The email is from a trusted source. There is no subject. The body is super short with just an “FYI…” and a link to a site I’ve never heard of. I just assume I’m going to click through and find a company that is doing exactly what we are doing with AlumniChoose, except they are post funding and have major traction in the market. Luckily, that wasn’t the case here, but my heart jumps a beat each time one of these type of emails come in. 

A quick note about competition, in general I tend to ignore competition and focus instead on kicking a*s on our strategy. I’ve found little value in spending too much mental bandwidth, or daily resources, worrying about what the competition is up to. Instead, I tend to do a bi-monthly scan of what everyone is up to. But don’t think that means I don’t know a lot about my competition, I just don’t obsess about it. That’s why an email, like this one, that has a site I don’t know scares me.

With the massive amount of information Google knows about us, it’s interesting to see how the data is slowly peaking out from behind their databases. Here are two examples..

Based on who I’m sending an email to, gmail recommendends other people I might want to include on the email.

When I do a search, Google lets me know what links my friends also shared.

Facebook status update from my 18 year old cousin.

Every Red Rover institution has a student ground team that helps us with the launch, student adoption, and ongoing engagement. Forrest Battle (yes that’s his real name) is our ground team member at College of Coastal Georgia. He and I chat via email on a regular basis, but unlike most schools who give you your name as your email, at CCGA, they assign you a number like 920037023@ccga.edu. My alma mater did the same thing and it felt shitty.

Every time I email Forrest, I’m reminded of what CCGA thinks of him, and all their students, as just another number in their database. I know many of our readers don’t have control over every institutional system, but take a moment to step back and see what internal systems you are using within your walled garden that either hurt or support the vision of individualized learning.

If an email scam happens to make it past my gmail spam blocker, I like to consider myself decently good at quickly spotting and deleting it. My expert deciphering skills have come from years of flexing my judgement on repeated scams in my inbox. I’m smarter now than I was eight years gets ago.

On my trip to Boston today, I watched as two highschool students tried to decipher if an email that one of them received was a scam. The friend kept saying it was a scam, but the one who got it was still optimistic. It was cute watching them navigate their judgement to the conclusion that it was a scam.

I could tell right away it was a scam when one girl said the prize amount was offered in British Pounds. Too me that’s obvious, but to her that was her first encounter with that type of scam. Next time she’ll be smarter.

Makes me wonder as I write about my journey of growth on this blog if someone who’s “been there, done that” is sitting back smiling as they watch me learn how to fish for the first time.

We all have the potential to be a student and teacher to someone else.

I used to divide tasks into high, medium, and low urgency. High meaning I'd take care of it within the week, low meaning sometime in the future, and medium meaning sometime in-between. I've since simplified my prioritization to only high and low urgency, and ditched medium.

Why? Every time I have to decide how to label a task it costs money both in time and opportunity costs (other work I could be doing). With the addition of a medium label, my time to prioritize took too long because I didn't have a clearly defined set of rules as to what constituted a medium level task. Where as high and low were clearly defined.

With only high and low prioritization levels, my organization time has significantly dropped and I'm much more effective at responding to the most important tasks first.

Try it out yourself by ditching medium level prioritization and clearly defining what it means to prioritize something as high or low.

When a student joins their school’s campus directory and is recommended campus groups based on their interests and joins a group, the student leader of that group receives an email notification. Our first design (see image below) of the new member notification email was intended to be fun, hip, and student like. It turned out looking messy, confusing, and unaligned from the rest of the directory’s design.

In our second round of design (see image below), we wanted to align more with the directory’s design, as well as highlight more of the social aspects (profile picture, weblinks, and interests) of a student. The goal is to prompt the student leader to reach out to the new student and make them feel welcome.

This is a nice step in the right direction. As with all things in Red Rover, we’ll watch the data over time and make adjustments as needed.