Life is short, and you have to work until May just to pay your federal taxes. So we'll get right to it and pack this page with five goals and dozens of ways to achieve them in 2001.
Goal 1: Upgrade Your Infrastructure
Boost your efficiency with the right stuff and support.
- Buy a new PC with 1.2 GHz CPU and a 60-meg hard drive or a Mac G4 Cube.
- Get cable or DSL Net access.
- Ban the busy signal by getting voicemail.
- Ditch AOL and register your domain name.
- Fire H&R Block and hire a CPA.
- Use accounting software.
- Consider incorporating.
- Cancel Business Week and subscribe to the Industry
Standard.
- Spring for a better desk chair.
Quotable: "If anybody gave a course on everything non-techie free agents need to know about technology, I'd sign up tomorrow," says Daniel Cobrinik, solo lawyer in New York City.
Read more on home office and accounting.
Goal 2: Ramp up Your Network and Your Net Worth
Work your network to raise your net.
- Reconnect to all your contacts with an email hyping your Web site.
- Terminate off-brand clients, including any dotbombs whose stock has given up 80 percent.
- Stand tall and pitch your dream client.
- Tell Greenspan to take a hike by raising your own rates.
Quotable: "Once a month I'm going to invite a smart, interesting person I don't know very well to have lunch," says Daniel Pink, author of the forthcoming book Free Agent Nation: How America's New Independent Workers are Transforming the Way We Live. "This will force me out of my office and my comfort zone, exposing me to new ideas."
Read more on firing clients and renegotiation.
Goal 3: Up Your Offer
This year, provide better service than you did last.
- Reeducate yourself with the aid of pulp books, e-books, videos, Web-based courses -- even live humans if you must.
- Seek out gigs with high learning curves.
- Give clients exactly what they want and are willing to pay for.
- Add value where your customers need it, even if they don't know it yet.
Quotable: "My primary goal for 2001 is to increase my business in media training and creative consulting," says public relations consultant Michael Schwager.
Read more on continuous improvement.
Goal 4: Raise Your Ethics
Do the right thing in business relationships.
- Stop double dipping, and that includes triple dipping.
- Disclose conflicts of interest before the fact.
- Divest yourself of investments that pit you against your client.
- Keep your clients' secrets.
- Refuse gigs with cigarette makers and other immoral businesses.
- Don't sell yourself short.
Quotable: "I never set specific goals, since the danger is that you hit them when you should have accomplished more," says Alan Weiss, president of Summit Consulting Group.
Read more on ethics.
Goal 5: Lighten Up
Avoid looking back on 2001 as a remake of the 1983 cult documentary Koyaanisqatsi, a maelstrom of time-lapse street-traffic scenes depicting life out of balance.
- Make conscious decisions about your personal ratio of work to life.
- Eliminate unnecessary business travel.
- Shun jobs that are long on hours and frustration but short on pay.
- Have your kid spend a day or an hour with you as you work.
- Surprise your spouse with a lunch date.
- Keep your promises to yourself.
Personal Vow: I will enshroud my homeoffice PC each night when I go downstairs for dinner and vow not to return to it until the next morning.
Read more on managing toward a vacation.
