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Wow. Time flies.
Today is this newsletter’s sesquicentennial! 150 weeks of B2B tech, sales, marketing, and music. This all started as a way to stay in touch with my peers, share, and collaborate during a global pandemic. Despite the current grim economic outlook, I hope those dog days are over and we’re on to bigger and better things in 2023!
Thanks for coming along for the ride – give this song by Florence + The Machine a listen (150bpm by the way…) with me as we see what the experts are saying this week.
What Makes You Feel Good at Work?
With all the media hyping financial uncertainty and recession, maybe we’ll work extra hard to find ways to feel good. What makes you feel good? At work, perhaps it’s reducing the number of meetings you attend!
Shopify thinks that eliminating meetings will help productivity. They recently reinforced their commitment to a radical reduction in meetings – including zero meetings on Wednesdays.
With many workforces remote, the number of meetings seems to have increased exponentially in the name of keeping people connected! If you know me, you know I’m critical of long or unnecessary meetings. Here at Virtual Causeway, we have policies like “Get S#!T Done Wednesdays” to keep the team focused on productivity.
A recent analysis found one-on-one meetings are up 500% since the start of the pandemic… but another study found a productivity increase of 73% in companies that ban meetings three days a week.
So what do you think? Should you take all those extra meetings in your calendar and wash them away?
Music and the Math of Feeling Good
If you’re like me, music makes you feel good. Listening has the power to stir our emotions at any age. But why do certain combinations of sounds have such a strong effect on the way we feel? How does the brain translate music into an emotion?
A Dutch neuroscientist has tackled the analysis of one very specific type of music: the feel-good song. Jacob Jolij, an assistant professor at the University of Groningen, has come up with a formula that describes the anatomy of these songs to find out why they make us feel so warm and fuzzy inside. Jolij applied this formula to a database of the most popular feel-good songs from the last 50 years to see where the good vibes come from in these tunes.
The result – a ‘Feel Good Index’ (FGI) – includes the sum of positive references in the lyrics, beats per minute (bpm), and the song’s key. The higher a song’s FGI, the more feel-good it is predicted to be. Happy lyrics, a fast tempo (like this week’s 150bpm song), and a major key all help create music we perceive as brimming with positive emotion. With the average pop song running at a tempo of 116 bpm, 150 really runs fast!
Looking for some more 150bpm songs to help you feel good? Here’s a list to get you started!
What about B2B? Find what it is that makes your clients feel good if you want to survive. It might not be music, exactly… but what’s the figurative 150bpm that you can give them?
As always, don’t hesitate to call me to brainstorm or just say hello!
Looking forward,
Rick
Rick Endrulat, President | ricke@v-causeway.com | www.linkedin.com/in/rickendrulat