Not gonna lie - this outfit was just as fun in 2009 as it was in 1989.

(post raison d’être: develop a bit of habitual OCD as you create & publish your content. It will save you effort and embarrassment, and improve communication with your clients)

I subscribe to a lot of marketing emails specifically to keep tabs on what others are doing and to inspire myself to do better design when jobs come along.

I must admit, however, that this is not the reason I subscribe to the NKOTB mailing list.

The New Kids captured my pre-adolescent heart in 1989 and have held a special, albeit regressive and irrational, place ever since.

So, yes. I am a likely-convertible audience member.

When I opened a recent email from “the boys,” I happened to be on my crappy little PC laptop, which makes viewing things a chore and tries to keep me “safe” at every turn. While I’m not hugely concerned about having to click a couple times more to access content, it sometimes results in viewing pages without images. Add to that Gmail stopping image loads from new email addresses, and when I eagerly clicked on the email to find out what the “VERY special announcement” was, I saw an email stripped of images & design elements. (check out the side-by-side comparison in this image)

This is pretty common across email clients (I’m looking at you, Outlook), and I’ve known this for a while.

I don’t expect my clients to be doing a ton of cross-client (or cross-browser) testing (who has time for that when you’re busy pouring candles or chasing your 3 year old around your store?), but I DO want my clients to develop a little bit of OCD when it comes to creating their content, be it email or web, specifically when it comes to images.

So, without having to sweat over the details of SEO or design, how can you make sure that you don’t look as silly as I do in my NKOTB outfit (besides holding back on declaring your love for Jordan Knight)?

• be diligent about filling in all fields in your CMS (specifically – check out the sign-off, where it says “Love, NKOTB signatures” – I guarantee that if the person in charge of this campaign had designed it with an eye to no-image reading, it would have instead read “Love, Donny, Jordan, Jonathan, Danny & Joey.”  Also, take a look at the upper right corner of the email, where the social share buttons are – they’re impossible to read when the images are off)
• don’t rely on images to communicate (this email actually does a good job of that – the images aren’t crucial to the messaging)
• write subject lines and introductory sentences thoughtfully (the NKOTB crew does a good job of this, consistently. They tease without giving away the farm so that I want to click and read further. I learned that being coy can pay off in subject lines back when i worked on Harrah’s Total Rewards emails – users were much more likely to open emails when the subject line was a little mysterious or flirty)
• involve an expert (this is where I give BIPI a plug… even if you compose your emails, it’s definitely worth it to involve someone with a trained eye (even if it’s a proofreader!) to take one last look at a campaign’s proof before you drop it

From now on, when you proof your emails, try and look at them with the images turned off! For bonus points, check out this recent post on Email Design Review – they showcase a really cool use of the images-not-loaded concept!

On the upside, at least they've kept this email simple and the the point. It's clear what they're selling, and *they* have original content... (click to view a larger image)

I was so dismayed to see this email in my inbox today that I initially thought it might be a joke.

The subject line of “New Email Marketing Tool Eliminates the Need to Write Your Own Articles,” drove me to open the email, only to find that it was, in fact, not a joke. MailerMailer is completely serious when they suggest that you use boxed, stock content to fill your emails.

Feel free to check out the promotion video on vimeo…  as long as you keep in mind that this is a HORRIBLE idea. I don’t say this just because I hope that my current and future clients will ask me to help them create content (that is one of the areas where BIPI shines!). I say this because I am a consumer and email audience member and I HATE it when people waste my time.

Now, it is just my opinion. I’m pretty sensitive to big-brand BS. I don’t have cable, I buy organic produce and I’m a generally all-around cynical person.

This is a big part of why I own my own business now, after salaried employment with big, publicly-traded companies for 4 years. It didn’t fit me.

This is why I choose the clients I do, because I like working with small business owners who are passionate about what they do and have a real stake in the product they produce or the service they provide.

Canned content is the opposite of that.

No matter how helpful those articles might be, they have no place in an email you send to your audience. Your audience signed up for your emails because they want to hear from you or about your product. Canned content is worse than elevator music… it is the email equivalent of the never-ending loop of generic sales patter that the bank makes you listen to while you’re on hold.

It’s worse than silence.

While I recently lamented over some rookie mistakes I’ve seen clients make, ALL of those mistakes are preferable to using canned or plagiarized content.

So. Please, respect your email audience. I promise you that it will pay off in good vibes AND in sales.

