In this the latest installment of my regular technology tips series, I must begin by extending my apologies to all those who are already Search Engine Optimization (SEO) experts. What follows is not for experts, or even experienced amateurs. Instead it’s merely some very simple tips for getting started, specifically aimed at all those who feel completely bewildered or overwhelmed by the challenges of getting found on the web.

SEO: The only acronym you really need

The last thing anyone needs is another acronym, and tech geeks the world over (yes, yes, that includes me) are guilty of polluting our vocabularies with a vast array of incomprehensible short-hand for equally incomprehensible terms and concepts.

But as a small or medium-sized business that doesn’t have a globe-crushing brand (yet), those three little letters, SEO, are absolutely critical to your future success.

You see we live in a culture plagued by information overload and one of the many consequences is that (a) nobody knows who you are and (b) most of these nobodies couldn’t find you if they wanted to.

But we also live in a culture in which the web provides unprecedented access to other markets, and a vehicle for you to deliver your message to your customers. SEO is essentially a way to turn information overload to your advantage.

A brief history of RSS

If you’ve been reading blogs for a while then the world of RSS is most likely old news. The New York Times was the first major news organization to offer its readers the option of subscribing to RSS feeds, back in 2002, and since then it’s become the de facto standard for syndicating online content.

So, since 2002 is eons ago in Internet time, surely RSS is so ingrained in web culture that it’s hardly worth discussing? Well not really. Over the past few months I’ve made a conscious effort to get outside of the insular tech community and understand how real people use real technology in the real world. I’ve discovered that perhaps two thirds of my friends and family have either never heard of RSS or have a vague notion of what it is but have never seen it in the wild, so to speak. Another testament to the technology community’s chronic inability to explain itself…

So, what is RSS and why should you care?

RSS stands for Really Simple Syndication, which is of precisely no help in explaining what it is. A better explanation is that RSS makes the content you see on websites “portable”, so you can read it in places other than on the website itself. Most commonly RSS feeds are read in RSS readers, which allow the user to subscribe to as many different feeds as they care to. The result? Instead of bouncing from website to website looking for articles and other new content, simply open up your RSS reader and you’ll instantly have access to all of your favourite websites. My fire hose analogy is all about the extent to which there is an overwhelming volume of content online, but RSS readers allow you to control the flow…

Today we honor the spirit of the child to see things clearly, to be tender and ferocious, to be true to life.

I want to be a dogfish
and catch a leaping catfish
with whiskers as long as a stream.
And I want to be
the rain trinkling down on the world
telling it it’s springtime.

- Noah Frank, Grade 2
from Prayers for a Thousand Years

Blessings from Carrie & Danielle during this sacred time.

Star Cluster NGC 3603 from Image Editor.

We’re big fans of all things natural and eco-friendly at C&D, so we were delighted when we had the opportunity to find out more about Joshua Onysko, CEO and founder of Pangea Organics. Not only is Joshua a passionate advocate of truly organic and natural approaches to beauty and skincare, he’s a big believer in the responsibility of corporations to support ethical, sustainable and cruelty-free business practices.

1. The future is coming, and I like what it looks like.
2. Women are smarter than men.
3. Pangea is the best skin care company in the world.
4. Natalie Portman will ask me out some day.
5. The only true answers in life are the ones that are not written.
6. Sex will never go out of style.
7. The fringe always predicts the future.
8. We must learn to see the positive, or we will be blinded by the negative.
9. Love does conquer all….that’s why we all need a great pre nuptial.
10. That to thank you for being a C&D reader, Pangea would like you to receive 50 per cent off your holiday order. To take advantage of this offer, simply email us at Holiday@pangeaorganics.com with Carrie and Danielle in the subject line.

10 Things I Know for Sure is a semi-regular series we’re running, to introduce you to inspiring people making a difference in our world. If you have suggestions for people you’d like to see featured, be sure to let us know.

It’s well over two years since Twitter launched, and in that time the service has been adopted by more than two million users. Which is odd, really, since virtually no-one I speak with outside of the technology and blogging community has even heard of Twitter, or if they have they simply can’t understand what purpose it serves.

Twitter is one of the first and certainly the largest of what are known as “micro-blogging” or “micro-content” services. The premise of Twitter is extremely simple: in 140 characters or fewer, tell the world what you are doing right now. Not the world, in fact, but rather the people who choose to “follow” you on Twitter. If they do so, they receive updates (”tweets”), either on their cellphone or their computer, as you update your status. In theory the 140 characters constrain you to saying what’s really important and relevant, but in practice it’s often used for the boring, the trivial and the tragic.

