Jason's Business By Bootstraps

  • Clearing the clutter, or how SpamSieve saved my sanity

    Hey, wanna know why I haven’t been posting for the past two years? Sure, I’ve been writing elsewhere, but mostly, I’ve been busy. Busy deleting spam. Here’s the thing: I’ve had my primary email address for over 13 years now. It’s gotten on just about every list you can imagine, and by “every list” I […]

  • Around the web: Coaching and costs

    A few links with commentary for today: Chris Brogan: What do Coaches Do? I’m letting the video play in the background while I write this, so this link was more of a prompting to get me talking about coaching rather than commentary about Chris’ post itself.  I’ve used a variety of coaches over the past […]

  • Time management 202: planning the week in advance

    I’ve written before about how I track my hours on pretty much everything every day (originally in a spreadsheet, later just in a journal) as a means of spotting inefficiencies and opportunities to systemize and/or outsource, but this week I took it a step further.  Or backwards.  Not sure.  Anyway, I tried to log my […]

  • One more day (off)

    A one day break from, well, anything can easily become a two day break, which leads to the few days break, which leads to the “why not make it an even week” break, which quickly and nearly effortlessly can become an indefinite hiatus. It’s true of fitness, habits, and yes, business. One of the challenges […]

  • Marketing or procrastinating?

    I’ve spent a lot of this week working on a new marketing program for January.  This is a good time of year to do that kind of thing, since most people are either on holidays or thinking about them, so getting a decision on a project during this window is like pulling teeth (though I […]

  • Job security

    This week I met a guy who’d recently been laid off from the tech industry.  He was pretty much taking it in stride, enjoying a bit of time off between gigs, basically. At least, that was the air he was pulling off.  I’m pretty sure I believed him. And about a month ago, a former […]

  • First impressions really set the tone

    An interesting lesson from video editing: I bought a new wireless microphone recently for my video marketing, and it’s 100% amazing, but because it’s a condenser mic it picks up ambient noise regardless and still needs some post processing.  Not a huge deal; I’m used to it.  My workflow has a noise removal filter that […]

  • Discoveries from the long run

    I managed to put in ten miles on the treadmill this weekend.  In a single session, minus the reset time in the middle because the machine doesn’t let you plug in more than an hour at a go. Yes, it’s as exciting as it sounds. That said, it was interesting.  My lungs held up.  My […]

  • Pushbutton businesses

    Things I did on a Sunday afternoon: ordered and provisioned a few domain names, a VOIP 1-800 number, and shot 15 videos.  If I’d hustled a little more, or spent the whole day on it, I could have had a mostly viable business up and running in a day, and it’s worth noting that it […]

  • My two biggest lessons from 2011

    When I refer to my biggest lessons, there’s a reason I don’t call them insights or learnings.  No, these were lessons, the kind of training one gets on the battlefield, and on a battlefield, you don’t emerge unscathed. To that point, I’m a little hesitant to share these with two weeks remaining in the year, […]