Author: James David (Page 4 of 20)

Last weekend, both members of the firm traveled to Washington, D.C. for the Southeastern Entrepreneurship Through Acquisition Conference. It was a much larger event than I’d anticipated, perhaps 500 people or more in attendance across the two days. This was our third conference of the year so far, and our most targeted and important. Events like this one are the only times when we ever get to see our clients and referral partners in person. They are a chance to demonstrate our expertise in front of a large number of people. They are also completely exhausting for me. That is not the case for my business partner, but I write the newsletter.

Through our sponsorship, we were the only attorneys who were part of a substantive panel discussion during the event. Other attorneys acted as moderators, but unexpectedly our firm received top billing out of the law firms on the sponsor placard. I assume that we paid more for that privilege, but we wanted to present and that’s what we were able to do. There was probably a time when I would have been rather nervous sitting on a stage in front of an audience of hundreds of people, but that wasn’t the case on Saturday. My strongest recollection was a dislike for how my voice sounded through the sound system in the auditorium, a result of sounding different to myself than to anyone else and something that isn’t unique to me. Legal diligence is hardly the most exciting topic, but I tried to keep things light by playing off college basketball preferences during the introductions since there were MBA students from four main schools at the conference.

By the time the closing reception started on Saturday in the late afternoon, I was finished. During almost every conversation I had during the weekend, I was pouring out energy and answers to whomever I spoke. It was little use for me to try to mingle with people by the end, so I spent most of the hour and a half sitting on a bench inside with a lite version of a thousand yard stare. I still had multiple people come up to me to talk about either the information I’d discussed during the diligence panel or about how they’d enjoyed our ongoing webinar series we’re doing around legal issues in small business M&A. I had only positive interactions the whole weekend, but it was not a weekend filled with rest.

Something I did several months ago to try to regain more control over my time was to add friction to my experience of watching YouTube videos. I removed the YouTube app from both my phone and my television. I also installed a desktop extension so that I no longer see recommended videos. I only see the channels to which I’m subscribed and if I want to watch something else I have to type it in the search bar. Those things may seem silly, but they helped me cut down massively on the time I spend mindlessly watching videos.

This weekend, I was in a location with the YouTube app installed on the TV. It offered a great reminder of why I deleted the app from both the TV in my apartment and from my phone. On both Saturday and Sunday, I spent way too much time watching I don’t remember what travel or urban planning or whatever other video I picked to watch. This only added to the malaise I’ve been feeling, which was the last thing I needed. At least I’ve returned to a place without that particular black hole so I can start building again. We also now have enough work to let me feel productive most days, so I will lean into that and regain some solidity.

I’ve started reading The Last Expedition, a book about Sir Henry Morton Stanley’s journey through the Congo to rescue Emin Pasha after the collapse of British control of Sudan and one of the last crazy explorer enterprises in central Africa during the colonial period. I’m not far enough into the story to have any thoughts about the journey, but the introductions of some of the protagonists have me reflecting already. Stanley’s own reinventions of himself and his autobiographical revisions are crazy enough, but Emin Pasha was on another level. The authors describe Emin Pasha as follows:

Though he affected the dress and manner of a Turkish Muslim and presented a résumé that included service on the staff of the Ottoman governor of northern Albania, he was, in fact, a German who was Jewish by birth though raised as a Protestant. His given name was Eduard Schnitzer.

That is an insane life story, and it is almost impossible to imagine one person going through so many transformations today. In the age of the internet, people have found themselves facing severe repercussions for things they said or did years later, and that says nothing about all of the video surveillance, fingerprinting, and DNA testing that didn’t exist in the late nineteenth century.

The potential for shifting identity and beliefs could be used for nefarious ends, yet in some ways we have all lost from its disappearance. There is seemingly less room today to explore new ideas lest someone accuse you later of being a hypocrite. Never mind how changing beliefs can be a sign of growth and maturity; ours is an era of snap judgments and cheap virtue signaling.

Now an abrupt turn to my own life. While I’ve not reinvented myself in such an extreme manner, I have changed the type of law I practice. I’ve now spent more time as a corporate lawyer than I spent as a litigator. When I first made that transition, it was painful as it marked the closing of a chapter that I’d expected would have many more pages. Even now, our firm fastidiously avoids litigation for my own wellbeing. That was not a transition that required scrubbing my past or rewriting my own history, only removing a few articles from the internet that are no longer useful. Mine was a more transition of degree than of kind. I’m glad looking back that the only battle I had to fight was internal and that I didn’t have external forces, digital or analog, arrayed against me making that shift. I’ve also not been haunted by that part of my past; if anything it makes me better at my work now, and that helps me when accusations of inadequacy start flying from the worst parts of my psyche.

