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How to Stop Procrastinating: 8 Methods a CBT Therapist Teaches Clients
If you want to know how to stop procrastinating, the key is not forcing more discipline on yourself, but understanding why you put things off in the first place. Most people who ask me for help expect a lecture about willpower. They sit down on the couch in my office, apologize for being late on something like a thesis, a tax return, or an email to a family member, and wait for me to tell them to try harder. I never do. After many years of working with chronic procrastinators, I can tell you that trying harder is almost never the missing ingredient. The people I see are usually trying…
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How to Stay Productive Working From Home: What Actually Works
I’ve spent most of my career helping companies and their people figure out how to stay productive working from home. Before 2020, that mostly meant tech startups and a few forward-thinking agencies. After 2020, it meant almost everyone. Hundreds of conversations later, I can tell you the question I hear more than any other isn’t about software or policy. It’s a quieter, more personal one: “Why do I feel busy all day at home but get so little done?” If you’ve asked yourself that, you’re in good company. The problem is rarely motivation or discipline. Most of the time, people are trying to run an office day inside a house…
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How Much Emergency Fund Do I Need? A Financial Planner’s Guide to Finding Your Number
Almost every first meeting I have with a new client leads back to one simple question: “How much emergency fund do I need?” We usually start by going through retirement accounts, mortgages, and college plans, but everything eventually comes back to what happens if your income disappears tomorrow. I usually ask a direct question: “If your paycheck stopped tomorrow, how long could you keep the lights on without touching a credit card?” There is usually a pause. Sometimes a laugh. Occasionally someone says three months with confidence, but when we actually add up their checking and savings, the real answer turns out to be closer to five weeks. That gap…
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How to Make a Budget You’ll Actually Stick To: A 10-Step Guide
I have sat across the table from a lot of people who were embarrassed about money, and most of them wanted to learn how to make a budget that would finally work. Some of them earned very little, while others earned a great deal. Still, almost all of them opened our first session with some version of the same sentence: “I’ve tried budgeting before, and it never works for me.” So here is what I tell every one of them. The budget did not fail because you are bad with money. Instead, it failed because it was built for someone else. In fact, it was built for a version of…
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How to Use AI at Work Without Sacrificing Quality: An Interview With an AI Workflow Specialist
Almost every team I talk to has the same story. Somebody discovered an AI assistant, showed everyone how to use AI at work to get a draft in thirty seconds that would have taken an hour, and the whole office got excited. Then, a few weeks later, a client email went out with a made-up statistic in it. Or a report landed on a manager’s desk that looked polished and said absolutely nothing. The excitement turned into suspicion, and now half the team uses AI quietly while the other half refuses to touch it. We sat down with an AI Integration and Workflow Specialist who spends most of the week…
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What Is Cloud Computing? A Plain-English Guide
What is cloud computing, really? I get asked some version of that question almost every week. Sometimes it comes from a founder who just signed a hosting contract and isn’t sure what they bought. Other times it’s a marketing manager who keeps hearing “we’re moving to the cloud” in meetings and nods along. Once it was my own father, who wanted to know why his photos were “in the sky.” So instead of writing another textbook explainer, I’ve put this together the way I’d answer it over coffee. In other words, these are the real questions people bring to me, in roughly the order they come up, with the answers…
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How to Write a Business Plan: A Coach’s Step-by-Step Guide (With Free Template)
When founders ask me how to write a business plan, I start with something I tell almost everyone who sits across the table from me: nobody is going to grade your plan on how pretty it looks. Instead, they are going to grade it on whether you actually understand your business. That sounds obvious, but in practice it isn’t. Over the years I have read hundreds of plans, and the ones that fall apart usually look impressive on the surface. For example, I have seen forty pages of glossy charts and a mission statement that could belong to any company on earth. Then, when I ask one simple question like…
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How to Start a Small Business: A Step-by-Step Guide for First-Time Owners
I have sat across the table from a lot of first-time owners trying to figure out how to start a small business. Some of them walked in with a thick binder and a spreadsheet for every scenario. Others walked in with a napkin sketch and a gut feeling. Here is the funny part: the binder did not always win. The people who made it were usually the ones who asked good questions early, listened to the answers, and kept their costs low while they figured things out. So if you are wondering how to start a small business and you have never done this before, pull up a chair. I…