As some of you have noticed, we changed email delivery services for those of you who receive our Daily Q&A by email. It hasn’t exactly been smooth sailing, and a few people have contacted us to say that they didn’t receive this morning’s email.

If you aren’t getting the Daily email and would like to, simply enter your email address and name in the sign-up box you’ll see on every page (or visit our sign-up page for more information). We will only use your email address to deliver the Daily Q&A; you won’t receive any emails from anyone else and we won’t disclose your email address to any third parties.

While we’re on the topic of subscriptions…

You can get our content as an RSS feed, using Google Reader, Bloglines or any other RSS software.

RSS is a great way of “pulling” content to you that you know you’re interested in but want to read on your own schedule. RSS readers typically show you a list of headlines from your favorite websites, and let you read full-length articles without visiting the website itself. If you want to leave a comment you still have to click through, but for me RSS is the best way to read the content I want, when I want it, without spending a lot of time surfing from site to site.

Darren Rowse over at ProBlogger has a great introduction to RSS, which covers everything you could possibly want to know.

Subscribing to Our RSS Feeds

You can subscribe to feeds for virtually any “slice” of our content, from every article on our site, to feeds for individual categories (for example, our Relationships Category) or authors, to the feed for the Daily Q&A.

Our advice? Start with the main RSS feed, and then narrow down your interests as you get to know the content on our site.

Questions? Feel free to ask away in the comments, below.

Photo by luisvilla.

A snapshot of AllTop

I spoke with someone this weekend who had never heard of Flickr, and wasn’t really aware of how, why or where anyone would upload and share photos on the web. Honestly, I was shocked, and not simply because this person was in his early 30s rather than his late 70s.

Approximately 25 million people visit Flickr.com each month, in the US alone, and the site is certainly a global phenomenon that was instrumental in defining the concept of web 2.0. For many, Flickr was their first introduction to the concept of “sharing” information on the web, and it turned something that used to be very difficult (distributing your digital photos to anyone) into a spectacularly easy task. In turn, the reason we find it so easy to use Facebook and other social networking tools has a lot to do with Flickr having made us comfortable with participation in large online communities.

I live in Kitsilano, a busy urban neighborhood in Vancouver, on a street where parking spaces are few and far between and parking enforcement officials detect expired meters in the same way that hungry sharks smell blood in the water. So it’s really no surprise that frustrated drivers often park across my driveway.

Usually there’s enough room so I can squeak my car past the intruders, but last week there was a new and shiny-looking Acura parked more than halfway across the driveway. So I called the City of Vancouver’s parking enforcement line who promptly sent someone over to ticket and tow the Acura. Seriously, I’ve never seen such militant efficiency from a city official.

This weekend I did something I’ve procrastinated about for months — ended years of buying coffee in disposable cups. It’s so fundamentally unnecessary and wasteful to throw away paper and cardboard and plastic all for an Americano that lasts for all of 20 minutes, yet our culture makes it so incredibly easy to indulge in this kind of waste, day-in, day-out.

I love Sigg products, and I’m happy to hear that they’ve been overwhelmed with demand since the Bisphenol-A (BPA) health scare that linked plastic water bottles with breast and ovarian cancer.

So I was delighted to discover that, in addition to water bottles, Sigg also makes travel mugs using the same extruded aluminum manufacturing technique. I’m truly passionate about brand that simply know what they’re good at and execute on it flawlessly regardless of prevailing trends — and Sigg seems to be exactly that kind of brand. Sadly I couldn’t find a mug as sleek and stylish as the “Metro” model pictured here (let’s just say the one I bought looks more than a little middle-aged), but on the other hand it’s refreshing to sacrifice a little style for a lot less waste.

One very simple tech tip this week… If you have a blog and don’t use FeedBurner, then drop everything and head over there to set up your account.

What is FeedBurner? Well it’s the best method of distributing your website or blog’s RSS feed in a manner that makes it very easy to manage and track your subscribers. It used to be that bloggers had no visibility to what happened to their content unless someone actually visited their website using a plain old browser. But FeedBurner gives you accurate statistics on everything from how many people are reading your content in an RSS reader, to which items are most popular.

The other indispensable benefit of FeedBurner is that if you move your blog, your RSS subscribers will continue to get your content with zero interruptions and without requiring them to resubscribe.

