The reach of the internet
I think one of the best things about the web is the ability to reach an audience that is spread far apart geographically. So even though fans of a product may be pretty rare, you can reach all of them, and that makes the product viable, while also allowing those odd-ball consumers to buy exactly what they want.
The artist of Dinosaur Comics attributes a lot of his success to this factor. For those unfamiliar with the comic (I'm a big fan), the concept is that the comic uses the same exact visual layout, but different dialogue in each strip. The author posts a strip every weekday, and has more than 4 years of comics, which all manage to maintain originality and hilarity. However, it's a comic than many people find weird and different, and not at all what they're interested in.
Twenty five years ago, Dino Comics would probably have been a 'zine photocopied and distributed in local used book stores. The comic likely would not have been popular enough with mainstream readers to ever get syndicated in a newspaper. Thanks to the internet, those of us who do like this type of comic can easily access it, the author has access to as many fans as possible, and no one who dislikes it is forced to read it (by having it show up in their daily newspaper.)
As an avid consumer of words, I love the access the web gives me to other people who like to put their thoughts down in writing on their blogs. It assuages some of my yearning for a world where we would still write handwritten letters to each other - really putting some thought in before writing. E-mails are a great way to stay connected, but they are more like a quick phone call than a letter.
So, what has the web allowed you to do that would be unimaginable without the far-reaching tendrils of the internet? What would you like to use the web for more in the upcoming year?
I'd like to use the web more to connect with people this year. I was better at developing lasting relationships with people online when I was 14 and the internet was a place where I could share my (awful) poetry and art and be inspired by other people who were interested in those same things. I guess I was ahead of my time then, haha. But I would like to get involved in more communities of things that interest me, and learn from them. All I need is a little time to practice my hobbies in, once I've learned more about them online...
October in Review
I'm laughing at myself now when I see that I thought I could save an extra $4,500 in cash by the end of the year. That would have been about $750 each month, starting in July. It has been four months of saving now, and I am almost at $1,000 of extra savings! At the very least, this exercise has made me more aware of how much money I actually have that is not budgeted for.
Extra Cash Flow - $257
Total extra cash saved since July: $968
In October my "extra savings" increased by $257. At the end of September, I was out $300 in reimburseable expenses from work, so essentially I had a $300 extra inflow in October that should have been attributed to September.
However, to offset this extra inflow, I managed to accidentally pay my student loan off by an extra $340! The student loan system switched websites this month, and I tried to make my usual extra payment as soon as I could log in. However, the system kept giving me an error message on the last step. I gave up, and logged back in the next week to complete the payment. THEN two payments show up on my account a few days later. Luckily I had the extra cash, and I'm fine with paying extra, otherwise I'd have been pretty upset!
Setting professional goals: planning your career
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We recently had our annual reviews at work, and as part of the process, we were asked to set some goals for the upcoming year. By all accounts, these goals are not really followed up on by management, but I put some thought into my goals anyway, because they're MY goals and it's MY responsibility to follow up on them.
After setting my goals, I thought I'd share some tips on setting your own goals, whether it is for your annual performance review, or just for your own benefit.
Setting professional goals forces you to think about your career, and to broaden your view from the here-and-now, to the future. You may be scrambling to do all your work well in the moment, but take a minute to think about 5 years from now, or 10 years from now, and what you need to do to get where you want to go.
Maybe just doing your work each day isn't enough. Maybe you need to become involved in the community, find new clients for your company, seek out training events that you can attend, and then teach your coworkers about.
Figure out what your overall objective is first
Is your goal to make partner in the next 10 years? Is your goal to move into more of a business development role? Do you want to specialize in one industry?
Before you can set your goals for the upcoming year, you need to put some thought into your ultimate goal over the next 10 years. (Or 20. Longterm. However far ahead you think you can handle.)
If, deep down, you don't plan to make partner, then your annual goals now may be completely different. You don't need to point out to your boss that you are not attempting to make partner, of course!
Some of our former employees were interested in part-time work when they became parents. They handle monthly bookkeeping for some of our clients now, rather than working for us full time doing audits. It would also be possible to transition to working as an individual tax accountant - but our firm does more corporate taxes, while an individual practitioner would likely handle more individual and partnership returns.
Even if you don't work in accounting, you can still apply this to the job you are currently in. What direction do you want to go in from where you are now?
Figure out what your short term objectives are
Okay, now that I have set my long-term objective, I can figure out some short term objectives are.
Let's say I picked the "partner" route. I'm going to want to make sure I'm assigned to some of our biggest clients, I'm going to want to network with other people at the levels in between me and partners. It depends on your firm what other objectives you might have.