Sometimes I have to pinch myself to really belive that it’s real that I’m here, rockin’ some fuzzy socks and comparing hexidecimal color values for a living. I used to do this for a hobby, as something to keep me sane while I pulled a 9-5 at a “real” job… and now I’m paying my mortgage with it.

Life is so good… if somewhat less filled with glamour than the life of a roadie. But the thing is… the only difference between the two of us right now is the window dressing. Both of us are doing exactly what we want to do rather than being stuck paying the bills with “work”.

Chris will talk at length about how he’s always known what he wanted to do, about paying his dues, about how to make it in Nashville. My path here is definitely not as cut-and-dry… except in one respect, and that’s PodCamp.

PCN10 was my first official exposure to the Nashville digital community, and regardless of how cheesy and cliche it is, I will confidently say, it changed my life.

Only 3 months into official unemployment, I was an extremely naive, bright-eyed freelancer, working a webmastering gig downtown that I was completely unqualified for in any official capacity. I had very little understanding of what PodCamp was or what I’d experience there, but it sounded good – which was good enough for me in my effort to impress my new client.

I am not someone who is easily convinced to try new things, meet new people or go new places. I get nervous, a little sweaty, and desperately desiring to run away rather than face that new thing (which should tell you just how anxious I get, because I do NOT run. I’d rather let a bear eat me). March 6, 2010 found me predictably anxiety-ridden as a checked in at the front of Cadillac Ranch. I didn’t know anyone! Where would I plug in my laptop? Someone will discover just how much I don’t know!

Amazingly – but, in retrospect, unsurprisingly – by the end of the second session, I was in my element. Someone asked for my twitter handle… several people I didn’t even know retweeted me after I used a session hashtag… I had lunch with someone I didn’t even know and we had a great conversation about politely refusing to work for free. I saw people who I’d met in other ways and discovered that we had this PodCamp thing in common, which increased my confidence and my comfort level.

For the first time since my 4 years working with VSC, I was excited about work, about the potential for what projects I could work on in the future and what new things I could learn.

Not long after PCN10, my client list began to grow. Of course, this could be attributed to the fact that I was working on building that list… but I’m convinced that I’d never have had the courage and the confidence to do that work without that initial PodCamp experience.

2011 found me at a critical point in the development of my business and my brand… and it also found me getting involved with the PCN11 crew. Although I mainly attended the meetings and then volunteered the day-of, my participation in the crew allowed me an even greater opportunity to connect with people in the digital community, which gave me the support I needed to keep plugging away at the hard work of owning my own business.

2012 is no different – I’ve spent the first 3 months of this year working through some pretty big-picture ideas about where I want my business to go and how I want to grow it (while dealing with some personal challenges, too). Besides my roadie, the main way I find the strength and inspiration to keep doing the hard work of doing what I love are the weekly PodCamp crew meetings. Sure, the 5-10 unbillable hours I spend on my crew responsibilities smart a little when it comes time to look back over the month and do invoicing, but the fact of the matter is that my involvement with PodCamp is what inspires me to keep striving for more billable hours, for more clients, more projects, more geekily awesome ways to make the digital practical. I’ve made professional connections through PodCamp that are driving my ability to take on more work and keep my business growing.

I know the day will come when I have 40+ billable hours every week and I have to step back from crew responsibilities, but after experiencing first hand the motivation and creativity that PodCamp inspires, I can’t really imagine what they day will be like.

With only two weeks left until PCN12, crew activities are reaching fever-pitch. There are some days (usually Wednesday night, when I’m prepping that week’s PCN email) where I want to pull out my hair – and where I wish I were hopping on a private jet after the work was done. But it doesn’t take much – usually about 5 minutes into a Monday night crew meeting – to remind me that I’ve gotten lucky here in Nashvegas.

This year’s PodCamp Nashville is April 14 at Tequila Cowboy (formerly Cadillac Ranch) – the doors open at 8:30 AM. If you have any vested interest in digital media at all – if you own a business that uses digital marketing… if you wish you could be a digital media expert… if you need digital inspiration of any kind – you should be there.

You’ll be able to find me at the bar from 8-10, selling meal-deal tickets, after which I’ll be soaking up all the sessions I can. I really hope I see you there!

Eye-candy has a lot to do with which emails I love - because I tend to admire what I can't do myself - but you don't have to be an artist or a writer or a tech geek to compose a really great email - you just have to know yourself.

