Blog of James David Williams

A blog about adventures, musings, and learning

Month: May 2025

Business Book Implementation

May 14, 2025 / / 0 Comments

One of the conversations I had after last week’s event in Philadelphia has me revisiting a book I read in part earlier in the year and that has been sitting on the table beside my recliner in the months since. The book was first recommended to me by one of our referral partners who is building a well-oiled business machine. That was sufficient justification to buy Buy Back Your Time and skim through it searching for ideas. I’ve implemented a few of the basic concepts already and have looked over the mental frameworks a few times, but we’re about to embark on a real quest using the book’s framework as version one of a new trial. The goal over the coming months is to tackle that most insidious of modern time sucks, the email inbox.

The email inbox can be problematic in many ways. My biggest problem is not that I’m drowning in volume. We’ve implemented some routing flows that have addressed that issue and it’s not like I was getting hundreds of emails per day even before that. My biggest problem with email is that I have it open almost all the time, a residue from a past life.

When I worked for a big law firm, I grew to fear email. We had to be on all the time and if we didn’t respond within a few minutes we could face quite the hiding from our bosses. One of my good friends even developed muscle spasms in his leg from the anxiety of waiting for the next vibration notifying him that another work email arrived. When people ask me why I left the big firm, that little vignette is one of the anecdotes I tell. Despite all of that, immediate responsiveness was so deeply engrained that it is still a mental battle. And this even knowing the benefits that await on the metaphorical other side and after having turned off email phone notifications.

Has anyone gone through the steps outlined in the book, email-related or otherwise? If so, feel free to let me know which parts have worked well for you, what you might have tweaked, and if anything didn’t work at all. I’m more interested in the first half of the book than the second currently but I appreciate in advance any thoughts or comments.

A Little Time in the Caribbean

May 7, 2025 / / 0 Comments

In addition to the work trip this week and juggling multiple closings, I spent a few days at a resort in Puerto Rico. It was not a destination I would have chosen and probably not a place I’ll return to anytime soon, but that wasn’t the point. There were red flags on the beach consistently and warning signs about rip currents anyway. I took a short walk on the beach one morning when I woke up way too early, but otherwise stayed out of the sun and returned just as pale as I’d started.

I went for a retreat through a community of entrepreneurs with online businesses. I am the only attorney as it is a group of people running content, digital agencies, ecommerce, and SaaS businesses, but the way we operate our business looks a lot like many of the digital agencies and I’m able to share a perspective on the M&A process that is otherwise absent from the group. I’m not in the group for business development (though I have assisted members of the group with transactions), but for me it’s more about exposure to cutting edge ideas and being around my people.

The event was two days of sessions, a mix of presentations and hot seats to help members with particularly pressing issues, and an excursion day where we went into Old San Juan and kayaked into a bay filled with bioluminescent plankton. I skipped out on the morning coffee tour and instead sat around talking with other people who decided not to schlep up and down hills in the sun; I don’t drink coffee anyway. The notes I took during the sessions will take weeks to fully process as I mentally turn over the ideas in my head and think about how they might translate into my own context.

I’ve attended several events with this group, both in-person and virtually. At this point, I know most of the people and even if we only see each other once or twice a year we’re able to have conversations as friends. It is the sort of community that I’ve not yet really found in any one place, a group of people who understand the business and life challenges that come with the path I’ve chosen. It’s a group of people with whom I’m able to have conversations that just aren’t possible elsewhere. It says a lot about the group that I’m willing to leave North Carolina during what is some of the best weather of the year to go to tropical humidity and that I’m willing to go to Las Vegas every year for the main conference even though Sin City is hardly my speed.

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