That helpless feeling

I’m a doer. It’s probably why I have such a hard time handing off tasks that should be done by other people. An email will come in with a small task and instead of forwarding it over for somebody else to take care of, I’ll either stop what I’m doing and take care of it…

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How do you break up your day?

I am having a pretty interesting time at work right now. We have a number of projects that we are working hard to get finished, but things keep coming up that cause them to stall. And, you know how it goes, once one project slips, it pushes the next project, and the dominoes start falling…

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Trying to plan a working getaway

Lately I have been thinking a lot about how to make myself less and less the center of my company. Mainly because I feel that I can become the bottleneck. Also because it’s hard to scale. I have taken some steps by hiring a couple project managers, and that is definitely a step in the…

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1000 reasons not to

Holy crap we did it. 9 months after we started, we finally released a major update for one of our plugins this week. On one hand, I am very excited (and proud) about the work we did. But the first thought that comes to mind is, “what took so long?” I know the answer. I…

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When good enough isn’t

A long time client asked for some help. Like I do with a lot of projects, I first try to see if there’s something off the shelf that would scratch the itch. Unfortunately, the request was JUST custom enough that even a really good existing plugin would still need to be tweaked. Since I’d probably…

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Coworking. Or, why I’m back in an office.

I spent the better part of 10 years working in an office. I spent the next 3 years working from home. Both have their benefits and drawbacks, of course. As much as enjoy working from home (the commute is awesome), I have been having a pretty big issue with creating a work/life split. My home…

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Instant Messenger is the Devil

Software like Adium and Pidgeon are so darn handy. They let you hook up your Google Chat, Yahoo! IM, AIM, MSN and other instant messengers along with access to tons of IRC channels, too. Man, what a great invention. Instant access to everybody I’ve ever exchanged email with (thanks gchat) all at the click of…

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Knowing when to say when

Better late than never, that’s what they always say, right? I’ve had a project on my plate for a while that started out as one thing and then morphed in to something totally different. The problem is, I didn’t notice the fact that it was morphing until I had already done a shit ton of…

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Some thoughts on finder’s fees

Last year somebody reached out to me and mentioned that they had a client they couldn’t take on so they wanted to pass them my way. I got some basic details about the project and it seemed like we’d be a good fit for what the client needed, so I said send ’em over. The…

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What do you use for small business accounting?

For the past 2 years I’ve been using Quickbooks to handle the bookkeeping for my business. But, I freakin’ love FreshBooks and I want to use it for invoicing. The problem that I have is that I can’t import FreshBooks invoices/payments into Quickbooks so it means I have to do double entry in order to…

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