Self Improvement & Career

Most people aren’t busy—they’re just unfocused, boundary-less, and addicted to looking important. This piece delivers seven brutal truths about time, attention, and why most nonprofit professionals are stuck in a loop of motion without progress. If your calendar is full but your goals are stalled, this is your wake-up call. Stop being everyone’s unpaid assistant. Start producing outcomes. Because in the end, you’re either running your day—or starring in someone else’s productivity fantasy.

I didn’t invent these ideas. I stole them from Ben Franklin, Dan Kennedy, and a few dead Stoics. This isn’t a polished productivity manifesto—it’s a brain dump of what actually works: Sunday planning sessions, inbox discipline, ROI-filtered to-do lists, and saying no to everything that doesn’t move the needle. You can’t deposit LinkedIn likes into your checking account. Stop being busy. Start being effective. The secret? Fewer things, done better.

AI is smart enough to discover names of people in your organization. Legitimate-looking emails come in with the line, “see attachment” — which, when opened, launches malware. Others request sensitive business information or for you to fill out an RFP behind a password. I wrote back to one such bot, and it responded so convincingly I almost fell for it. Be very careful — two friends lost between $4k and $7K at work through such an attack. Only one was reimbursed.

As a young ambitious person I remember boasting, “I’m a perfectionist.” And I was! I believed there was a right way to do everything. And I was downright obnoxious about it to the point that I would teach an employee how to hold a pencil. But now I know better.

Endless texts, tweets, emails, calls, chats, IMs, Facebook updates… What do all these things have in common? They’re all fundraising work interruptions! When it comes to development, you need to put the hours in. Here’s how to avoid all the interruptions that are stopping you from raising the money your nonprofit needs to thrive!

Personal finance is largely about taking a proactive approach to planning your future. Along the way however, it’s also about avoiding common mistakes that typically result in unnecessary financial stress. Here are some hard-won tips for planning your future (and your legacy).

We’ve all known someone who collected stuff in his garage. Always parked his car outside because he had no space. Eventually, he built a second garage for his car. Of course, over time he filled the second garage with more “junk,” too. Work can be like that– you can fill your days with so much busywork that you need to add another hour, then another hour… and so on and so on, until your days are gone!

Will a positive attitude alone make you succeed? No. You need far more than that if you want to be successful. Here’s why a positive outlook is worthless, unless you have more in your quiver.

Grown powerful elephants can be tied down in their place with a thin rope around their neck. It doesn’t seem to make sense. Is your nonprofit – like these elephants – tied down by self limiting beliefs?