I will admit that a tiny part of me gets my feelings hurt when people I know start email marketing for their business but don’t ask me for my help¹. To a lesser extent, I feel this way when clients of mine do their own emails and don’t call on me for help, but somehow that it easier to take.

Both situations have happened more than once, and what makes it hard to get over is that I keep getting their emails… and they suck.

Yes, I signed up for their emails for a reason (besides the self-flagellation). I want to see what they’re up to! I want to see what kind of information they give out and how they present it – because, for me, all marketing emails – amateur or professional, abysmal or exceptional – are of interest.

There are some lists I stay on for personal reasons – like Apartment Therapy & Yoga Journal – and then there are some I stay on specifically because I like the quality of the marketing. Jeni’s Splendid Ice Creams is a perfect example. Jeni’s doesn’t have a regular sending schedule, but when they DO send an email, it charms my pants off! The photography & design is clean and colorful, the marketing angles are ingenious, and their copy is downright delightful. More than once I have been so excited about their call-to-action that I’ve filed the email away with the intention of stealing the idea later.

Then there are the emails from my friends (or even from clients who do their own emails).

They are not clean. They are not sassy. They are not exciting. Here’s why:

1. They try to write a novel. I am the first to admit that Hemingway was probably talking to me when he said “kill your darlings.” I am verbose. I love to read my own words. I love composing long, rambling emails. The summer after my sophomore year in college, I had an email exchange going with a friend that probably totaled in the 10s of 1000s of words. But, then, I was not trying to market to my friend (she liked me well enough already).

THE FIX? Be concise. The easiest way to do this is to link to content on your website – if you have a lot to say, boil it down to 50-words-or-less and use those 50 words to tease your email recipients into visiting your site.

2. They repeat themselves. No one appreciates getting an email once a week with practically all the same content from the month before but one new update buried way down at the bottom. You will lose readers. It doesn’t matter if you’re offering a 20% off coupon or have included tomorrow’s winning lottery numbers. Readers will see that recycled content and stop reading… and likely stop opening your email at all.

THE FIX? Wait until you have something new to say. Even if people don’t hear from you for 3 months, they will still open your email if you consistently have something new and interesting to tell them (I could go on at length about emailing frequency, but that’s a post for another day).

3. They think they’re a graphic designer. I admit that in my past, I have used Comic Sans². Clearly, I am not a gifted graphic artist, which is why the font on this blog is all wonky. But when you’re not an artist, and when what you want is to get a clear message across quickly to as many of your readers as possible, you’ve got to let go of your pretensions at graphic design.

THE FIX? Keep it visually simple. Stick with bold/larger headlines and straightforward, sans-serif body text. No colors! No font changes! No funny business! Make use of that “Remove Formatting” button if you have it.

4. They try to talk to everyone or sell everything. This is kind of a “bonus” item in the list, because with the limited resources & time that most small business owners have, they can’t be bothered with segmenting their audience to target specific groups (A/B testing, gathering more personal information from audience members, action/response-triggered campaigns). But the answer is not to try and appeal to everyone and sell every item in your inventory.

THE FIX? Pick a lane. (who’s Elanie?) Just pick one thing that you want your email to be about. Maybe it’s a customer testimonial. Maybe it’s the month’s upcoming events. Maybe it’s a new product or a specific sale. But just let your email be about one thing – your audience will be happier and more loyal.

I had to sit down and write all of this tonight just so that I don’t start replying to my friends’ email newsletters while tears run down my face, writing the email equivalent of “Why Don’t You Like Me?! A Bitter Woman’s Journey Through Life.” The bottom line is that I want to see good emails in my in-box, I want to read them. Yes, I’d love more work, but more than that, I’d like to see others doing good work, too. It inspires me to be better myself.

So – if you plan to sent out an email newsletter, will you please give me a ring? There are still about 8 months left before I stop giving away the milk for free. At the very least, read Email Design Review on a regular basis. Your audience will thank you.

¹secret confession #1 – I’m still willing to give away advice for free all day, despite what this article that I found through Jenni Leeds admonishes. I’ve promised to stop doing this by the time I’m 30 but it’s going to be a hard addiction to beat.)

²secret confession#2 – When I was a kid, mom bought this software called Print Shop Deluxe, and we used it to make homemade banners and cards. PSD’s limited toolkit was my first introduction into design and typesetting. I moved on to using Claris Works, then Word, and finally, blissfully, QuarkXpress, InDesign, Dreamweaver and now WordPress. Throughout my experience with layout & typesetting for print and digital media, I’ve been a font-lover. My uncle, our computer/networking guru, would constantly chastise mom & me for having too many fonts loaded on our computers. When Google WebFonts came onto the scene, I had to change my underpants I was so happy. That is all just to say – I know. I knooooooow.

