The cheat sheet

Cheat sheets, the compliment of being blunt, a few other phrases, and 7 other things worth your time.

I moved the furniture in my home office this weekend. And I took the time to throw out the “cheat sheet” Post-It notes that I’d scattered around the spot where I normally put my laptop.

Wait, you mean you’ve never had a bunch of “cheat sheet” Post-Its to remind you to use certain phrases during video calls? Oh, my friend. Pull up a chair.

If you can look on the bright side of pandemics (sorry, Monty Python), the fact that we’re doing so much via video now means you can write notes reminding yourself to weave certain magic phrases into your conversations.

These are the kinds of things that evoke positive reactions from other people, and that you might not ordinarily, automatically say. It’s as if you had a TelePrompTer for every conversation.

Now, I wrote some of these down, tongue-in-cheek a while back. It was kind of a joke, I admit—but then, lo and behold, I caught myself actually using them. But now I seem to use them automatically, so I got rid of the Post-Its. (They were a bit clut…