Well, Hello Lifehacker!

By Matt & Jon:

To our surprise and delight yesterday Lifehacker featured one of our recent posts about Taking Meeting Notes on their blog. If, as a result, you found your way to The Corporate Hack and are a new subscriber, we welcome you!

The response to our post yesterday on Lifehacker was interesting. There were a bunch of folks who thought our concept of sending follow-up notes to the meeting leader was a blatant attempt to suck up. There were those who felt this practice would ultimately lead to being designated the permanent de facto note taker for all future meetings.

But there were also some great insights from readers: EricSoderberg offered that taking and distributing notes ensures that your voice gets heard, even if you tend to not speak during the meeting. EricSlaw appropriately points out that notes must be sent immediately after the meeting as he's not getting paid for his word-smithing abilities. ProlificProgrammer got a raise for taking notes and posting them to his company's internal wiki!!

Jon wanted to offer this follow-up to the post in response to the many great comments:

I was absolutely blown away by the comments we got on this post -- tons of great insight and some surprising stories of how well this method paid off. One of my favorite anecdotes on note-taking actually arose recently at lifehack.org, another great productivity blog.

Turns out one of America's greatest inventors wrote over 5 million pages of notes in his lifetime. Thomas Edison took incredibly detailed and organized notes, yet had a powerful memory with which to recall them all. Edison is proof that taking detailed and action-oriented notes, and cataloging them for easy retrieval can greatly improve your business strength and flexibility.

Now, I understand we can't spend all day slaving over pen and paper (and a lot of meetings just aren't noteworthy!), but choosing the right time to jot a few things down can really pay off. Even if you don't send the notes around, having them on hand for future reference can really save you from looking foolish or unprepared.

If you haven't had the chance to read the original post yet, Quick Tip: Meeting Notes, please do! And be sure to give us your thoughts as well - we enjoy the dialog! In the meantime, here are some other recent posts from The Hack we think you might find interesting...

Recent Posts...
GTD 101: A Brief Overview Of Getting Things Done
Action Oriented: Create Meaningful To-Do Items
Pushing Decision Making Down
Quick Tip: Subdivide Tasks For better GTD

Now Soliciting Unsolicited Rants

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We're looking for some great unbelievable stories about your life in the corporate world. Email your rant to thecorporatehack {at} gmail.com and we'll publish it here!

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Don't lie... sometimes things just really irk you at work. Like really hack you off. And you've considered blogging about it to tell the world and, wisely, thought better of it.

Well, we're going to offer you an outlet here at The Corporate Hack to give you an opportunity to release some of that steam building up inside. We're starting a weekly series here called Unsolicited Rant Friday where we allow our fine readers the opportunity to offer up to the world unsolicited rants about whatever it is about corporate life that is bothering the bejeebers out of them.

What we're really looking for is some great, unbelievable stories about life at the office... whether it's dealing with co-workers, coping with rules and bureaucracy, or the fact that it takes your computer 25 minutes to boot up in the morning. Feel free to change the names to protect the guilty, and we'll make sure your identity is safeguarded.

So if you've got any good stories you need to get off your chest in a public forum, send them our way. Email your rant to thecorporatehack {at} gmail.com and we'll publish it here!

We The Audacious Professionals Who Blog

By Matt & Jon:

The Corporate Hack has been live for a little more than 3 weeks now and already we've gotten a great response from our visitors and readers. One of our most exciting developments was being recognized by the folks over at Brazen Careerist who took us under their wing and invited us to be part of their new blogging network of young professionals and Gen-Y writers!

Brazen Careerist is led by columnist and professional blogger Penelope Trunk and we're truly excited to be part of this team. Already we've made some great friends and yesterday published our first guest post within the Brazen network on the blog Twenty Set.

Exciting stuff! Thank you to those of you who have visited and subscribed to the site over the last few weeks. We hope the content so far has been decently insightful and relatively entertaining... yeah we'll keep working on that.

Please get in touch and let us know your thoughts -- we really want the Hack to be a great destination for those in similar circumstances. We hope you can turn to us for good insight on productivity, corporate life, and maybe a few laughs along the way. Thanks again for reading!

Your Corporate Hackers

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Contact Us:
thecorporatehack {at} gmail.com

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The Corporate Hack is written for young professionals, by young professionals. Here's a little bit about us and why we do what it is we do...

Jon:
Jon is 24 years old and one of the co-founders here at The Corporate Hack. He is from Kansas City and as such has an affinity for good BBQ sauce. Some of Jon's specialties include efficiency and beating the snot out of GTD. At his dull 9-5 corporate job he's known for his ability to manipulate data quickly, and as a result hates being referred to as "the data guy"... but deep down inside he likes it. Jon's a music guy - even went to school to learn how to record it - and regularly enjoys discussing the intricacies of albums with you that you've likely never heard of before.

Jon's Top Posts:
How To Talk Your Way Through An Interview
Pushing Decision Making Down
Hack Your Desk Phone: Filter Calls To Voicemail
GTD 101: A Brief Overview Of Getting Things Done

Matt:
Matt is 26 and is another founding member of the Hack. He's from Minneapolis and is knowledgeable of all things northern, from cold weather to funny accents to lots of little lakes. Matt's a marketing guru in the digital entertainment field and is an account manager for a top digital media company. He likes GTD, hiking, organization, and numerous things you'd see on a Match.com profile. His paper pushing job focuses on leveraging sales opportunities and driving strategic brand promotions, and his company likes to see his winnings, his learnings, and his corporate buzz talk.

Matt's Top Posts:
Action Oriented: Create Meaningful To-Do Items
Hack Your Expense Reports While Traveling
Quick Tip: What To Do With Business Cards
GTD 101: A Brief Overview Of Getting Things Done

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We would love to hear from you if you have questions or comments - leave us a note below, or send us an email to thecorporatehack {at} gmail.com.

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The Corporate Hack

By Matt and Jon:

hack [hak] - verb or noun:
(1) To manage successfully
(2) One who works hard at boring tasks
(3) To withstand or put up with a difficult situation

So what is "The Corporate Hack"? Or maybe more importantly, who is "The Corporate Hack"?

We started this blog to speak to, and perhaps on behalf of, a new generation of young professionals. Fresh out of college, and fresh with new ideas, we arrive in corporate America with grand (and likely naive) ideas of how we're going to change our industries and our world.

Noble goals they are, but all too often quickly dashed by the realities that are office politics, performance assessments, and of course the bottom line.

The Corporate Hack is for the new flock of twenty-somethings, and perhaps even thirty-somethings, looking to find their place in the real world. When it comes down to it, we figure there's a lot of young professionals who are a lot like us, out there asking the same questions about work-life as we are:

• How do I navigate corporate culture?
• How do I deal with relentless and ridiculous management?
• How can I stop wasting time on the meaningless things and be more productive and efficient doing what I was really hired for?
• And probably most importantly, how do I find fulfillment?

So who is the corporate hack? It's us. Putting up with the difficult situations... working hard at the boring tasks... But the real hack is managing the corporate world successfully, and that's what we hope to provide with this blog: a resource for you to get things done, to move up, to be successful, to find fulfillment -- and hopefully have some fun, and a few laughs, along the way. So, welcome to The Corporate Hack... you're one of us!!

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We would love to hear from you if you have questions or comments - leave us a note below, or send us an email to thecorporatehack {at} gmail.com. To meet the Editors of The Corporate Hack please read our bios!

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