Last week we left our heroine in the dire straits of her mid-twenties-identity-crisis. Little did she know it was not an identity crisis at all, but merely preparation for what lay ahead!

Clearly, there is some sort of thinking going on in here. Possibly this is why I smell smoke.

What happened between 2007 and 2012, while not best forgotten, is at least best glossed over. Let’s just say, Danielle survived. She grew up and became D’nelle. BIPI survived alongside me, thank goodness. Those 5 years were not an easy time for her, either. She was at turns neglected and overworked, and in 2010 when I started- unwillingly, mind you – to run her full time, there were some growing pains. What was her “hook”? More to the point, what did I even want to do with my life, much less the life of a corporation that had been mostly a crutch for its entire existence?

Well, boys and girls, I will tell you.

For two years now, I’ve sailed BIPI under the flag of a Digital Branding Firm, wherein I was the head cook and bottle washer. I made the trash and I took it out. I’ve been at turns desperately thankful for the luxuries she’s afforded me and desperately anxious over how to keep her going. It hasn’t seemed satsifying or sustainable to simply be a one-woman show, an EIN-glorified freelancer. I have, time and again, turned to my professional contacts for help with projects that have been either out of my scope or out of my ability to complete in a timely manner.

Now, thanks to a chance meeting and drink with one Peter McDermott, what I’ve been trying to do all along has become sharply and clearly into focus.

BIPI is a Digital Remodeling Contractor.

Whether she’s the first or not, I don’t know – it occurs to me now that I ought to go hunting to see if such a beast exists elsewhere (because, lord knows, I’d love to cheat and learn from others’ mistakes).

Here is the conundrum that I have faced over the past two-five years: it had seemed to me that “going it alone” was the only alternative to “working for the man” – in fact, the system I have participated in since I graduated college is clearly set up to be one or the other. And, by that, I mean, the business models that most of us are familiar with are either freelance or agency. Either we’re a lone freelance wolf, a gun for hire (a tip of the hat here to my darling roadie who has exposed me to a fascinating world of gun-for-hire rock’n'roll road crews) – or we’re sucking at the corporate teat.

Just to be clear, here’s how it seems to me that the digital marketing industry most often works:

Freelancer has built a relationship with Susie Client and she pays her (at her SSN) money to manage her email campaigns. But she needs a website UX overhaul. Hey, awesome, Freelancer can do that, too! But she ALSO needs her logo re-thought, 500 business cards printed, a facebook squeeze page with website integration, a linked-in group built & moderated, and an ebook rewritten & redesigned to coincide with her UX overhaul. That’s quite a lot of work for Freelancer, who wants to specialize only in email marketing and UX.

So, Freelancer contacts 3 colleagues, a graphic designer, a social platform specialist and a printer. If she’s lucky, maybe one of those colleagues will have a business (like, LLC, corp, etc.), but it’s mostly likely that her colleagues will also be freelancers working under their SSNs for 1099 income. Maybe she coordinates amongst all of them, or maybe she doesn’t, but regardless, Susie Client is in a weird position of paying 4 different people, interacting with 4 different people, trying to coordinate amongst them and getting frustrated. Freelancer isn’t equipped to take on paying her colleagues, nor does she have the time or the expertise. Not only that, but Susie Client doesn’t have time for this nonsense either.

What I would like to see happen is for there to emerge a player who is the tech equivalent of a Remodeling Contractor. This person owns a business and is essentially a project contractor, doing the dirty work of owning an EIN, coordinating their subcontractors’ schedules, vetting subs, creating space for collaboration, and project managing as the point person for Susie Client, who only has to deal with the one person. Agencies work like this, with an Account Manager taking on the role of point-of-contact… but Agencies are “real jobs”. Freelancers don’t want real jobs.

And, more importantly, Susie Client doesn’t want or need an agency.

This is, officially, the new direction for BIPI in 2012. Sure, I’ll still be getting my hands dirty. But in this brave new world where freelance is too little and agency is too much, I’m taking a new (well, maybe not new. My parents did it for 25 years, after all) path.

