business development : mackenzian

April 17, 2017 By Keisha McKenzie

Honoring your own limits

When I’ve talked about honoring boundaries in the past, I’ve typically talked about honoring others’ boundaries and respecting their limitations: not asking of them more than they can viably provide; not seeking bread from stones or fruits out of season.

I’ve not talked as much about honoring my own boundaries and respecting my own limits.

This year, honoring my limits looks like outsourcing tax return preparation and filing an extension for my business property taxes.

Taxation of business property is one of the funding streams for local government in Maryland, and license fees and assessments pay for roads and fire services in my county. I’m happy to pay for those things every spring. I just don’t have the bandwidth to do it this week.

So, for the first time ever, I’m taking the option to file later.¹

This weekend I turned over my documents, receipts, and income and expense summary spreadsheets I organized myself. By June, the accountant will have caught up, I’ll have put aside the money for the license renewal and assessed taxes, and most of Earth won’t have noticed.

This won’t always work, I know.

Life includes hard deadlines as well as boundaries with elastic in the waist, and sometimes it’s much more burdensome to defer an activity or report than it is to breathe deeply and submit on time.

But part of honoring oneself is learning the difference.

Sleep is a good thing.

File that extension.

First things first: I’m not a tax advisor. I’m someone who’s tired.
Secondly, for state and federal taxes, extensions allow you to delay submitting the return. They don’t allow you to delay settling up, so you’ll still need to do the work to estimate your bill and pay if you happen to owe.

May the odds be ever in your favor. [Back to text: ◄]

September 1, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Tools: Use them

Death to Stock Photo image: Keystone K-77 projector exposed on a light wood desk next to a white wall. — You can’t avoid all tedious processes, but you can use tools that make your life easier.

As the last third of the year begins, I’ve been reviewing this summer’s finances. I spent about 6 hours combing through transaction records today—until I realized that there are no prizes for suffering, just as there are no awards for doing every job myself or taking every course available without putting them into action right away.

I forgot the first principle of Doing Good Work Without Exhaustion:

Use the tools at hand.

For finances, I have You Need A Budget and QuickBooks. For categorizing revenue and certain transactions, I have online banking export files and Excel. For task management, I have Asana and Workflowy. For notes and source management, I have Evernote and a dedicated hard drive folder. For mid-writing back-ups, I have three cloud services, including email.

These are all tools that someone literally designed to make routine work processes easier, and my life is in fact easier with them than without.

Ever the would-be student, I don’t like to use tools that make the logic of a process opaque to me: I want to know why each tool works so that I can apply that learning to other tools in its class.

But there’s no benefit to unnecessary suffering, not in business and not in the rest of life.

July 18, 2016 By Keisha McKenzie

Wisdom requires action

At the Justice Conference in Chicago last month, local minister Rev. Harvey Carey provoked peals of laughter from attendees when he talked about people going from conference to conference, writing great ideas in their notebooks, going home mountain-top high, and then never applying those insights to their lives or work.

I laughed too, in the key of “What do you know about my life”?

In December last year, as part of my year-end audit, I banned myself from conference travel and business training—books, webinars, and web-courses—until I had recovered from FY 2015 and was practicing principles I’d already learned.

So I tracked Creating Change 2016 from a distance, sent goodwill to my peers at the Conference on College Composition and Communication, kept busy working locally, and bought nothing.

My bank account loved me for it. And I created room to rest, digest, and build/rebuild in ways that make sense for me.

Graphic and web branding specialist Brittany Melton (@xobritdear) advises early-stage freelancers and professional bloggers to do likewise: let aggressive marketing pass them by, and not over-invest in supplemental training during any period when they need to focus instead on implementing core practices. It’s core practices that will sustain us long term.

When we instead over-consume resources, we risk talking about doing, talking about planning, planning to do, planning to plan, and building up an amazing stockpile of planners; we meet with world-changers and are so inspired by their speech and example, but somehow we close the book, course, or conference, and routine life never changes.

This is such a waste of good resources, and there are better ways to operate. In an article on expressive and other regular forms of writing, Gregory Ciotti shares the psychological case for consistent action:

In both emotional intelligence and in hard sciences like mathematics, writing has been shown to help people communicate highly complex ideas more effectively. Writing helps eliminate ‘it sounded good in my head’ by forcing your hand; brains forgive fuzzy abstractions, prose does not. —Gregory Ciotti, July 15, 2016

So

Audit yourself. We’re in the third quarter of the year now. More importantly for me, whatever your schedule is, I’m in the third quarter of my year. I still have projects open that I thought I’d have completed in April. I have two proposals hanging in the ether. And there are eight books in various states of partly-read on my desk right now.

Regaining balance in the midst of a non-stop schedule has two equally essential parts: (1) insisting on stops and pauses and Sabbaths and weekends, so that life is no longer non-stop; and (2) committing to steady action that can clear commitments in a reasonable time.

Learn to force your own hand. I organized and took classes at a week-long intensive this time last month, and wrote my insights down immediately. I didn’t want to wait a month or more; I wanted to receive, evaluate, digest, and implement.

Because I know what it can be like. “So excited” becomes “Woah, look at all these emails I missed” and “Let me catch up with that” becomes “Remember that class? Great, distant memory.”

Wisdom requires more of us. Honor what you’re learning by doing something with it.