Restricted products, don’t let them blow up your Amazon account.

 

When you’re a third-party Amazon seller, it’s easy to make poor assumptions on restricted products.

For example, you might assume that you can sell anything that you can find on Amazon.com. Or, you might assume that you can sell all legal products. However, there are restricted products you need to be aware of.

Both of these assumptions would be quite false:

• Don’t fall into the trap of uploading large catalogs for drop-shipping. These might include prohibited – or even illegal – items for sale.
• Just because it’s legal, doesn’t make it ok. For example, vaping accessories cannot be sold on Amazon. Nor can many supplements – even some you might find at the local drug store.
• Amazon reserves some dangerous items for itself. Amazon.com retail sells tasers, but it doesn’t allow its third-party sellers to list them.

Turning Mundane Subjects Into Exciting Visual Communication

Years ago, I wished I could work on advertising projects for household names because I thought that above-the-line work would bring creative satisfaction. I’ve been lucky to work with many well-known businesses and charities, but looking back, my smaller projects were the most satisfying creatively.
Often, big brands have already established guidelines which mean there’s less room for me to experiment and exercise my creative muscles. I’m not saying brand guidelines are unimportant, but I prefer to work on projects where I feel I add the most value and a little of myself.
These days, product companies seem more interested in refining interfaces and simplifying user experiences. I value those things when I use a product, but I find working on these projects less rewarding. Well-known clients still have a certain allure — and having logos in my portfolio has been good for business — but I now look for projects which offer me the freedom to develop my creative interests.
I’m fascinated by how design can tell engaging stories about products and services, even those which might be considered mundane by some. I enjoy exploring how images, layout, and typography can be used to communicate messages in visually distinctive ways. Above all, I love using my experience and interests in art direction and graphic design to help businesses, charities, and sometimes individuals, who might otherwise be exposed to them.

“I do not attempt to speak on behalf of the machines. Instead, I have tried to make them speak for themselves, through the graphic presentation of their elements, their operations and their use.”

— Giovanni Pintori

Even highly regarded, well-known designers spent time working with mundane subjects and produced iconic work. After moving from Switzerland to the United States, Erik Nitsche for magazines including Harper’s Bazaar, Life, and Vanity Fair. But it’s his work for General Dynamics which became his most recognized. In his five years as an art director at the aerospace and defence company, Nitsche developed an information design system which resulted in annual reports, posters, technical data, and Dynamic America, a 420-page book tracing the company’s history.
Italian designer Giovanni Pintori worked for business products manufacturer Olivetti for 31 years where the simple style and geometric shapes he applied to advertisements, calendars, and posters developed into the company’s design vocabulary.

Procrastination Pointers

 Key Takeaways

    Planning your day the night before can significantly reduce procrastination, as it provides a roadmap for the next day, allowing you to focus on your most important tasks rather than getting caught up in distractions.
    Maintaining a clean workspace can help to minimize distractions and keep your focus on the task at hand, preventing procrastination of important tasks by directing your attention to less important, easier tasks.
    Breaking down large projects into smaller, manageable tasks can help to reduce the feeling of overwhelm that often leads to procrastination, while assigning deadlines to these tasks can provide a sense of urgency and motivation to complete them.

Procrastination is one of the biggest enemies we have to our personal productivity. Thinking about doing something and planning to do it are fine, but what if we fail to move ahead?

Procrastinating the unimportant items in our day is a useful talent. The problem for many, however, is that we are procrastinating the important and crucial items in our day, reducing our personal productivity and increasing our stress levels.

Here are five pointers to help you to better overcome procrastination. (You can implement them now or perhaps tomorrow or, better yet, next week!)

1. Daily planning the night before.

“People don’t plan to fail but they sometimes fail to plan”. Without a plan of action in place before you arrive for work it is real easy to get caught up in “stuff”. The phone rings, someone drops by and you direct your time responding to the loudest voices demanding your attention rather than to the most important priorities on your plate. A plan of action, prepared the night before is like a roadmap for the next day. You know what your next step ought to be to get you into productive action and away from procrastination.

2. Work with a clean desk.

“Out of sight, out of mind.” The reverse of that is just as true. When it’s in sight, it’s in mind and most of us cannot help but be distracted and our time is then directed to the less important and easier tasks causing us to put off the more important tasks. Working with a clean desk or clean work environment permits us to have only the most important task before us so that we can focus all of our attention on that task without other visual distractions.

3. Reduce large projects to bite-sized pieces.

How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time. Tomorrow you plan to work on a three-hour project. The problem is, many of us do not get three hours to work on any one item. We have to contend with interruptions, meetings, etc. (I don’t know that I even have an attention span that lasts for three hours!) And we often wind up procrastinating working on this task because “there’s not enough time to get this done”. So, instead of scheduling the entire three-hour project for tomorrow, schedule a small bite, a step or two that might take 20 or 30 minutes. Then put the next step on the next day’s To Do list and the next step after that on that next day’s list, etc. It may take several days, but you will get that elephant eaten up, one bite at a time.

4. Plan around interruptions.

Interruptions tend to occur in identifiable patterns. I get most of my interruptions early in the day versus later in the day. I get most of my interruptions early in the week versus later in the week. So, if I plan a big project first thing Monday morning, I’m creating stress because as soon as I begin, interruptions arrive and re-focus my attention causing me to procrastinate what I really wanted to do. It is so much easier swimming downstream with the current rather than bucking the tide. Therefore, I plan those larger projects for later in the day and later in the week when I tend to get fewer interruptions.

5. Assign deadlines.

Have you ever failed to achieve a New Year’s resolution? If so, that probably happened because you did not set a deadline. Deadlines move us to action. Without a deadline, things wind up in our “as soon as possible” pile, a “Never Never Land” where items will get attended to “someday”, “when I get the time”. Create a deadline and you will be moved to action.
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Dr. Donald E. Wetmore