Set goals that will help you achieve those objectives
You can't just set your goal to being assigned to the biggest client - you need to set goals that will help you get there. Maybe you'll attend an industry conference, to gain more knowledge about that client's industry in the upcoming year. Maybe you'll check with managers on that project first every time you're out of work to do during the year, and then make sure you do that work promptly and well.
At this point in the process, you are figuring out the actual steps you can wake up and do every day that will help you achieve your objectives.
How I applied this to my annual review
I set a goal to learn how to do a particularly tricky type tax return well - and then I laid out steps I can take to get there. I will read the regulations referenced in the form instructions. I will find a good example of how to do the return properly, and study the example. I will actively ask for more of this type of return to practice on.
I also set a personal goal to work more efficiently; I want to get my chargeable hours in and go home earlier this year. This is not a goal I shared with my boss, because I don't want to suggest that I haven't been using my time efficiently already... but that doesn't mean that I can't set it as a goal for the year anyway!
Your annual review
Does your employer have you set annual goals? Do they follow up on these, or leave them up to you to keep track of? What were your career goals this year?
How objective are quantitative performance measures?
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I love setting goals. I know a lot of you readers are big goal-setting fans too. There are some key factors in effective goal setting:
- The goal must be achievable.
You never know what you can achieve until you set a nearly impossible goal for yourself. Take The 60kProject, for example - paying off over $60,000 of debt in one year. However, on a day-to-day basis, setting goals that you can achieve is key. If, deep down, you think you cannot complete your goal, you will not work as hard to make it a reality. - You should be able to define steps that you can take to help you achieve the goal.
If your goal is to lose weight, you cannot just weigh yourself after a month and see if you me your goal. You can pick a certain number of calories to stick to each week - that's something that you can choose to either do or not do. But you cannot just choose to lose weight and have it happen with no interim steps. - There must be some way to measure your success.
Your goal should be measurable. Instead of saying you want to lose weight, you will decide that your goal is to lose 10 lbs. You can measure when you've accomplished that by using a scale.
These are the big, goal-setting requirements. But these standards, especially the third, can be abused. Maybe you lost 10 lbs by starving yourself, rather than eating healthy and working out. You may be less healthy now than you were before you lost the weight. But you have to make sure you understand that being healthy is what you ultimately are trying to achieve, not just having 10 fewer lbs on your body.
So when a company like a consulting company has employees bill their time by the hour, they tend to reward employees that work more hours, and have a high realization. While their goal may be aligned with these measureable factors (get more money), their other goals may include providing high quality service, and a creating loyal relationships with clients.
The goal that is easy to measure may push these other goals to the sidelines. And the quantitative performance measures could be masking actual performance. Maybe two employees worked the same amount of hours, and had the same realization, but one of these employees was on a difficult, low-paying client, and managed to work efficiently enough to compensate for the low pay. Maybe one of the employees worked as many billable hours as the other, but angered clients along the way, destroying customer loyalty.
Companies fall back on using quantitative measures, because they seem like an objective and easy way to judge employee performance. Other measures appear more subjective, and firms shy away from these, since they are more difficult to apply evenly.
But in reality, employee performance cannot be reduced to a few statistics. Managers need to be involved with workers, and need to use their own judgement to assess whether an employee's performance align's with the firm's goals.
August in Review
Well I had a couple of goals for August:
Hit 160 billable hours at work
Get grocery spending to $200 or below
Save some cash towards a down payment on a house
How did it go?
Billable Hours
Well it was looking like I wasn't going to hit the billable hours target, but then the last two days I worked til past 8pm, and just barely hit 160. I am ready for a vacation! (Total hours at work in August = 206 or something. I would make a goal to have a higher percent of my hours in the office be billable, but we're about to hit our slow period for the year, so that wouldn't really make sense!)
Food
I spent $212 on groceries last month (I didn't go to the supermarket over the weekend, and now I am out of food! That may be cheating a little, except it is making m clean my cupboards out a bit with my scrounging.) So, I am close to only $200 for groceries. However, my "eating out" spending was $126! A lot of this was due to buying (cheap) lunch instead of bringing lunch in the first two weeks of August. So next month I'll try to avoid that, but it'll increase my grocery spending a bit? Ideally, I'd like to have my eating out spending at $100 or lower, but it needs to be lower for the next few months to make up for overspending over the last several months.
Saving Extra Cash
I am trying to see how much extra cash I can squeeze out of my budget each month. This is after making investments, paying off my student loan, and setting aside a fixed amount each month for my upcoming trip to Spain. Last month I managed to put away an extra $609! I was thinking I could get $750, but this month I only had an extra $140!!
