This year was a great year for me both personally and professionally.

The time flew by and the year was filled with a number of ups and downs, but recently I’ve slowed down and not in a good way. Keeping a lead foot on the throttle was probably not the best thing for me. I’m beat up, worn out and frankly limping into the holiday break. In some ways I wonder if it’s how Micky Ward felt after one of his fights with Arturo Gatti.

Like those two entertaining fighters of the early 2000s, I’ll live to fight another day, but I need to be realistic. There is no real excuse for limping home in any state of one’s career as it’s a bad tradeoff to an unsustainable work ethic or habit.

So how can I fix this?

Perhaps the best advice for me came from my friend Arik Hanson who blogged on the best advice PR folks had ever received – Work harder not longer. Sure it took a few months to sink in, but the notion of working smarter not longer is starting to sink in (thanks buddyJ).

Life is too short to be consumed by the 9-5 minutia, so my first order of business is to keep myself to a strict work schedule. If it can’t be done during my hours in the office, it can wait until the morning. My boss has been telling me this for close to four years now but it never sank in. I guess it took the dragging feeling that I have now to finally sink in.

I’m also going to take a more regimented routine with my use of social networks both in professional and personal time. There is a tremendous value in these networks, but they can become time consuming. I am not sure what this is going to look like yet, but there will be times where I’ll drop off the grid to really hit the pavement.

Julien Smith wrote an interesting piece the other day about increasing traffic to his site via Twitter. The fact of the matter was that he just did one thing different – only posted things that were a 10. So moving forward, I am going to add that to my list of things to do for you the reader of this blog. If a post is not up to snuff, it will sit on my netbook until it gets there. It also means that if the content can’t be expressed emotionally in words, I’ll take to video and photos to best portray the idea.

You probably don’t know this about me, but I am awful at asking for help. It is possibly the biggest reason for this whole rant, but I need to be better at it. In the office, I work with two awesome guys (follow them on Twitter here and here) who are smarter than me and can do things just as well as I can. At home, I can ask my lovely wife (and editor-in-chief) for help with things and also take her advice (getting back to the previous point) about posts that need work and actually do it instead of settling for good enough.

OK – Rant done.

While this post is a semi-reflective need for change, I’m sure many of you have found yourself in a similar boat. How did you get through the rough patch? I would love to hear your tips and experiences below.

This year was a great year for me both personally and professionally.

The time flew by and the year was filled with a number of ups and downs, but recently I’ve slowed down and not in a good way. Keeping a lead foot on the throttle was probably not the best thing for me. I’m beat up, worn out and frankly limping into the holiday break. In some ways I wonder if it’s how Micky Ward felt after one of his fights with Arturo Gatti.

Like those two entertaining fighters of the early 2000s, I’ll live to fight another day, but I need to be realistic. There is no real excuse for limping home in any state of one’s career as it’s a bad tradeoff to an unsustainable work ethic or habit.

So how can I fix this?

Perhaps the best advice for me came from my friend Arik Hanson who blogged on the best advice PR folks had ever received – Work harder not longer. Sure it took a few months to sink in, but the notion of working smarter not longer is starting to sink in (thanks buddyJ).

Life is too short to be consumed by the 9-5 minutia, so my first order of business is to keep myself to a strict work schedule. If it can’t be done during my hours in the office, it can wait until the morning. My boss has been telling me this for close to four years now but it never sank in. I guess it took the dragging feeling that I have now to finally sink in.

I’m also going to take a more regimented routine with my use of social networks both in professional and personal time. There is a tremendous value in these networks, but they can become time consuming. I am not sure what this is going to look like yet, but there will be times where I’ll drop off the grid to really hit the pavement.

Julien Smith wrote an interesting piece the other day about increasing traffic to his site via Twitter. The fact of the matter was that he just did one thing different – only posted things that were a 10. So moving forward, I am going to add that to my list of things to do for you the reader of this blog. If a post is not up to snuff, it will sit on my netbook until it gets there. It also means that if the content can’t be expressed emotionally in words, I’ll take to video and photos to best portray the idea.

You probably don’t know this about me, but I am awful at asking for help. It is possibly the biggest reason for this whole rant, but I need to be better at it. In the office, I work with two awesome guys (follow them on Twitter here and here) who are smarter than me and can do things just as well as I can. At home, I can ask my lovely wife (and editor-in-chief) for help with things and also take her advice (getting back to the previous point) about posts that need work and actually do it instead of settling for good enough.

OK – Rant done.

While this post is a semi-reflective need for change, I’m sure many of you have found yourself in a similar boat. How did you get through the rough patch? I would love to hear your tips and experiences below.

