Michael Bianco

How to Tackle an Overwhelming List of Tasks

This last week I didn’t keep up with my task list. Some work with a client required all of my attention and the notification badges on my email, todo list, and Slack messages kept growing. When Saturday rolled around I was buried. After dumping everything in my mind and organizing tasks into logical contexts I realized that there was no way I was going to get through everything. The glowing red double digit notification badges didn’t give me any hope or encouragement either. I’m not in the clear, but here’s what helped me gain momentum and dig my way out of the hole: Split tasks up – even if they are small. It’s helpful to break up tasks, even if they should take less than 30min, and schedule the pieces sequentially through the week…

Working on Your Life vs In Your Life

I’m reading the E-Myth Revisited. One of the key concepts is the idea of working on your business instead of in your business. In other words, working on streamlining the process that you or your employees use to create the product or execute the service rather than actually performing the service or creating the product. Without improving the system you can’t scale the outcome. You’ll be a slave to an undefined process that you can’t delegate. The same principal applies to my personal life. I need to work on improving the systems an processes that I use to run my life. Working on my life, not just living it. Here are a couple examples: Where am I wasting time? What tasks or processes are time consuming but necessary?..

Results Follow Clarity

Clarity is hard. It takes effort to defined what you are looking for, why you are looking for it, and what you are going to do to get it. Clarity creates results. It creates momentum. Opportunities appear with knowledge of exactly what you are looking for. Without precise goals you can’t adjust your time and energy to seek out opportunities that align with that vision. Without a framework to interpret opportunities or situations from it’s hard to say no. It’s hard to choose between opportunities when all the opportunities are better-than-great. Driving results requires saying no. It requires cutting out the good to make room for the great. And, sometimes, it means cutting out the nearly-great for the extremely-great…

How to Get Clarity When Your Mind is Scattered or Distracted

When I have a week that is concentrated on a single project I often feel as though I loose focus. My mind can forget other projects or important tasks that were not contained within the context of the project I was working on. If I don’t catch myself, there is the opportunity for things to fall through the cracks. I forget to respond to important emails, to close the loop on an important task, or push the ball forward on an important project. Here’s a practice I use to recalibrate myself: Organize all the paper with ideas or tasks in a single stack. Get a blank legal pad. When my mind seems scattered a blank piece of paper brings clarity…

NetSuite SuiteTalk User & Role Edits Are Delayed

If you work with NetSuite’s SuiteTalk API, you know that: You must access the API via employee/user record in NetSuite API calls specify the user role to use You will get different results based on which user and which user role you are accessing the API with. For instance, if the employee record has the “Sales Rep” option checked, all Sales Orders created using that employee/user credentials will have the “Sales Rep” field assigned to the user’s record. Each role has a different set of permissions. You will get different fatal error messages depending on which user role you are operating under. Often, when developing a NetSuite integration, you’ll need to make edits to the SuiteTalk user/employee record or the role…

Install PHP with PNG Support on Apache in Yosemite

Yosemite comes with Apache + PHP out of the box, but its PHP binary is a bit handicapped. It doesn’t come with built in PNG support. This causes issues if you are developing WordPress sites: resizing PNG images will silently fail. If you have custom image sizes set in your WordPress theme, they will not be created at all if PHP is not compiled with PNG support. Here’s how to recompile PHP on Yosemite via Brew: You’ll have to edit your Apache configuration to use the new PHP installation: There are also some additional WordPress & PHP tools you can install via brew.

Why You Should Blog and How to Get Started Quickly

I’m a strong believer that everyone should start a blog. I understand the resistance to committing to it, to getting out there in the conversation, to possibly failing or feeling like you have nothing to say. I was talking to a close friend the other day who was giving me a hard time for my more technical blog posts: Everyone has something to say: it hasn’t all been said before! Here are three reasons you should start blogging now: It clarifies your thinking. I’ve found that since I’ve started blogging on productivity I’ve implemented more of the principals I’ve blogged about because I’ve created clarity around those principals or thoughts in my own mind. It puts you in the conversation…

Split Shipment Fulfillment with NetSuite

NetSuite natively supports partially fulfilling a SalesOrder. However, updating an ItemFulfillment record (NetSuite’s equivalent to a ‘package’ or ‘shipment’ in other systems nomenclature) after it’s been created comes with some unique edge cases in NetSuite. Here’s the NetSuite state that I was operating in: Sales Order is created. order_status = _partiallyFulfilled An ItemFulfillment exists with ship_status = _picked A CustomerDeposit representing the payment coming from an external system is associated with the SalesOrder The contents of the created ItemFulfillment need to be adjusted and a second ItemFulfillment needs to be created…

Send & Receive Faxes Online for Free

An important aspect of building a business that’s scalable – one that operates when you aren’t around to “press the buttons” – is eliminating paper. I’m going to be writing about what I’ve put into practice over the last couple months to eliminate all my paper in my software consulting business. One of the easier (and obvious) aspects of going paperless is eliminating the fax machine. Yes, even if you run an internet-only business you will run into a vendor that only offers a fax machine as an alternative to snail mail. Here’s how to setup your business to send and receive faxes online with no monthly fee…

How I Learned to Never Forget Anything

Remembering things is hard. The constant firehouse of information – especially if you’re a entrepreneur everything-is-a-potential-new-product-or-idea type – is overwhelming. Here’s the secret to never forgetting anything: write it down. I’m not kidding, it’s that easy. Just follow these couple rules: Write it down right away. When you have the thought, or an action item is assigned to you, write it down right away. Don’t wait even a minute or two. In the moment, as the idea or action item is coming to mind, write it down. Don’t use paper. Some people would disagree with me here, but I believe this is crucial. Paper gets lost. Paper isn’t with you all of the time. You can’t edit paper. Paper isn’t backed up…

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