, since aid is often awarded on a first-come, first-served basis, is one of the most important tips these professionals provided. In addition, the FAFSA form has made some changes to parent information required and Congress has changed how federal student loan interest rates are set. Learn more about what’s new with the 2014-15 FAFSA and financial aid in my recent post.
Celebrating Dana’s Creative Services’ First Anniversary
One year ago today I took a leap of faith, quit my day job, and started freelancing full-time. As a person who is an innate planner, I wondered how I would handle not always knowing which project was coming up next. My one-year experiment has turned out better than I ever imagined.
I am grateful for all the wonderful new clients I have met and all the clients I have worked with on projects ranging from magazine articles, newsletters, higher education blogs, higher education website content, higher education marketing materials, and a nonfiction book.
Thank you to my clients for making the past year great. I look forward to continuing to serve you in the coming year, as well as developing new relationships with new higher education communication and magazine and book publishing clients.
Image credit: Stuart Miles/FreeDigitalPhotos.net
Dana's Creative Services, Dana McCullough, Freelance Writer and Editor 