This year was a great year for me both personally and professionally.

The time flew by and the year was filled with a number of ups and downs, but recently I’ve slowed down and not in a good way. Keeping a lead foot on the throttle was probably not the best thing for me. I’m beat up, worn out and frankly limping into the holiday break. In some ways I wonder if it’s how Micky Ward felt after one of his fights with Arturo Gatti.

Like those two entertaining fighters of the early 2000s, I’ll live to fight another day, but I need to be realistic. There is no real excuse for limping home in any state of one’s career as it’s a bad tradeoff to an unsustainable work ethic or habit.

So how can I fix this?

Perhaps the best advice for me came from my friend Arik Hanson who blogged on the best advice PR folks had ever received – Work harder not longer. Sure it took a few months to sink in, but the notion of working smarter not longer is starting to sink in (thanks buddyJ).

Life is too short to be consumed by the 9-5 minutia, so my first order of business is to keep myself to a strict work schedule. If it can’t be done during my hours in the office, it can wait until the morning. My boss has been telling me this for close to four years now but it never sank in. I guess it took the dragging feeling that I have now to finally sink in.

I’m also going to take a more regimented routine with my use of social networks both in professional and personal time. There is a tremendous value in these networks, but they can become time consuming. I am not sure what this is going to look like yet, but there will be times where I’ll drop off the grid to really hit the pavement.

Julien Smith wrote an interesting piece the other day about increasing traffic to his site via Twitter. The fact of the matter was that he just did one thing different – only posted things that were a 10. So moving forward, I am going to add that to my list of things to do for you the reader of this blog. If a post is not up to snuff, it will sit on my netbook until it gets there. It also means that if the content can’t be expressed emotionally in words, I’ll take to video and photos to best portray the idea.

You probably don’t know this about me, but I am awful at asking for help. It is possibly the biggest reason for this whole rant, but I need to be better at it. In the office, I work with two awesome guys (follow them on Twitter here and here) who are smarter than me and can do things just as well as I can. At home, I can ask my lovely wife (and editor-in-chief) for help with things and also take her advice (getting back to the previous point) about posts that need work and actually do it instead of settling for good enough.

OK – Rant done.

While this post is a semi-reflective need for change, I’m sure many of you have found yourself in a similar boat. How did you get through the rough patch? I would love to hear your tips and experiences below.

This year was a great year for me both personally and professionally.

The time flew by and the year was filled with a number of ups and downs, but recently I’ve slowed down and not in a good way. Keeping a lead foot on the throttle was probably not the best thing for me. I’m beat up, worn out and frankly limping into the holiday break. In some ways I wonder if it’s how Micky Ward felt after one of his fights with Arturo Gatti.

Like those two entertaining fighters of the early 2000s, I’ll live to fight another day, but I need to be realistic. There is no real excuse for limping home in any state of one’s career as it’s a bad tradeoff to an unsustainable work ethic or habit.

So how can I fix this?

Perhaps the best advice for me came from my friend Arik Hanson who blogged on the best advice PR folks had ever received – Work harder not longer. Sure it took a few months to sink in, but the notion of working smarter not longer is starting to sink in (thanks buddyJ).

Life is too short to be consumed by the 9-5 minutia, so my first order of business is to keep myself to a strict work schedule. If it can’t be done during my hours in the office, it can wait until the morning. My boss has been telling me this for close to four years now but it never sank in. I guess it took the dragging feeling that I have now to finally sink in.

I’m also going to take a more regimented routine with my use of social networks both in professional and personal time. There is a tremendous value in these networks, but they can become time consuming. I am not sure what this is going to look like yet, but there will be times where I’ll drop off the grid to really hit the pavement.

Julien Smith wrote an interesting piece the other day about increasing traffic to his site via Twitter. The fact of the matter was that he just did one thing different – only posted things that were a 10. So moving forward, I am going to add that to my list of things to do for you the reader of this blog. If a post is not up to snuff, it will sit on my netbook until it gets there. It also means that if the content can’t be expressed emotionally in words, I’ll take to video and photos to best portray the idea.

You probably don’t know this about me, but I am awful at asking for help. It is possibly the biggest reason for this whole rant, but I need to be better at it. In the office, I work with two awesome guys (follow them on Twitter here and here) who are smarter than me and can do things just as well as I can. At home, I can ask my lovely wife (and editor-in-chief) for help with things and also take her advice (getting back to the previous point) about posts that need work and actually do it instead of settling for good enough.

OK – Rant done.

While this post is a semi-reflective need for change, I’m sure many of you have found yourself in a similar boat. How did you get through the rough patch? I would love to hear your tips and experiences below.