Deductive reasoning for the modern taxpayer

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It’s tax time, and every year I think to myself that I should be deducting everything. Really. All my income comes from freelance writing, and since there’s almost nothing in my life that I don’t write about, maybe I can deduct everything.

After years of thinking I should do this but not really doing it, I finally took action. I talked about my deduction plan with Anne-Marie Fisher, director of tax services for CBIZ.

Here’s a transcript of our conversation:

Me: “I spent a lot of money on expensive eye cream so that I looked good for my Yahoo! photo. Can I deduct that?”

Anne: “They don’t like cosmetics or clothing that they say you could use outside of your article.”

Me: “But I wouldn’t have had to look that good if I didn’t take the photo.”

Anne: “But you looked good after the photo. The IRS is really tough on things that help your appearance.”

Me: “What if the cream made me look bad?”

Anne: “That’s a very aggressive position.” (This is tax-preparer speak for “No! Don’t do it!”)

Me: “OK. Forget the cream. What about moving. I wrote a lot about how I moved from New York City to Madison, Wisconsin.”

Anne: “That’s a fine deduction. Just document that you did if for a job.”

Me: “But I didn’t. I can work anywhere. I did it because I was going to die if I had to live in a 500-square-foot apartment for one more minute.”

Anne: “Do you have more business opportunities in Madison?”

Me: “Well, there are a lot of writers in New York City and very few in Madison, so I’m more unique being from Madison and editors like unique.”

Anne: “That’s good.”

Me: “I write a lot about how you’ll have more career opportunities if you keep your rent low. The new American Dream is about having a lot of time, not owning a house. Can I deduct my rent?”

Anne: “That’s very creative.” (That’s CPA-speak for “You’re out of your mind.”)

Me: “Here’s something I did. I went through all my expenses last year looking for some that are big and don’t seem to be deductible. I saw that my son’s violin lessons are really expensive. And you know, violin teaches self-discipline, and self-discipline is important for workplace success. I could write that. Then could I deduct the lessons?”

Anne: “He’s still getting a lot of benefit from the lessons, though.”

Me: “What if I write that he hates them?”

Anne: “Well, if he hates violin and you put him in the classes specifically to write your column, maybe you could prove that he was really upset by you taking pictures of him.”

Me: [Silence. Obvious disappointment.]

Anne [in a perky, helpful voice]: “How about meals. Do you deduct those?”

Me: “Of course. But what about my brother? He guest blogs on my blog. Can I deduct meals with him?”

Anne: “Sure. As a way to thank him.”

Me: “What about the plane flight?”

Anne: “To go see him? Well, things like this are always worth asking about. It’s like gambling. Some people just never want the IRS to talk to them.”

A Roll of the Dice

At this point I decide I’m a gambler, so I call another CPA. Larry Rice, director of strategic consulting at Rodman & Rodman. I cut right to the chase:

Me: “What can I write in my column about toys so that I can deduct the toys I buy for my kids?”

Larry: “Maybe if you had a regular feature where you review toys. But you’d have to throw them out. If you kept them, the IRS would assume your kids got personal enjoyment from them.”

Me: “Could I throw them out later?”

Larry: “No, that wouldn’t work because there was personal enjoyment. The IRS lets you deduct only 50 percent of meals, for example, because while they’re for business, you still get personal enjoyment.”

Me: “Can I deduct 100 percent of the meals I had with people I hate?”

Larry: [Pause.] “When you deal with your taxes, you’re presumed guilty until proven innocent. You need to prove why you have the right to take the deduction.”

Me: “OK. How about the coffee shop I write in. I’m there every day and I don’t have a home office. Can I deduct my lattes?”

Larry: “The IRS has a term — ‘ordinary and necessary.’ You have to show that what you’re doing is ordinary and necessary for your business.”

Me: “OK, there’s an article about how my generation loves to work out of coffee shops and many of us don’t have home offices. We just have a backpack. So how about I send this to the IRS and tell them it’s a new day and they have to get with the program and large latte bills are ordinary and necessary for writers?”

Larry: “Maybe you could do it if you met with people related to your business regularly. The IRS publishes a 30-page book to help people determine if their home office deduction is legal, and it has very tight requirements.”

Me: [Long, dejected silence.]

A New Hope

Larry gives me a good idea. He says that IRS agents receive audit guides that tell them what deductions they should expect from a person in a given field, such as 10 percent of a writer’s income is spent on travel.

So I can get one of those guides, and at least make sure I hit the top levels in all those areas. It’s a new approach, and I have new hope.

Finally, a note to my mom: Please don’t call me to say the IRS is going to read this column and come after me. I know you’re going to worry. But you don’t need to. In fact, now that I’ve written about you worrying, the next time I have lunch with you and you worry about me, I think I’ll deduct it.

 

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Don’t tell me about admirable moms

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A couple of months ago, two people sent me the same thing: A womens’ magazine was looking to interview a woman who was doing a good job balancing kids and a freelance career.

