In case you missed it check out episode 44 of the Supercharged podcast. I was fortunate enough to join Adam Dachis, et al, for a roundtable on the latest tech news, exploring the best tips, tricks, and downloads for doing things better in the digital age.
When To Care About Utilization and Chargeability?
Outside the services and solutions world utilization and chargeability have little meaning. Inside a consulting company, however, these two numbers drive your business.
Let’s take a closer look at each.

Utilization
What Is Utilization?
In short, utilization measures whether your consultants are doing anything. More specifically, is the work they’re doing right now tied back to a particular project of some sort?
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Websites are Easy; The Content, That’s the Hard Stuff
TL;DR
Make blog writing into a natural habit so you feel something missing when it’s not there.
@jeff_steinke serious request…can you write a blog post about how you write blog posts. When you do it each wk, how long it takes, etc
— Bryan Rosenbaum (@bryanrosenbaum) January 7, 2015
OK Bryan, great question. You’re right, it’s pretty easy to figure out how to create your first blog. Especially with sites like WordPress and Squarespace.
But adding content?
And doing it consistently?
It’s taken awhile but I’ve found a great routine to writing, enough so that it’s part of my weekly schedule. So here’s how I write a post each week.
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A Snap a Day
I’m going to start Snapchatting more often.
A lot more often. Like every day more often.
And I want you follow along.
How I Work: 2015
As we officially shut the door on 2014 one of the last things I like to do is take a current snapshot of the tools I’m using.
Productivity Tool Trends
First, a couple trends I’ve noticed.
First, I’m paying more. Of the 15 apps listed here I’m paying for 7 of them. A few years back you’d be lucky to get money from me on a quarter of the apps I used. I wrote about this earlier in the year as I’ve learned how minuscule the cost of these apps are – a couple bucks a month – in comparison to the time you save.
Second, this list is getting longer. I’ve added 17 new apps this year compared with the 12 from last year, which doesn’t include many of the honorable mentions I left off to keep this list from being overwhelming (e.g. Overcast, MyScorecard, Misfit & Multi Timer for Pebble, and more). Maybe I’ll need an app purge in a year, but as long as they keep talking to each other I’ll keep exploring and updating.
Of course you can always catch the latest on the How I Work page. In the meantime, here are the tools that made the jump to became part of my daily work flow during 2014.
One of the Worst Words in Business
There it was.
A word that stood out starkly against all the others around it.
It was an innocuous email less this one word that kept nagging me. As one of my fellow employees wrote to me in a recent email,
…I was surprised.
Three Easy Ways to Make Better Goals
Around this time last year I talked about The Aspire, Achieve, Do Method for goal setting.

And it’s amazing because there are just three easy steps.
- Aspire: Write out natural language statements for your aspirations –> “I want to be more physically fit.”
- Achieve: Come up with a S.M.A.R.T. goal that aligns with your aspiration –> “Run a 5k in under 25 minutes.”
- Do: Identify regular habits that will help you achieve your goals –> “Cardio workouts 3x a week.”
2014 Technology Lessons Learned
This is the Lessons Learned blog after all so it’d be appropriate to recap the 2014 technology lessons learned.
With that lovely graphic, in no particular order…
Bringing Hardware as a Service to Consumers
So close! I ended up just a few months short of 10 years of ownership on my car. Not to be, though, as I finally made the switch to something newer.
An interesting goal nonetheless, as 10 years is just an arbitrary date set to a nice round number, right?
In any case…as you’re probably already aware, tech has made huge strides in automobiles since my previous 2001 model year car was built.
Nope we’re not just talking satellite radio either. Things like:
- Fully bluetooth equipped cars
- Backup cams
- Parking sensors
- Adaptive cruise controls
- Heads up displays (HUDs)
- Tablet-sized displays in the center console
And this doesn’t even scratch the surface of all the technology that’s buried underneath the hood now!

Atlanta Mobility Radio – Atlanta Food Bank and Catavolt
This week I joined the Atlanta Mobility Radio team for their weekly show on Business Radio X.
You can listen to the full show here where we talked about the Catavolt mobile platform and how we were able to partner together for a solution for the Atlanta Community Food Bank.
In a TL;DR version of the radio show I wanted to share my lessons learned working with Catavolt’s platform.