Now

Life

A major focus lately has been improving my concentration. I use Todoist to track all my tasks, but I’m not as disciplined with building context lists as I should be. LLAMA Life helps by pulling my today’s tasks from Todoist and giving me a clean, single-task view. Instead of scanning my list, it either suggests one task or lets me set the order for my day. Keeping this habit isn’t easy, but it’s been helpful in not bouncing between things and improving focus.

Work

The challenge is finding a balance between serving my clients and building my own business. I want to grow long-term, but I’m also learning things from my clients that scale into my own work. It’s not a case of one at the expense of the other, but more about balancing the two, since I don't have all the brain energy in the world to do everything. Don't have a clean answer, but it's definitely given me lots to think about

Rabbit Hole

Lately, I’ve been thinking about the wide range of niches within marketing. Taking Rite of Passage has been interesting since there are sometimes interest groups setup that include Marketing, but often it feels like discussions devolve into venture capital and AI, which isn't really Marketing. AI especially seems to have become like the “air fryer” of conversation topics—something everyone is talking about, but not something that adds a ton to a conversation. This realization has given me more ammo to focus more on finding my tribe, such as folks interested in the thought processes that go into Marketing.

Reading

I’m reading You’re Not Listening, which argues that we often don’t remember people’s names because we’re too focused on ourselves. We worry about our posture, appearance, and how we’re coming across, which makes it hard to pay attention to the other person. Easier said than done, though!

Favorite Quote

"I think the most interesting thing is that people are using Llama Life as part of a workflow. So we’re not trying to compete with Todoist, Notion, Asana, Trello, etc. Llama Life is not meant to be a place to store your master list of todos, or manage and collaborate on a project. It’s designed to be the “tip” of the workflow. Most of our customers store their todos and projects somewhere else and then transfer them to Llama Life for their focus session during the day." -Ness Labs

Life

I've been feeling overwhelmed lately, and I think a lot of it comes from my productivity stack. I'm big on the GTD methodology, but definitely have a habit of checking email and my Todoist inbox multiple times a day, which I realize now makes me feel like I'm spinning tires, and not actually getting anything done. I'm trying out a couple online working services (Caveday, Flow Club, FLOWN) to see if that can help me get back into a deep work routine. Or just planning better, and trying to eat the frog every morning.

Work

I've been thinking a lot about what I want Curve to be, and a big part of that was reading Company of One. It's a fantastic read, and really the crux of it is asking if growth is the right option; in other words, you can add staff, but that means you need HR, managers, etc. Granted, Curve is years from that, but it makes me think of the power of being small, and being able to build relationships and be a partner in a way that bigger firms can't.

Rabbit Hole

Alongside Company of One, I've been reading At Home for my lighter evening read. One of the stories the book shares is about Joseph Paxton: Besides designing the Crystal Palace for the 1851 Great Exhibition (one of the first large buildings to use glass and iron) he was also a gardening expert. At Chatsworth House, he built huge greenhouses, including one just to grow giant water lilies. He was into urban planning, helped design London parks, and even got into politics as a Member of Parliament. Oh, and on the side, he started a magazine about gardening, invented a fancy kind of hose, and once floated the idea of building a giant glass dome over parts of London.

Reading

Company of One: One big takeaway for me is thinking about how sharing your expertise online usually helps you; yes, other companies can copypasta your work, but they can't copy your personality, how you show up for your clients, and the thought process you bring into it- all things a small (ie microagency) can focus on as their unique selling point.

Favorite Quote

"We trust people by default. For example, we have implemented very few checks to ensure that people are “doing their work.” Great work is self-evident, and you don’t need to check for it. When we take the time to hire for the right cultural fit, we’ve found that we don’t have to have systems in place to look over people’s shoulders." -Amir Salihefendic, Doist Blog

Life

Just turned 31, and basically spent the day getting pizza (first time in a year... gotta live diet fun) and taking a 4hr phone call with my best friend. It's a simple life, and I'm all for it. And thankful that I have someone that I can literally talk about anything with.

Work

I feel like I'm hitting the hardest part of building Curve yet- how to position my company. I know at the super high, 10k foot view that I want to be that neutral, sits-in-marketing-but-still-technical type of resource that I never had, and I know that I want the brand to match my... candor. But the actual look and feel of my website? That's the hard part- especially because I can technically design it all, but I also know that I'm a C+ designer at best. So it's been a journey of trying to find the right team for helping me build it out, and finding the balance between being lean (not needing a full agency model) but also wanting something that looks badass (wanting something more than average)

Rabbit Hole

I ended up doing an updated CliftonStrength test, with some surprising results: Futuristic, Strategic, and Arranger are still top for me, but competition moved down, Includer went to the bottom, and they got swapped with Ideation and Individualization. I'm still taking it with a grain of salt, but it's interesting to think- am I less inclusive because my experience have changed since college, or is it simply that I've built up other areas? I've definately learned a strong connection with someone is rare, and it takes effort to build that friendship, so plenty to think about.