I went to a live improv comedy show for my Friday entertainment. It was hosted by the same organization with whom I took an introduction to improv class last fall, so it wasn’t my first time in the endearing little black box theater with its hodgepodge of mismatched chairs making up its stadium seating. It was, though, the first time I’d returned since I performed in front of a very small audience at the conclusion of that class.

The event was billed as a game show. The competitive dynamics weren’t as de minimus as on Who’s Line Is It Anyway (e.g. points were tallied throughout the event and there was a winner), but it wasn’t exactly Jeopardy! either. The host was British, so that added an extra dimension to some of the humor on display. It also meant that during one of the games while the contestants were drawing a scene of an audience member’s day based on very incomplete information, there was some audience Q&A in a segment titled Ask a Brit. Topics there included the royal family, what to call fried potatoes, and the upcoming premier league season.

My favorite bit was a game of PowerPoint karaoke. PowerPoint karaoke is something I’d heard about before but had never actually seen. There are websites that are repositories of PowerPoint presentations. Those presentations can be about anything (and sometimes it’s impossible to even discern the topic of the presentation). In PowerPoint karaoke a presenter gives the presentation blind, that is without seeing the slides beforehand, and so completely off-the-cuff. In this version, the participants were given a fixed subject beforehand, but there are versions of the activity without that constraint. This may sound awful, but it was a lot of fun to watch as each new slide brought a new challenge to make some new random image fit into a story about either painting or computer modeling (the two assigned topics).

I opted not to participate in any of the events as an audience member as I didn’t want to judge the competitors in any official capacity and didn’t have any funny suggestions come immediately to my mind when the host asked for ideas for a few of the games. Oh well. I don’t think I’ll attend that event when they host it again in the coming months, but I’m glad I went to this one. If nothing else, it helped get me back in the mode of doing and trying new activities after a bit of a rut during early summer.

For a little over a month now, I’ve been tracking all my working time. It was anathema to me after the years I spent detailing my life in six minute increments in a past life, but I wanted data as I strive for constant improvement. So far, the results have been sobering.

I was well aware that I’ve not had a great deal of client work over the past month. This part of the summer is normally slow for M&A activity as people take summer vacations. There have been a couple of weeks, though, where the time breakdown was truly stark. The bulk of my working hours have been spent in meetings, both internal and external. Some of the internal meetings have been permitted to balloon given the paucity of other tasks, but we’re still working to establish regular agendas to tighten those up in advance of a surge in client work that should arrive soon. I’ve also padded the external meeting category through a categorization glitch/decision to have things like webinars and CLEs count in that category. My content creation stats also look good from a time perspective, but the output hasn’t matched. Part of that is learning the new website back end interface, but most of it is not dialing in when I’m working on articles. I have finally started working in earnest on one that has been in the queue for months, but it really should have been completed by now. Regardless, seeing the stats and my current content backlog offers a kick up the back side.

Dead spots also persist in my workdays, but I am getting an even better grip on when my energy levels tend to ebb and flow during a typical day. Armed with that knowledge, I’ll make a few tweaks to my default meeting availability in the coming days. Despite this apparently stuttering start, I will continue to track my working time moving forward. Doing so will continue to provide me with data that I can consider and feedback on the changes I make.

From 6PM on Friday to 6PM on Sunday, I consumed only water as part of a 48 hour fast. I opted for 48 hours instead of 72 (or more) to preserve my sleep, but that is still enough time to give the effects I wanted from the fast. Fasting like this is something I do 2-3 times per year. It helps me reset and recalibrate my eating habits and going through it reminds me that I can do mentally challenging things.

To accelerate some of the benefits, I spent most of Saturday walking. I walked on parts of Duke’s campus I’d never visited, including the chapel that is the icon of the campus, and discovered a new dim sum/boba tea restaurant that just opened and I will visit soon. I also made some real progress on an audiobook I’ve been listening to and managed to get a little sunburned after the clouds parted early on during my jaunt. Sunday afternoon was a bit of a drag. I was not as productive as normal during my Sunday afternoon admin session prepping for the upcoming week. I expected this, but it was still annoying as it made Monday morning a little more chaotic before my Monday meetings began.