If you need more information about RSS, try my earlier blog post, RSS for the rest of us.

And if you aren’t currently subscribed to our RSS feed but would like to do so, you can find Carrie & Danielle’s feed here.

PS: The chart in this post shows our RSS subscriber growth over the last few months. Thanks to all of you who’ve signed up!

I was inspired in part by our recent Q&A about eco-friendly living to make a serious effort to shop locally. Starting in August is relatively easy since, here in Vancouver at least, there is a wealth of wonderful local produce, much of it organic. But August or not, I quickly ran into some serious limitations. It turns out that it’s virtually impossible to buy 100% local.

But living a little more sustainably is better than not sustainably at all, so here’s my list of the products that I can’t buy locally, but can’t live without. Call it a get out of jail free list if you like, and console yourself with the thought that if most of what you’re buying is local you’re making a huge difference.

Five things I can’t buy locally, yet…

1. First and most obvious of all: coffee. I’ve given up coffee about 30 times in the last 10 years, for on average two days each time I tried. It’s futile, never going to happen, a bust as they say. Until the climate in Vancouver radically changes, I’m afraid I’ll still be relying on air shipments of Lavazza Gold. But what I am going to do, starting tomorrow, is stop buying coffee in disposable cups. It’s completely avoidable with a tiny bit of planning.
2. Olive oil’s next. Call me a cooking snob if you like, but I can’t use anything else for frying onions, roasting my world-famous-in-my-own-mind-potatoes or virtually anything else that takes place in our kitchen. I did find an article about some adventurous folks who’ve been growing olives for years now on Pender Island, just off the coast of Vancouver, but I don’t think they’re producing oil commercially, yet… I’ll be first on their customer list if it happens.
3. Bananas, of course. They’re a superfood in so many ways, and both my daughter and my cat (yes, don’t ask) love them to bits. Surely someone could grow them indoors, anyone?
4. Pasta. Again I might just be a food snob, but I haven’t been able to find any pasta made in Canada (let alone BC) that comes close to my current favorite dried pasta brand, Rustichella D’Abruzzo. I’m a real believer that the kind of pasta you use is not incidental to the quality of your final dish. But that said, we grow enough wheat in Canada that it must only be a matter of time before someone fills the void.
5. Last but not least it’s something that I can live without but my better half certainly can’t. Chocolate, of course, which not only isn’t local but often originates from countries caught in the throes of political and economic turmoil. My answer here is to buy organic, fair trade products such as Ottawa’s own Cocoa Camino brand, which guarantees both a sustainable product and a fair wage for the producer.

So in August when the shelves are packed with local cherries, strawberries, raspberries and blueberries, it has been difficult but not impossible to shop mostly local. At the very least I know that by choosing local products when they are available I’m sending a message to retailers that their customers want more.

And here’s the most important thing: so often our supermarkets simply don’t stock things that are grown quite literally just around the corner. The only way that will change is if we take a little extra time and spend a little more money to shop elsewhere.

Photo courtesy of ian_ransley.

I’m a little late in posting about Seth Godin’s recent article on clicking ads to thank bloggers for great content. At C&D we’re huge fans of almost everything Seth has to say about marketing, business and treating your audience with respect, but like many others I completely disagree with the notion that ads should be treated like a tip jar.

Several bloggers have observed that encouraging people to click ads is generally against the terms of service of whichever ad network you’re using, but that’s a little beside the point. For me the bigger issue is that advertising hasn’t changed nearly as much as many online marketers would like to think.

If you’ve followed the C&D blog for a while you’ll know that I happily wear the mantle of “office geek“. I’ve always been fascinated by technology, since before the days back through the mists of time when I played clunky games (in colour, no less!) on my Amstrad CPC6128.

I’ve never really been concerned with the mechanics of how technology works; for me it’s much more to do with how the application of technology makes my life easier and more interesting. And in turn it’s about my ongoing frustration with how impenetrable technology can be for the average person who simply wants to get on with the job at hand. For reasons that aren’t clear to me I’ve never had trouble interpreting geek-speak, but I know that puts me in the minority, and in turn that for most people there’s nothing more frustrating than technology that simply isn’t clearly explained.

In what is becoming a weekly ritual, Carrie and I climbed Vancouver’s Grouse Mountain at just before 7 a.m. today. The cocktail of extreme physical exertion and being alone with my thoughts is addictive, and it’s at these times that I find the greatest clarity and inspiration.

So I thought I’d start a semi-regular series of blog posts following each of these hikes, as a way of sharing ideas and (I hope) continuing the momentum of inspiration.

