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Time Blocking: How to Plan Your Day for Deep Work
Most of the professionals I coach don’t have a time problem. They have a fragmentation problem, and time blocking is almost always where we start fixing it. They come to me saying they need to “get better at time management.” Then we open their calendar together. What we find is a workday chopped into pieces so small that no serious thinking could fit in any of them. There’s a 30 minute gap between two meetings, then a 20 minute window before lunch, then an afternoon that disappears into messages. By Friday they have been busy for 50 hours and can’t name one thing they moved forward. That’s why this is…
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The Pomodoro Technique: How It Works and How to Use It
Most people who come to me for coaching do not have a time problem. They have an attention problem that looks like a time problem. They tell me the day disappeared, that they answered forty emails and sat through three meetings and still never opened the proposal that actually mattered. When I hear that story, one of the first tools I hand over is the pomodoro technique. I do not recommend it because it is trendy, and I do not believe a kitchen timer has magical powers. I recommend it because it makes you be honest about where your working hours really go. Over the years I have taught this…
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How to Free Up Storage on Your Phone (iPhone and Android)
Almost every week, someone walks up to my support desk, slides a phone across to me and asks how to free up storage on their phone, usually with the same complaint: “It says storage is full and I didn’t download anything.” Then I open the storage screen and find 40 GB of video from a kid’s recital, three years of group chat memes, a podcast app holding 200 episodes nobody will ever play, and a navigation app with offline maps of a country they visited once in 2022. People don’t usually lose storage to one big thing. It goes slowly, a little at a time, through a lot of small…
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What Is Two-Factor Authentication and Should You Use It?
If you’ve ever asked yourself what is two-factor authentication and whether it’s worth the bother, let me answer with a story first. A few years into my career, a client called me on a Monday morning in a panic. Over the weekend, her business email had been sending invoices with new bank details to her customers, and two of them had paid. Her password wasn’t weak, either. In fact, it was twelve characters with a capital letter, a number and a symbol. The trouble was that she had also used that same password on a small online shop that got breached a year earlier. As a result, someone bought that…
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The 50/30/20 Budget Rule Explained (With Examples)
The 50/30/20 rule is usually the first budgeting framework I bring up with a new client. However, it’s rarely the one they end up following to the letter. That isn’t a knock on it. In fact, after years of sitting across the table from people with bank statements spread out and a shoebox of receipts nearby, I’ve come to see the rule as a diagnostic tool. In other words, it tells you, in about ten minutes, where your money is out of balance. What you do with that information, of course, is the actual work. In this guide, I’ll walk through what the rule says, where it came from, and…
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How to Start a Side Hustle While Working Full-Time
The first client I ever coached on how to start a side hustle was a hospital pharmacist named Teresa. She came to our first call with a notebook full of ideas, eleven of them, and a look on her face I have since seen a hundred times. In fact, it’s the look of someone who’s tired of waiting for permission. However, she didn’t need more ideas. Instead, she needed a plan that fit inside a life that already had a 45 hour work week, two kids, and a mortgage. Within six months she was earning a steady four figures a month writing medication guides for small clinics. Still, she didn’t…
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How to Get a Small Business Loan: What Lenders Look For
I have sat across the desk from a few thousand business owners, and nearly every one of them wanted to know how to get a small business loan without wasting months on the process. Some of them walked out with a loan commitment within a few weeks. Others came back three or four times before we got there. A smaller group never got there at all. What surprised me early in my career is that the difference rarely came down to how good the business was. It usually came down to how well the owner understood what I needed to see. If you want to know how to get a…
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Cost of Living in 2027: What’s Rising and What Isn’t
Every autumn I rebuild the same spreadsheet to track cost of living trends for the year ahead. It is not fancy. It is a typical household budget split into about a dozen lines, rent or mortgage, groceries, electricity, gasoline, health coverage, insurance, eating out, and so on, and I run each line forward twelve months using the best official forecasts I can find. Most years the exercise is boring in a reassuring way. Everything drifts up by two or three percent and the story writes itself. This year it did not. When I ran the numbers for 2027, the lines pulled apart. Some costs that hurt badly in 2026 are…
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How to Improve Your Credit Score: 7 Steps That Work
Most people who sit across from me in a counseling session open with the same sentence. “I just need to know how to improve my credit score.” They usually say it with a little embarrassment, like they’ve been caught doing something wrong. Then they slide a printout across the desk, or hold up their phone, and wait for me to tell them how bad it is. Here’s what I tell every one of them: a credit score is not a judgment of your character. It’s a math problem. And math problems have solutions. I’ve spent years as a certified credit counselor working with nurses, truck drivers, recent grads, retirees, and…
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How to Create a Strong Password You’ll Actually Remember
Every time I teach a room full of employees how to create a strong password, I start with the same question. “Raise your hand if you use the same password, or a slight variation of it, on more than one account.” The room hesitates. A few hands go up. Then a few more. By the time people realize their coworkers are being honest, most of the room has a hand in the air. I don’t ask that question to shame anyone. I ask it because it tells me the real problem. People are not careless. They feel overwhelmed. The average person juggles dozens of logins, and for years, bad advice…
