Organization

How to set and achieve smart goals

You know why your goals aren’t getting met? They’re dumb. You’re probably making a handful of mistakes: not writing them down, not assigning them a home and almost certainly not reviewing them, outside of at the end of the year, when you get all depressed about how little you actually got done this year while…

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Procrastination is the Worst

Procrastination. Some of us are really good at it. I struggle with it almost daily. I’ve found that when something is difficult, I’ll default to procrastination if I’m not careful. I’ve also found that procrastination can be cleverly hidden in a couple of different ways, as well.

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Why Planning (Too Far) Ahead Can Hurt You

“Change is the only constant in life.” —Heraclitus, Greek Philosopher Have you ever spent months on a project of some sort that had to eventually be scrapped for reasons that were beyond your control? Personally, there’s not much in life that’s more frustrating than for me to dedicate my time and energy into something and…

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How to Step Up Your Game in Goal-Setting with One Change

Goal-setting is a weird paradox. It doesn’t sound like it’s a difficult thing to do, but every January people get serious about it, trying to figure out some magic fix or shortcut. Well, this isn’t a post that will give you a shortcut, but it will give you tools and techniques to help you set and…

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The Five Words That Radically Changed My Time Management

Five words. That’s all it took was five words to completely change the way I looked at my productivity. For literal years I’ve struggled. I’ve been running my own business since 2003 and during all that time, it’s been a constant tension to manage: the limits of my time versus the people who all wanted a piece…

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Creating a balance between work and life

First, let me get two things out of the way: I’m not going to tell you that the idea of “work and life balance” is a myth. (Even though I did actually say pretty much those exact words. But read that post and you’ll get the idea.) It is a real thing that people achieve…

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Not all Productivity is the same: Ways to Create the Type Your Business Needs.

Teachers operate in a world where deadlines are required to be met, and goals must be accomplished. Introduce difficult parents and the pressure of overwhelming testing expectations, and it becomes easy to see, how the teaching profession suffers from a massive attrition rate. Successful teachers, learn early on, that recalcitrant students are non-productive students. They…

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2012 Tales: Making my own noose.

This is the last post of my 2012 Tales series, and it’s a doozy. If you haven’t read any of the others, be sure to check out all posts on 2012 Tales. Now, without further ado, let’s wrap this thing up. Earlier this year I acquired a client from California through a friend of mine. They…

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2012 Tales: The Carrot

Sometimes, no matter how many times you go through something terrible, if you don’t recognize how you got there – and take the steps to consciously avoid it – you’ll go through it again and again. When I first began freelancing my web design skills, I took all the usual avenues: I hit up friends…

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2012 Tales: The client with too many irons in the fire.

I gained and lost one client this year who had a difficult time focusing on the task at hand. You could tell in conversations, on the phone and certainly in the way he conducted business. He started last summer with a local coffee and entertainment venue, that looked like it would do well. They were…

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