I had some extra spending on art supplies in August - I'm going to aim for $0 art supply spending in September, but I do have some projects I want to get to that I need a couple of items for that I don't already have . . . Okay, so I will convince myself to use everything I have now, and then if I still am feeling creative, I can get those supplies in October.
What's ahead in September?
Saving Extra Cash
I have some extra blog income coming in this month (earned in past months.) I should get a cash inflow between $300 - 400 this month from blogging. I'm thinking that without the extra spending on art supplies, and cutting my eating out spending to $75 or so, plus some added doctor's visits, I should be able to save $200 in cash, plus whatever the blogging income turns out to be.
Annual Review for Work
Sometime in September I will have my first annual review. I spoke to one of our partners about this, and sounds like it's more of a goal setting meeting than it is a review of your performance, but it does go along with bonuses and raises, so some changes may be addressed. In preparation for my review (this weekend) I want to look back over the past year, make a note of which clients I worked on, and come up with some goals I would like to set for the upcoming year.
Blogging Goals
After September 15th, I should have a lot more time on my hands for blogging. I am almost down to 350,000 in Alexa ranking, and would like to make it to below 300,000 by the end of the month. I will also be putting some thought into the celebration of my first anniversary of AccountantByDay.com, which is coming up in October! Something to look forward to.
What are your goals for September?
Do you have goals for September? A review of your August goals? Tell us your goals in the comments, or link to your blog post on this topic.
Happy September everyone!
How’s it going, 2011?
We're half-way into 2011 now (wow, just realized how close election year really is!) and I thought I'd take this chance to look back on everything that's happened so far.
Work
Snow outside our client's offices in Boston
I made it through my first busy season at work, and now I'm only 3 months away from being able to apply for my CPA certificate! Things are a bit slower now, but I'm excited about my next busy season, when I'll know a little bit more about what I'm doing!
Sunrise - during busy season I had to get up to walk the dog so early, that this was the closest I could get to seeing any sunshine. Beautiful.
Student Loans
My student loans were $17,600 at the end of 2010, and today they are at $14,500. My goal for 2011, as laid out in my "2011 Goal Setting'" post, is to get the principal balance under $10,000. I will need to step up my payments from $500/month to a little over $750 per month to do that by the end of 2011. I may have to relax on this goal - while it would be nice to get them to under $10,000, I think that my emergency fund and saving to go to our little family reunion in Spain next year are a little more immediate.
My best drive from our golf charity event. My first round of golf ever!
Blogging
I set all kinds of blogging goals, like sticking to 3 posts per week, which didn't happen at all! This is why I don't have my heart set on making it as a professional blogger - I don't want to have to blog when I'm not inspired to say something. I have enough required work to get through from my job!
However, when I compare June's stats to December's stats, things are looking good! My visits during June were 1,639 (up 73% from 949 in December.) My page views were 5,268 (up 105% from 2,567 in December.)
My Alexa rank, which was well under 1,000,000 when I first put up my Alexa widget, is now back over 1,000,000. I believe this is because I'm not targeting only Alexa users right now, but have a lot of CA and CPA (and aspiring CAs and CPAs) who are regular visitors. The Yakezie challenge is going to take a lot longer to beat, but I think that this way is really for the best!
Sunset in Hilton Head - first vacation of 2011 was great
Art
Over the past 6 months, I have done almost no art. In between work and my dog, it's hard to find time to let myself get lost in a new project. In the past few weeks, I have picked up the pencil/charcoal/carving tools quite a bit more, and it feels good to be back!
Your Turn
How is 2011 going for you? Have you accomplished your goals? Have you decided that some of your goals aren't so important? Are you happy with how far you've come?
Retire early?
Many personal finance bloggers are hoping to retire young, or at least, to make some extra money through wise financial decisions. So, what would your plans be if you retired at 40 instead of at 67?
I imagine that I would still like to have some kind of productive work to do, whether it was running a small business, or being a mother. (Kids are far in my future, so I don't know how I feel about the idea of being a stay-at-home mom 24 hours a day.)
Regardless of whether it would make money, what would be your dream job?
For example: I like to knit in my spare time, but if I did it as a job I think that it would quickly lose all elements of enjoyment.
I think if it was fiscally possible, my dream would be to open a giant dog rehabilitation facility like Cesar Millan has in California. Hanging out with dogs all day seems like something I could do for the rest of my life….
So, what would you do if you could do anything? Travel? Start a business? Spend more time with your kids?
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