Pat

Also, be worth talking to. A couple of mine fizzled because I was obviously only there to practise and gave nothing back. Once I started caring about my partner's English goals as much as my Italian ones, people stuck around for months.

Do the arithmetic on your own position before you decide, because it is not abstract. Take the balance you would move, multiply by the yield you would be reaching for, and that is roughly the income you are volunteering for every year from now until you stop. On a meaningful sleeve at a yield well above the market's, that number gets uncomfortable quickly, and you pay it during the years you are working and earning most. Then ask whether the behavioural benefit is worth that annual cheque. For some people it genuinely is. Just make the trade knowingly rather than because a chart looked good.

Two years and two months. The last three months looked like: one project rewritten properly instead of three half projects, a CV rewritten by someone who actually hires, and applying every weekday morning before work rather than in bursts. The applying-daily part changed the response rate more than anything technical I did.

Put it in writing with a name in the field. If it is nobody's job, it is your job, and you cannot do it from behind the camera.

The philosophical ones about exhaustion as a condition of modern life are genuinely interesting and did precisely nothing for me on a Tuesday morning. Diagnosis of society, no instructions. Excellent once you're better, maddening while you're in it.

You probably don't need to wash the whole shirt. Most nights it's the collar and the underarms that need it, so I spot wash those two areas with a bar of soap and leave the body dry. Full wash every third day. Cuts drying time to almost nothing and the wool lasts longer.

The blank home screen for a focus mode is the single best setting on those devices and almost nobody uses it.

Video, never photos. Any resource showing you a still image of a sign is close to useless, because movement is part of the sign. If either of your apps is picture-based, drop it today.

Auditing for load rather than hours. My hours look completely fine on paper, which is exactly why nobody believes me.

Freezer stocked while I'm okay. That's the first thing in this whole process I can actually execute this weekend.

I hadn't clocked that my evenings are still a performance. Even alone. Especially alone, maybe.

If you must give a fixed number, price the chaos in. My rule is a 40% uplift on any fixed quote where the client has changed the brief before the work started, because they will change it again and the only question is who pays for it. If they balk at the number, that's useful information about how much they value their own indecision.

Slight disagreement with going straight to Liberman. He is excellent but he is arguing with the field as much as explaining it, and if you have no background the arguments are more fun once you know what the consensus positions are. I would read a general history of English first, almost any of the standard popular ones, then Liberman, and you will get much more out of him because you will recognise what he is pushing against.

The library card point deserves its own thread. I had full OED access for three years without knowing it.

I went back to paying, honestly. Not because the free one was worse but because I am the kind of person who needs to have spent money on something to take it seriously. Knowing that about yourself is worth $8 a month.

If you can only buy one bag, buy the one that fits the smaller airline sizer you'll encounter, then flex volume with a compression strap. A 40L that squashes to 30 is more useful than a 20L that can't grow.

Charge for the audit. A paid two hour audit with a written summary at maybe a quarter of a project fee filters out everyone who was shopping, pays you for the work you were doing anyway, and converts far better than a free call because they've already bought something from you once.

This. I gave up on 40L for that airline and use a 34L, and I have never once had a conversation at the gate since. The two litres I lost were mostly air.

Delete the brokerage app from your phone and check on a laptop once a month. Six weeks in, nothing you see there is information, it's just weather.

A few things that moved my number by maybe four hours a week: batch invoicing to one afternoon a month, a proposal template with three fixed packages so writing one takes 20 minutes not two hours, and refusing to redesign my own site more than once every two years. That last one is the biggest and I say it as someone who has broken it twice.