Translating Geek Into English
Yeesh! So where am I behind, and by how much? Let me count the ways…
I haven’t put up a blog posting in almost a month
I haven’t updated the Yii book in two months (ugh!!!)
I haven’t sent out a newsletter in almost three months
But other than that…Oh, I haven’t exercised in four months (in the spring, I had started exercising daily, which I did successfully do for two months). So, where have I been?
On August 17, 2013, at the Northeast PHP conference in Boston, I gave a new presentation titled “How To Get There”. This was a motivational-like presentation, which is virgin territory for me, but I think it turned out well. In the talk, I recommend 21 behaviors and attitudes one should have in order to succeed, in order to achieve one’s goals. The tl;dr version comes down to this:
Be honest. Work hard. Never stop learning.
This is common sense, yes, but often it’s the things that should go without saying that most need to be said.
As I’m preparing for my three presentations at Northeast PHP in Boston next weekend (August 16th-18th), I’ve been reviewing some of the resources I have regarding public speaking. I thought I’d share three great posts on speaking at conferences.
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I am thrilled to say that I have accepted a position as a Support Engineer at Stripe. Here are the why’s and how’s of my decision.
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Although I’m able to charge a nice hourly rate, I’m all too aware that vast amounts of what I do doesn’t map to an hourly charge to any client. A considerable amount of my time is spent (in no particular order):
Writing blog posts
Replying to blog comments
Answering support forum questions
Dabbling in social media
Doing my company accounting
Reading and replying to email
While some, if not all, of these actions may financially benefit me in terms of selling more books, there’s no direct monetary association for them, and they take a considerable amount of time to perform. Time that could be better spent billing clients!
Of this list, too much time is spent in email. I suspect that’s something we can all attest to. The ironic problem with optimizing the efficiency of your routines is that you have to find the time to do so. Fortunately, I just recently read Nikil Viswanathan’s post “How to Win at Email”.
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