Hard work without goals is wasted work

At some point we were all told that quality beats quantity any day of the week. So why are we so often obsessed with the time we spend doing things rather than the real value of the things themselves? Pounding up the very steep trail (they actually call it the Grouse Grind or “mother nature’s stairmaster“, just so you understand it’s really going to hurt) I’m sure that it felt worse than it ought to have done because I didn’t spend enough time thinking about what I wanted to get out of the experience. Instead it was all about the pain of the moment. Next time I’ll do two things: set a time goal and pace myself accordingly; and for every painful thought I’ll counterbalance it with mental affirmation of the mental, physical and spiritual good it’s doing.

Competition is good, competition is right

Sometimes it feels as though competition has a bad rap — as if it’s only a step away from Gordon Gecko’s “greed is good” speech in Wall Street. But the right kind of competition — driven people working towards objectives that will make their lives or the lives of others better — is nothing but healthy. In business there isn’t a limitless pool of attention and customers so there’s no point pretending that, at some level, it isn’t about passing someone else on the way up.

But civility is also critically important. On the trail this morning there were lots of competitive hikers, many of whom obsessively watch their times and climb the trail several times a week in a quest to be faster. But even when it’s crowded on the narrowest stretches there’s no pushing and shoving. So I suppose what I take from this is that there’s no need to push others out of the way; competition is about being the best at something good and positive, not about impeding others. In fact the time you spend haranguing others is very likely diverting you from actually getting ahead.

Excuses help no-one, least of all you

Vancouver being the small town that it is we happened to meet our lawyer on the hill. Ian must be 15 years older than me but he blasted up the trail a good seven minutes faster than us. At the top I felt compelled to point out that I’d slipped out of my training regimen after a serious boating accident a couple of years ago. I used to be fast, and I’ve got an excuse for why I’m not now… Really, what an unnecessary thing to say. It did nothing but seek to diminish the achievement of the other person and provide me with an ongoing cop-out for not setting tough targets for the time I want to achieve.

It’s all about perspective. Far better to think to myself that my 15 year age advantage is more than enough to compensate for a two-year-old injury.

So, no rocket science or great wisdom there, but it’s just the beginning. Think of this first post as framing the more detailed thoughts I’ll share in the coming weeks and months.

PS: I’d really like to make a point of using my own photographs in these posts, but I didn’t pack the camera this morning. The photos here are courtesy of guidomax.

We’re looking for a rock star intern with serious online marketing skills. For more information take a look at the posting on our blog.

**Update: We have filled this position with a fantastic candidate. Thanks to everyone who applied!**

**Update: We have filled this position with a fantastic intern. Thanks to all who applied.**

I’ve been the CEO of Carrie & Danielle for about four months now, and I can honestly say that it’s the most inspiring and engaging workplace in which I’ve had the privilege of working. It’s rare indeed for authenticity and the web to meet like this…

We’re looking for a rock star intern to work with us here in our lovely Vancouver studio. The key qualifications are being super smart, engaged and enthusiastic, and utterly addicted to taking initiative. But there are also some very specific skills we need, too:

1. Knowledge of current search engine optimization strategies, including keyword research and targeting, on-page optimization and link building.
2. Excellent writing skills and understanding of how to write for search engines.
3. Thorough understanding of social media marketing strategies.
4. Basic html editing skills essential; understanding of css/xhtml desirable.
5. Ability to discern trends and important / relevant data from web analytics tools, including Google Analytics.
6. Familiarity with AdSense, including AdSense optimization techniques.
7. Experience with WordPress or other blogging platforms preferred.
8. Dog-walking and baby wrangling skills desirable but not essential.

This position is very much a jump into the deep end proposition. We work as a very tight-knit team and we’re all about supporting each other, but there just isn’t much time for hand-holding. And it’s a “get to know you” kind of thing. Initially you’ll be working with us for three months with the possibility of a permanent position if things go well.

Send resumes to careers [at] carriedanddanielle [dot] com, indicating in the subject line that you’re applying for the Internship. And include a brief letter telling us why you’re the world’s greatest intern. No phone calls please (we really mean it — calling about the position will not be seen as a sign of initiative!).

I’ve never been in sales, but I’m a passionate believer in the importance of good sales people.

Perhaps the single biggest indicator that your sales approach isn’t working is if your team is doing what I like to refer to as “aggressively waiting”. That is, instead of getting out there, generating opportunities, networking, and so on, they’re sitting in the office waiting for the phone to ring. As Alec Baldwin would say, they don’t deserve the Glengarry leads.