Reading

I've just started Atlas of the Heart after finishing Permission to Feel. Building a business is a big challenge for me, and I think emotional literacy basically touches every area of that- how I talk to myself, what I did and didn't learn growing up, how I show up for my (future) team, etc- and the first step of that is recognizingthe feelings when they come up.

Favorite Quote

"When we deny ourselves the permission to feel, a long list of unwanted outcomes ensues. We lose the ability to even identify what we’re feeling—it’s like, without noticing, we go a little numb inside. When that happens, we’re unable to understand why we’re experiencing an emotion or what’s happening in our lives that’s causing it." -Marc Brackett, Permission to Feel

Life

Thinking more on diet, and how mild food addiction might have a role in my life. I'm generally pretty fit, but after intentionally reducing sugar for ~2 weeks, it's interesting to see the changes, both good in terms of dropping a few pounds and generally snacking less, and the bad with a couple mood swings. One of them made me realize that my first go-to after a stressful client call was to grab a snack, when mentally I know there are muuuuch better ways to decompress, like a walk around the block.

Work

Thinking about my voice, and how to translate that into words. Going through some of my past writing about my work... it's bland and boring as shit. Sure, it might make my high school English teacher proud, but literally, anyone could have written it. I'm thinking how to get my writing closer to the way I actually speak, one way I'm exploring is Write of Passage.

Rabbit Hole

For someone that doesn't get a ton of emails (for work, most comms are in Slack or in a weekly 1:1, for everything else I either unsubscribe or auto-forward to Readwise to digest later) I realize I check email an awful lot. Sure, I like to think I'm being productive, but the more I think back, it's actually me either faking productivity, or looking for the dopamine hit that comes with new emails (ahhh yeah, order shipped!). It makes me think more about how energy rises and falls during the day, and trying not to spend my peak time (late morning) doing low-energy work (email)

Reading

Paved Paradise. Just started, but really like it. Talks about how much space we waste on parking, and how it often gets in the way of some of the bigger problems in a city (walkability, housing prices, 3rd spaces, etc)

Favorite Quote I've Found

"Through friendship, we can self-select into some of the most affirming, safe, and sacred relationships of our lives, not because of pressures from society to do so, but because we elect to do so. Cleo, who works for the government, told me that after her mother died, she felt alone and uncomfortable at the funeral. Her strained relationships with her family made her scared to break down. But when her friend Stephanie showed up, surprising her by flying in from Michigan, Cleo let herself weep" -Marisa G. Franco PhD, Platonic

Life

I've been thinking about diet a lot, and the way it impacts my mood, energy, and basically every other area of my life. Part of that is how the habits and mindsets we learn as kids are still at play. Think broccoli- I hated it as a kid, to the point that when given the choice between eating it now or sitting at the table until I did, I sat for 3 hours, but these days I actually don't mind it.

Work

Growing Curve means building a team, which means building not only around my strengths, but my weaknesses. I've been thinking about what skills I bring to the table, and how that'll shape the way I work with others. It gives me throwbacks to a StrengthsQuest test I took a decade ago in college; at the time I didn't do much with it, but a decade later it still kind of fits. If you're curious, I'm Futuristic, Strategic, Arranger, Competition, and Includer.

Rabbit Hole

Part of the diet inspiration is from feeling like shit over the last 2 years. I'll sleep for 9 hours, and still be ready for bed at 7pm. My working theory is a Candida overgrowth, which is fueled by sugar. Turns out sugar not only has the weight gain symptoms everyone knows, but it also hits things like making you feel less full, giving you dopamine hits that get into addition territory, and if taken long enough, leads to anxiety and depression. I'm still going through finding my hidden sources of it, but striving for less than 15 added grams a day.

Reading

An Astronaut's Guide to Life on Earth. Excellent read about the mindsets and life of going to space. Spoiler: actually being in space is only 1% of the job.

Favorite Quote I've Found

Stop assuming that the way to make progress on your most important projects is to work for longer. And drop the perfectionistic notion that emails, meetings, digital distractions and other interruptions ought ideally to be whittled away to practically nothing. Just focus on protecting four hours – and don't worry if the rest of the day is characterised by the usual scattered chaos. - Oliver Burkeman