Category: Processes & Productivity

April 1, 2026

Replaced by AI? Workflows, Service Design, and What AI Doesn’t Know

We don’t share everything with AI— and probably never will. In that gap is the boundary you get to set between your service’s value proposition and what folks can reasonably do with AI (instead of you).

Categories Processes & Productivity/Strategic Alignment

July 30, 2025

Change Sucks (Even When It’s for the Better)

The process of change comes with chaos and complexity – sometimes more than what you started with. You get through the process by maintaining vision while tolerating the chaos and complexity. (Even when the end result isn’t perfectly defined.)

Categories Processes & Productivity/Strategic Alignment

May 5, 2024

Organize Your Digital Notes: The PARA Method (plus one thing Forte missed)

Are you a digital note taker? Can you easily find – and use – those notes, or are they a jumbled and ever-growing collection of things you promise you’ll organize some day? If that sounds like you, you might want to try the PARA method. If this ends up working for you, go ahead and start sorting your old notes...

Categories Data Strategy/Processes & Productivity

May 5, 2024

Maximize the SEO Value of Your Calls-to-Action

If you’ve used a template to design a landing page or other marketing/sales materials, you’re probably familiar with the format that has you list a catchy sentence that perfectly entices your audience, followed by a button that reads something like “Learn More”, “Download Now”, “Enroll”, or “Buy”. That button is called a Call to Action (CTA), and, when it’s generic...

Categories Data Strategy/Processes & Productivity

June 1, 2023

SOPs Are Like a Dictionary for Your Business

What type of thing is the dictionary? And why does it matter to your SOPs?

Categories Processes & Productivity

January 9, 2023

Client Intake Forms

One of the primary tools of the client intake process is the intake form. In this post, I talk about how to set up tools like your client intake forms to help make your client intake processes as simple and efficient as they need to be. What is a client intake form? Client intake forms go beyond the formality of collecting names...

Categories Data Strategy/Processes & Productivity/Strategic Alignment

January 9, 2023

The Client Intake Process

Are you sabotaging your business by making it too easy to work with you? So much of today’s business rhetoric is about “removing barriers.” But you’re introducing barriers if your client intake processes and intake forms are not, at every step of the way, helping you make meaningful progress towards a successful outcome. In practice, these barriers look like In this post,...

Categories Processes & Productivity/Strategic Alignment

February 21, 2022

How to tackle a huge project | A SOP Story

TL;DR? There are four things you can do to make a huge project not only seem manageable but be manageable, even as you keep saying to yourself, “What was I thinking taking this on?!?” (1) Know what you’re trying to do and break it down into manageable steps as soon as possible. (2) Track your progress in a way that fosters...

Categories Processes & Productivity

September 15, 2021

Auditing your process improvement process | A SOP Story

TL;DR? Schedule some time to review the end results of the processes you’ve “improved,” and revise your current-day SOPs to incorporate back in anything you might have inadvertently “incrementally improved” out of your process along the way. Then again, you might just have an opportunity to pat yourself on the back for actually improving, and continue on! As a case study...

Categories Processes & Productivity

July 1, 2021

Analyzing time spent: Time management with box and whisker plots

We all know that there are only so many minutes in a day, and that goals like being more productive and effective hinge on things like better time management, that is, working smarter not harder. This is particularly true if you think you’ve got a pretty standard process in place. In this post, I’m going to demonstrate a visualization tool called a box and...

Categories Data Strategy/Processes & Productivity