I want to know all the best freelancers so that I can provide the exact solution that my clients need. And, yes, I want to keep it local, but more importantly I want to keep it connected. I want to feel like I’m leading a team. I love that my graphic designer, Kindell Moore, works with me at Starbucks. I love that my writing superstar, Sarah Pressler, is someone who I have grown to know and trust solely through really rich Facebook interaction that started from a random personal connection. I love that my life-saving Drupal developer, Rudy Barrett, came to me through my work with the Plugged In, Inc. productions of BarCamp & PodCamp here in Nashville.

I want to find clients who need this kind of service so that I can make a living helping people based on my experience. I’ve already been plugging away at this with Linda Morse‘s shopping cart and John Navin’s Personal Balance Blueprint overhaul, but it’s time to make this official. It’s time to see myself as a contractor more often than as a writer/developer/analyst/designer.

So. What do you guys think? Can BIPI turn her Remodeling Contractor dreams into a digital reality? More importantly, will my feet ever stay warm when I’m sitting at my desk?

I’ll keep you all updated. Meanwhile – help me figure this out!

Me and my dogs in December, 2007, 14 months after I started BIPI and smack in the middle of the economic crisis that would change everything.

I don’t know how many people know this about me, but when I was in college, I genuinely thought that one day I’d move home and run my parents’ business.

They owned Montgomery Associates, Inc., a remodeling company in Atlanta, GA. Growing up, it was all I knew. Mom & Dad didn’t have “real” jobs – they ran MAI from our home for over 25 years. Back in the early aughts, they had finally, it seemed, achieved success. They had a big fish of a client that was paying the bills, allowing my dad to do what he loved – small projects for homeowners that were problem-solving challenges at their best.

Dad’s ability to listen to a client, figure out what they wanted, and then give them that plus what they needed, is something that I pride myself on professionally. Mom organized everything from top to bottom, billing, sub-contractors, supplies, everything. And my brother and I – our entire childhoods were consumed with the business. We saw everything. Every phone call that came in at 2AM about a busted pipe in the ceiling, every argument about invoicing, every trip to bail a subcontractor out of jail (no joke).

The fact that MAI had finally achieved success was not something that came out of the blue for us. We’d seen how hard the struggle had been and when we went off to college, we went feeling secure and happy. After all, we were children of the late 80s & early 90s. Apple was booming, the internet was coming and I, for one, was well cosseted in my Ivy tower.

I had started BIPI in 2006, soon after graduating college, with an eye towards the future: I loved Nashville and thought, perhaps, that MAI might move to Tennessee (my dad’s family home is outside Tullahoma). Incorporating seemed a smart move – I was freelancing a good bit and the tax benefits, although initially small, would allow for a very easy transition when my family wanted it.

Well, for those of you keeping score at home, 2007 rolled around. Everything fell apart. No more housing industry meant no more work. And the big fish client? Well, they decided that they’d wait on pretty much every project MAI had going with them.

As it all ended, the surreality was accompanied by a nice little mid-twenties identity crisis for yours truly. Wasn’t I meant to take over my parents’ business? What good was my mediocre grasp on job-site spanish and the 25 years I’d spent as essentially an apprentice going to do for me now?

… Stay tuned next week for BIPI origins, part 2: Berry Interesting Productions, indeed

The road ahead looks so much better from where I'm sitting now!

As I was finishing up today’s must-be-dones, posting about them on Facebook like a good little marketer, I had a thought that surprised me:

Oh, wow, I love my job!

It surprised me because it’s been a long time since I’ve had that thought… not that I didn’t love doing this before just a few minutes ago, and not that Starbucks isn’t fulfilling sometimes, but that it welled up in me so suddenly and so purely, unfettered by qualifiers or disclaimers.

Perhaps it was because I’d just read a couple blog posts by colleagues that are full of hopefulness about 2012 (Thanks, Kindell & Sarah!). Perhaps it was just the result of a day filled with doing work that I love, nourishing my body and my mind (with an omelet and a nap!), cleaning the kitchen, and anticipating cuddles and netflix before bed.

There are a lot of exciting projects that I’m working on right now – Linda Morse’s site, Alchemy of Sol, is getting a new, site-hosted shopping cart. Two Star Design’s store is making enough sales to fully fund – and justify further use of – their emma email account with me. John Navin’s Personal Balance Blueprint is getting a UX overhaul and a much-needed fresh perspective thanks to Sarah’s blogging. Tomorrow, I start working on re-facing the B.T.C. Old Fashioned Grocery’s site and adding shopping cart functionality. And it’s PodCamp season, to boot!

