office

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Being The Boss

I was a reporter in a newspaper bureau, covering the county school system and writing stories about things like dress codes, standardized test scores and school board politics.

I enjoyed it but grew bored after a couple of years. I was pretty sure I wanted to be an editor. Or, more specifically, in charge.

When one of the designers in the office built an internal website for employees to get to know each other better, she had us fill out a survey that included our plans for the future.

I answered, “The boss of you.” Continue reading →

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Earning the “gardener” badge

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A friend recently related my love of plants to the joy I feel when my team builds something new at work. “You’re a gardener. You grow things,” he said, standing in my office. It may have been the first time anyone has referred to me by that term “gardener”, which delighted me. Like runner, blogger or musician, “gardener” is a label made more legitimate when bestowed upon you by someone else. Fundamentally, though, I think anyone who has realized plants can teach you about your own life can call him or herself a gardener. A few things I’ve learned: Continue reading →

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Life buries us all in occasional clutter

Monday morning I had the pleasure of interviewing fellow Franklin resident Liz Jenkins for a post I wrote for OnNashville.com, which promotes the work of Nashville’s fabulously diverse blogger community. As a professional organizer, she’s teaching a class for harried entrepreneurs (more on that in a minute). But in the course of talking about that, we got to chatting about the  different reasons so many of us need help with everything from organizing our RSS feeds to learning how to set up a kitchen pantry. Like most every behavioral issue, it’s a mixture of who we are inside and what’s happening in the world around us. Liz helps clients deal with the latter. I personally could relate to every single one of the situations she described:

Continue reading →