But it doesn’t just apply to sales. All of us are guilty of too much reticence, at work and elsewhere in our lives. I often say to the team at C&D that many businesses don’t succeed simply because people are unwilling to be clear about the things they need others to do. As the saying goes, you rarely get things for which you don’t ask, which means that unless you do ask your staff won’t magically translate your clever business plan into concrete actions, your customers won’t tell you what they really think and your suppliers’ best prices won’t materialize.

There is of course the issue of how you ask, something on which I certainly need to work (understatement alert!). But assuming you’ve taken care of step one (knowing what you want, of course), perhaps the single most important quality shared by good leaders is an ability to translate this knowledge into action. And funnily enough, a big part of knowing what you want is actually having the conviction to say it, stick to it and follow through.

So I’m saying that you should pick a course and stick to it regardless, right? Well, not really. Very often you don’t get the results you anticipated, to which the correct answer is not to carry on blindly. But my point is that at some point you’ve got to turn theory into action and get started. The more quickly and confidently you can do so, the sooner you’ll get the only kind of validation that matters: the reaction from the market.

Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain.
The Wizard of Oz

Getting Started is the Hardest Part

This post is the first in a regular series I’ll be writing about practical tips for incorporating technology into your business. We’ve got a lot of small business owners and entrepreneurs reading our website, so we thought it would be helpful to reveal some of what goes on behind the curtain.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how impenetrable tech-related things are for many small businesses, so my intention here is to simplify the overwhelming list of things you could do into lists that you can start with today and see real results from tomorrow.

It also drives me completely crazy to experience first-hand the way that a lot of IT support firms and contractors treat small businesses. From ridiculous hourly rates to recommending unnecessary and expensive services, it often feels like there is an entire industry predicated on keeping entrepreneurs in the dark and feeling trapped by the complexity of technology.

Carrie & Danielle are hosting a 4 week workshop series based on their Life Style Map. Participants meet once weekly in C&D’s Vancouver studio to create a vision for true living and an action plan to make it real. Interested? Email: karryn@carrieanddanielle.com

We adore questions. Which is a good thing because we get a lot of them here at C&D. We were answering them individually until it occurred to us that there were a lot of people who were asking similar questions. And so Ask C&D was born.

Think Dear Abby for the enlightened soul: style and spirit and wealth and relationships and home and stuff and…whatever you’ve got. Send it in. (Unless you want advice on filing a tax return, there we can’t help you. But we KNOW someone who could!)

So ask away – the lines are open! Write to hello@carrieanddanielle.com

With enough inside information and a million dollars, you can go broke in a year.
Warren Buffett

Since today’s Q&A is on the theme of good advice about money (something to which I ought to pay close attention), it’s surely serendipity that the first thing that caught my eye on the Yahoo! Finance page this morning was a list of money saving tips. Tips from none other than the Sage of Omaha, Warren Buffett.

I’m a huge fan of Buffett and his long-time sidekick, Charlie Munger, not simply because of their spectacular successes in business, but also because nothing beats their wry sense of humour and self-deprecation taken to an art form. For instance, Buffett once responded to a question at Berkshire Hathaway’s AGM regarding his and Munger’s respective ages by observing:

At the average age of 80, we’re aging at the average rate of only 1 1/4% per year. That’s a lot better than younger people.

But back to those tips… Highlights after the jump.

I wrote a brief post about our launch on my personal blog today, focusing mostly on the extent to which we kept things simple when planning the new website. On reflection I’m not sure that “simple” is the right word.

Reviewing the responses submitted on our first Daily Q&A, what stands out is the thought and intelligence that each and every one of our readers has put into their answers. Being the stats. junkie that I am, I pasted all the comments into Word (yes, I’m a mac guy, but yes Danielle was right, Word is better than Pages or NeoOffice or any of the other nonsense I’ve brought with me into the office) just so I could see exactly how much people had written. More than 5,000 words, all of them profound, deeply moving and sincere.

So “simple” clearly isn’t the right word, but the point I was trying to make was that what we’re trying to do here is not to impose a top-down set of ideas on our community. Rather our hope is for this website to provide some structure, a sounding board for and a place for reflection upon the ideas our community already has.

So the feedback that means the most to us isn’t praise because we say things that are witty or smart or meaningful (though we hope to be all of these things). Instead, as we expand this website, we’d like to know whether we’re succeeding in creating a space in which you feel inspired to tell your own stories. Simple, really.