Now for the bit of irony from the weekend. I watched Hunger on Netflix. Yes, that is the real title. Yes, I was thinking about food even more than usual this weekend. The movie is a taut thriller that had been on my watch list for a while. It is in Thai so for the full experience you need to be willing to read subtitles, but it is worth the extra effort. The show is about a young female cook working in her family’s noodle restaurant in Bangkok who is noticed by a junior sous chef of a famous chef who only cooks at elite private events. I won’t spoil the plot, but it is a cinematic ride with plenty of twists and turns and one that made me reflect on the costs associated with pursuing a singular greatness. It also made me even hungrier by the time I broke my fast on Sunday with some bacon and brisket.

I continue to grab new experiences when possible as a means to expand my horizons and perspective. A few weeks ago, this meant traveling across the Atlantic to attend a European business event. This weekend, it meant going to my very first professional cricket match, a T20 match between the Washington Freedom and the LA Knight Riders.

T20 is a version of cricket that lasts about as long as a major league baseball game, and if you are familiar with baseball you can watch a few explainer videos on YouTube and be ready to watch a cricket match even if you’ll still have a few questions. The action of T20 cricket is at a more regular cadence than a baseball game—six balls per over, about a minute between overs, twenty overs of batting per team, and a thirty minute break in between.

There is a T20 league in the United States that is in its second season. The league splits its games between Dallas-Fort Worth and here in the Triangle, both areas with large South Asian diasporas. The epicenter of T20 cricket is in India, home to the Indian Premier League. The weather on Sunday felt like I could have been in certain parts of India. It was over 100 degrees and humid when the first ball was bowled. I huddled under an umbrella for some shade as I sat in my foldable camp chair watching the action. Almost everyone in attendance knew the rules, but there were a few brave souls who sat there in the heat needing explanations of what they were watching. Ample respect for them.

I had wanted to go to Friday’s match to see a few stars that I’ve watched in various highlight reels, but the weather had other plans and that match was rained out. I therefore went to the weekend’s other match instead. There were still plenty of international players on display. In addition to Americans, there were players from the Caribbean, England, New Zealand, Bangladesh, South Africa, and Australia on the pitch. The crowd shared a similar level of diversity.

I sat with a side-on view, the equivalent of sitting down the baseline at a baseball stadium instead of behind the plate, which made it a little challenging to tell how the ball was moving. It certainly seemed like the ball was moving faster than it does when I’ve watched cricket on a screen. I was also zero for two on my assessments of whether challenges to the umpire’s decisions would be successful, so there were a couple of different forms of humble pie that were served to me as I sat there.

The match itself was not very competitive. Washington’s bowlers blew away LA’s batters leaving them with a below par score. Yes, the teams supposedly represent different cities even though the matches are only played here and in Texas; no, there isn’t a team name affiliated with North Carolina. Washington’s opening batsmen, both Australians, then made light work of the chase and the outcome was never in doubt. That was secondary to the overall viewing experience. The crowd was maybe 2000-2500 people. There were food trucks offering concessions. It was too hot for me to want a curry, but a mango lassi might have been a great option if I’d seen it before I was walking towards the exit.

I’m continually trying to improve my work processes. As part of that, I am almost always reading at least one business-related book at any given time. Currently, that book is The Effective Executive, which may seem an odd choice for a small business owner. Regardless, it is the exemplar of the Lindy effect in business management books and so I decided that now was the time. I’m not quite halfway through it as I’m focusing on content output, but the second key concept of the book (the first is that effectiveness can be learned) is that to be in control of your time, you have to know how your time is spent. This seems obvious, but it is something I haven’t done in the last five years.

I learned to hate time tracking when I worked at a big law firm. I had to record every task I completed in six minute increments. It was a task that I frequently neglected, leading to a regular scramble at the end of each month to record all of my time. I was not alone. The problem was so widespread that there were several policy changes about inputting time during my stay at the firm. A lingering dislike for the tedium of time tracking is a secondary reason why we use flat-rate billing for our client work.

Anyway, it’s time for an experiment. For the next four weeks, I’m tracking all of my working time. I want to know totals and breakdowns, but also I hope that I’ll find dead spots that can be reallocated and that I’ll be more able to reflect on how different tasks at different times affect my energy levels. I’ll write about my conclusions whether anyone else finds them interesting or not when the analysis wraps up. I hope that I’ll be able to make some educated changes to how I handle my schedule by mid-August.

Next on the business book list is going to be re-reading $100 Million Leads as one of my upcoming content projects is to create targeted lead magnets. If anyone has other recommendations for resources in creating lead magnets, I’m happy to include them in that effort as well.