Entrepreneurs have a saying: you need to be working on your business, not just in your business. That often gets viewed as spending time on things like planning, marketing or establishing systems. But it goes beyond that. And while not all of us may be entrepreneurs or business owners, all of us need to take the time to work on ourselves.
Figuring Out What Matters
Proposals are a fundamental part of my professional reality. Having written a few hundred or so over my career, you’d think I’d be fairly good at that. And I am, in my way. I have strategies. I like to think that I give good proposal. But there are aspects of the process that are persistently challenging. The most significant part being figuring out what the client actually requires.
Don’t Be That Consultant
Whether consultants or employees, we all have clients that we serve. We advise, advocate, support and sell. How we do that depends on our attitude and our orientation. It is shaped by how we show up in our work, and how we engage with those around us. We have a choice in that. And we forget that at our peril.
Taking The Time To Plan When You Are Too Busy Doing
You know the feeling. You’ve got a mountain of work in front of you. Projects that are critical are falling by the wayside to make room for the latest dumpster-fire of urgency that landed on your desk. The merely important projects mock you from the depths of notebooks that go back years, reminding you of […]
Planning For 2019
And so another year begins. And with it, we turn our attention to hopes, ambitions and intentions for the future. And how we think about planning and managing the resulting commitments and goals. For some of us, that means a trip to buy office supplies is in order. But sometimes the best planning tools are the ones that we already have.
Keep Going
We (and I) write and think a lot about work. We embrace dedication and commitment and “giving 110%” like that’s something easy to do. In reality, it’s not easy, and sometimes it’s downright unpleasant. And the risk is that—faced with a mountain of work—we run screaming in the direction of our Netflix queue and oblivion. Some thoughts on how to persevere instead.