The Cross is proud to present the Vancouver Premiere book launch event for Carrie McCarthy & Danielle LaPorte’s bestselling book STYLE STATEMENT.

Sunday June 1st, 2008 at 2pm
Talk starts at 2:30pm
Tea, coffee and treats will be served
Limited Seating and Goodie Bags, please RSVP to reserve a spot
Copies of the book will be available for purchase at the event

Complacency is perhaps the very worst thing that can take hold in a workplace, but its origins are often subtle and hard to detect.

Mostly it’s that we assume that we’re doing the basics of team-building and really taking care to run the business, but along the way we stop (or in some cases never start) actually doing these things. The obvious things are the first to get neglected because they’re so, well, obvious that we console ourselves that someone must be taking care to get them done.

More wisdom from the good people over at 37 Signals.

Sometimes the real hero is already home, because he/she figured out a quicker way to get to “done.”

A little bit of context: 37 Signals make the excellent products Basecamp, Backpack, Campfire and Highrise, all of which perfectly express their mantra of “less is more”. That is, most software doesn’t need more features, it needs fewer things to  distract you from the job at hand.

As I’ve written before, I’m a big fan. What I really like about David, Jason and the rest of the crew, though, is that they seem from the outside to be impervious to the panic-stricken approach to business that dominates much of the tech industry. That is, they utterly reject the notion that things being done yesterday is more important than the nature of the things being done.

At first glance it reads as though it applies only to software-based businesses, but there are huge lessons for businesses and indeed people of all kinds to be learned from their book, Getting Real. Definitely on my must read list.

Great post by Seth Godin today about what he calls being me centric vs. you centric:

I published a book so I need you to read it

vs.

There’s something you need to read, so I wrote about it.

All morning I’ve been thinking about how so much of what we buy is made by people and companies who made things simply so we would buy them. And how refreshing and inspiring and rare it is when we stumble across things that simply and elegantly address a pressing need.

- Dan, Innovative Serene

I admit it, I shamelessly stole the idea for this post from a comment left by Scott Heiferman (yes, the MeetUp guy) on Kara Swisher’s blog.

“Someone needs to write the Crossing the Chasm for this era.”

Crossing the Chasm remains a groundbreaking book and, like all books that introduce a truly innovative idea, its conclusions have become so ingrained in modern business culture as to seem entirely obvious.

The basic premise is this: technology-based innovation thrives in the beginning by feeding the appetite of early adopters for new things. This audience is quite tolerant of risk in the workplace and elsewhere, and pushing boundaries is more important than being safe. But products stall when they seek mainstream acceptance because there is a chasm between the enthusiasm of the early adopters and the pragmatism and risk aversion of the early majority — i.e., the people you actually need to sell to to build a really large business.

There’s a lot of bravado and war stories in the start-up world about hours worked, much of which sounds a lot like those tales our parents used to tell us about walking five miles uphill in the snow both ways to school. The team over at 37 Signals, whom I admire deeply, have lots to say about the futility of long hours for their own sake, and more recently why people with families and other commitments outside of work are fundamentally good for your team.

The difficulty, though, is for businesses that are building something new there will always be more things to do than there are hours in the day. One of my favourite time management strategies is the old staple of the urgent-important quadrant, in which if you organize everything on your plate according to its squares you’ll discover that vast amounts of activity are urgent yet not important.

I think what often gets missed when people think about time management is how we actually decide what’s important and what’s not. I’m notoriously bad at managing my own time, so to compensate my approach to work is pretty simple: focus on measuring progress according to very specific goals for the business and doing so regularly. And in turn ensuring that everything that gets done (as distinct from everything that could get done) aligns with these goals.

One of my favourite movies of recent months is Michael Clayton, in large part because of Tilda Swinton’s mesmerizing performance as the chief counsel turned CEO in waiting for a vast agribusiness conglomerate.

There’s a scene in which her character is rehearsing for an interview, alone in her hotel room and crafting her responses so her carefully managed persona will seem authentic and spontaneous. The hardest question to fake is the one about leading a balanced life, which of course she does not. In an inspired moment she stumbles over the answer and comes up with this:

When you are really enjoying what you do, who needs balance? There’s your balance.

Behind her response is a truly broken person (and as we discover, one who’s about to meet head on the consequence of her lack of balance). But still, it’s a tricky thing to wrestle with, what balance really means.