Guinea pig life lesson 🐹

Hey hey! We had a typo in last week’s Tech Trick. The shortcut to open the VBA editor is Alt+F11, not F1. Thank you to our (very) attentive readers for catching that! Bet you won’t forget that tech trick now. 😅

Also: The team and I are working hard to ✨ upgrade ✨ some of our courses! We’d love to know:

Extra Zeros? No Problem 🙇

POV: You’re a teacher who spent hours grading tests and putting scores into a spreadsheet. Then you click that percent button to convert them and—wait, what? 

Why is Excel showing you 7700% and 8600%? 🫠 Not even your star students are that good.

Here’s what’s happening behind the scenes ➡️ When you hit the percent button, Excel does two things: 

1. It multiplies your value by 100. 

2. It applies percentage formatting. 

So that 77 you entered? It becomes 77 x 100 = 7700%. Excel works this way because in mathematical terms, percentages are actually fractions of hundredths. 

So the question is…how do you fix this? Easy!

And that’s it! Now your percentages are ready to go (just in time for report card season 🍎). 

Today in Unlikely Productivity Lessons 🐹

We’re getting tips from a guinea pig.

I know what you’re thinking: “Kat, what could a guinea pig possibly teach me about productivity?” I had the exact same reaction when I first saw productivity YouTuber Ali Abdaal’s newsletter on the topic last month. But it’s worth thinking about.

Here’s the gist: Ali’s wife had a guinea pig named Piggy. Every day, she’d clean Piggy’s cage, lay down fresh hay, and watch as Piggy excitedly rolled in it. But minutes later? 

Piggy soiled her hay. And Piggy, now upset by the mess she’d made, would sulk in the corner of her cage. 

Ali calls this Piggy’s Paradox. Here’s how he defines it: “Our tendency to sabotage our own carefully created environments of peace and order, only to then feel dissatisfied with the chaos we’ve created.” 

And once you see it, you can’t unsee it: 

• You clear your calendar to reclaim your time…then fill it with new projects. 

• You finally empty out your closet…then buy more clothes because, well, now there’s space! 

• You go on vacation to unwind…then cram so many excursions you need a vacation from your vacation.

Piggy’s Paradox isn’t a guinea pig problem—it’s a human one. So how do we stop? Ali suggests answering a question from entrepreneur Jerry Colonna: “How am I complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want?” 

That’s what I’m journaling about today. If you do the same, let me know what comes up for you! 💫

• Feel like you’re busy 24/7 but never progressing? This might help. 

• Tired: Adding contacts in Outlook. Wired: Using email groups. 📥

• This PowerPoint trick makes your presentations unignorable. 🔥

• The pros know how to use VBA to unhide columns. Do you? 

• 9.4 million people watched this video on how to remember anything. 😮

Hope you’ve been enjoying this extra sunshine! ☀️ Fun fact: Arizona (where I live) and Hawaii (where I used to live for a bit) are the only two states that don’t observe daylight saving, so my clocks stayed put over the weekend. The more you know!

Stay Exceling,

Kat