There are so many things to look forward to each day, and so many things to be thankful for that I’m finally getting to have surprising thoughts like this, rather than ones that trigger adrenaline and panic.

Maybe this is what life is supposed to be like…? Having spontaneous positive thoughts after a long and busy day?

If this week is any indicator of what 2012 holds, I’m fully on board.

Are you being a unique snowflake?

One of the things I enjoy about the types of clients (small businesses) and variety of work (from web dev, site management and email marketing oversight to content creation, SEO optimization and social media management) that owning my own business allows for is the fact that every job includes the opportunity to coach my clients to be better communicators about themselves and their brand.

I’ve always been great at making a silk purse out of what originally appeared to be a sow’s ear – one doesn’t work as a writing tutor to college athletes without the ability to tease out insightful content from an earnest but messy first draft – and that skill is still serving me well today. I’m working with one of my clients to build up his email readership & audience engagement as well as his brand’s reputation on LinkedIn, and I gave him some advice today that applies to all of my clients – Google values original content and you should too.

The brilliance of the continued evolution of the Google algorithm is that is does not reward duplicate content any more than your college professors did (Just ask my friend Audrey Peters who’s a professor at ETSU). But Google takes you one further – even if it’s not strictly plagiarizing, even if you mention and link to the article, Google doesn’t care.  Google cares about new, unique, original content, because Google wants to provide its users with credible sources. It would serve you better to share an article as a tweet or a linked in post than by copying and pasting it to your blog (my mom would argue “no” to this vehemently – she hates following links. But my mom isn’t Google). Even though copying/pasting/rearranging/summarizing an article to acts as a blog post might be helpful in continuing to engage the people who are already reading your blog (especially if they’re my mom), it will actually work against you in the long run, because the Google algorithm will start to penalize you for not being original. What Google wants is a fresh, unique perspective, not a simple re-posting. Sharing your knowledge and your opinion (even if it was inspired by other content) – adding value by sharing your expertise – ups your interwebs cred; copying and pasting does not.

But! – you argue – My readers need to see this article! It’s important information! Well, sure it is. That’s why cnn.com published it in the first place. What you need to remember is that your readers are reading your blog because they value what you have to say. They value your expertise. Let them read the primary source on their own if they want to, but give them something of value – your own expert opinion.

Yes, this will take more time/resources than just copying and pasting. If you don’t have more time or more resources, your best bet is to cut the fat. Stop trying to do a lot, and concentrate on doing a little very well. Of course, if what you don’t have is time, but you do have resources, then you can send the work on over to BIPI and we’ll turn it into shinola.

“I used to keep two facebooks, one for personal and one for professional, but I stopped that. It’s all one anyway. The personal is professional.”

I was excited to hear someone else say this, because it reminded me of a trend that I’ve been noticing more and more lately – the personalization of the professional. Seth Godin touched on this a month or so ago in a post about the recession and “the coming revolution.”

The future feels a lot more like marketing–it’s impromptu, it’s based on innovation and inspiration, and it involves connections between and among people–and a lot less like factory work, in which you do what you did yesterday, but faster and cheaper.

For the first few years of operating BIPI, I was in a headspace that was very dual. I wanted to keep the personal, personal and the professional, professional. I had my facebook on lock-down and two twitter accounts. My corporate logo and color scheme was stuffy and my writing stilted.

Who was I kidding? Myself, mostly.

Because as much as HR-departments-of-my-past (cue scary, Halloween music) may have wanted it to not be true, the personal is professional … and vice-versa. And in this Godin-articulated coming revolution, we are all individuals, looking to connect, hoping to do good work, longing to produce quality products, and maybe, just maybe, dreaming of creating something beautiful.

This afternoon, as I grumpily walked in my bare feet out to my kitchen to stick my leftovers-for-lunch in the microwave, I was kind of mad at myself for needing to stop working to eat. I felt a little headachy and a lot frustrated with my productivity on my current task. It was at that moment that I thought again of John’s words. The personal is professional. There’s no way I’ll be able to give the search engine evaluation folks my best without taking care of myself on a personal level, too… feeding myself lunch and having a little non-work time to think while I do.

It makes me wonder – what kinds of things do you do to take care of you, the professional? Whether you’re lucky like I am (right now) to be working from home on a variety of interesting & engaging projects, or you’re stuck slinging lattes like I will be (in just a few hours), how do you take care of yourself so that you can keep doing work you love?