I was on vacation, relaxing after a busy season of client projects and savoring my time away with my family. Then I got a call an emergency call from a client. There was a frantic plea from him concerning lost data. If something wasn’t resolved quickly their operation would be shut down and the FBI […]
How am I ever going to survive this? This thought that crosses every person’s mind their first couple of weeks into parenthood. For me it happened when I fell asleep two words into a 10 word text message. That’s when the desperation starts to creep in and you start reaching for every possible recommendation the […]
There seems to be a lot of Freelancing “rules” bouncing around “Never call yourself a freelancer” “Never use Upwork” “Don’t do any work for free” “Do not start a job without a contract” “Stick to your scope of work, timeline and payment terms” “Hourly billing is nuts” I have a confession to make: I don’t […]
A big theme of my articles is about reducing anxiety related to working as a consultant and business owner. Several articles back, I talked about optimizing for happiness, and I think over the years I’ve really developed some great strategies to help make that happen. But I realized that I didn’t really talk about WHY […]
Watch any sports event on TV and sooner or later you’ll hear the stats start to roll: Average at-bats in a spring training game – per team, per player, per home or away game The field goal kick distance record – for regular season and post season play Number of free throw shots at the […]
I was sitting on a plane on the way home from a site meeting last week and was thinking about my next email to you. Nothing really brilliant occurred to me. But back at home, sitting at my computer with my teething baby smooshing his face against my french doors, I realized something important. I […]
I’m in San Antonio for the week working onsite with a client. I remember my first onsite visit and the nerves/excitement I felt. This seemed apparent to my boss so he offered little tips as we traveled. Some of them went something like this: “I wear my suit when I fly so it doesn’t get […]
The one time we tried to use an online babysitting service we got a girl who liked to take half naked pictures with the kids and post them to Facebook. After our initial interview we got a follow up text from her stating “she really needed the gig because she had bills to pay.” Which […]
Protect Your Attention. That’s been my mantra for 2017. It’s something I got from an interview Jason Fried did with lifehacker. In it he described the following as his life hack (emphasis my own): “Saying no. Techniques and hacks are all about managing what happens when you say yes to too many things. All the […]