“You should respond to this!” said one of the emailers. “This will be great publicity for your book!” said the other emailer.

Articles that talk about women doing a good job balancing work and kids make me sick.

Annoying articles like this are everywhere. Here’s one. It’s about a woman in the military who is also a mom. Right away my radar goes up — lives of miliatary families are not exactly stable for the kids. The title of the article is “Admirable Mom”. I find this title despicable because who is the arbiter of “admirable” when it comes to this?

And why do we need to admire the moms we write about? Why do the women who are successful in work also have to be successful in the kid department? You know what? Most women who have a full-time job and a partner with a full-time job are having a really hard time holding things together. And the longer the hours, the worse it is.

But the bigger issue is why do we have to rate the job people are doing in their parenting? It’s an impossible job. Most people are making errors every day, and no one has any idea which of the infitinite amount of errors we can make are the really bad ones.

There is no rating system for parenting. The parents of kids at Harvard might like to believe that this means success, but it doesn’t. There is no measure. The parents of the kids saving starving kids in Africa also do not get to go to the top of the parenting chart. Becuase there is no chart.

So everyone should please shut up about the articles about women who “do a good job balancing work and family”. What does that mean? Good job? And what about that it’s all self-reported? What sane woman is going to speak on record about her career and say that she is not doing a good job with her kids?

Do your kids love you? Do you love your kids? That’s all there is. It’s very frustrating, in light of intricate and predictable quantified system of rating ourselves and others in the workplace. A study by Stanford DeVoe and Jeffrey Pfeffer at Stanford Business School shows that people think about work while they watch their kids soccer game. No surprises there. The study says that people are computing their billable hours and time lost for the day. This makes sense to me becuase math problems about work are easier than interpersonal problems about family.

Work is measurable and parenting is not. Bob Sutton, also a Stanford professor, quotes a study that shows people like things that are measurable. We like to know how we’re doing. We like to have a goal and meet it and know we’ve done a good job. We like acknowlegement. There is none of this during an afternoon hanging out with your kids.

The parents whose minds are not wandering to work are parents who don’t have engaging work. Because any type of engaging work is easier than being with kids. I’m not saying don’t spend time with your kids. I spend every day from 1 – 8pm with my kids. And even later than that if I don’t do a good job during bedtime negotiations. I choose that. But it’s hard.

And I would never hold myself up as a role model for parenting becuase the idea of ranking parents is absurd. Besides, I’m like that dad who can’t keep his mind from work. When my kids are really difficult, sometimes I’ll escape to my web metrics report. There are not official kudos for getting through another round of superhero wars. But there’s no arguing with the graph that shows a good day for blog traffic.

You know what? It’s stressful to have a career and kids, but also it’s stressful to have just kids. So the best you can do is try to not bring the workplace stress home with you. becuase that’s really realy bad for kids. They notice. But sometimes, let’s just all be honest, work is a way to alleviate some of the stress at home.

So here’s my advice: Don’t have too much stress at work, don’t have too much stress at home. And don’t have the hubris that makes you want to respond to one of those journalists looking for an admirable mom. If you want to be ranked, go to work. There are not rankings for parents. That’s what makes parenting so hard.

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Video blog: Everyone suffers from low performers, so get rid of them

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Bruce Tulgan tells the four reasons you have to fire a low performer, and the best way to get low performers to leave on their own.

[MEDIA=6]

(requires the Flash 9 Player)
iPod Video – Download

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The Madison update (and the Britney update)

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A lot of people ask me how living in Madison is going. For those of you who don’t know, I moved from New York City to Madison, WI about six months ago. I can’t believe it’s already been six months, because I still feel like I’m in culture shock.

It is shocking, for example, that five blocks from where I live, people go ice fishing. Or that the town seems to revolve around schedules for the University of Wisconsin athletic teams. But the most shocking thing is the lack of advertising.

In New York City, the bombardment of advertising is so extreme that it all adds up to a reliable source of information about what’s going on in the world. Everything has an ad on it. The streets are literally lined with advertising. And there are newsstands every block, so the world’s headlines, too, are impossible to miss.

In Madison, we pass one or two billboards a day, if we drive across town. When this blog was mentioned in Business Week last month, I spent an hour driving around Madison trying to find a copy of the magazine. That’s when I started thinking about how isolated I am from the advertising world.

But it really hit home tonight when my brother sent a link to me about the mess in Iraq.

I wrote back: “The most interesting thing in here is the reference to Britney’s head. What’s up with her head?”

He wrote back: “She shaved it. Do you live in a cave? Did you know Anna Nicole Smith died? There was commercial-free round-the-clock coverage on the major TV networks.”

In fact, I didn’t know about the incessant coverage. We don’t have a TV. I have never had a TV, although I have a lot of respect for the content on TV. That’s why I don’t have one — because I know I’d watch it all the time. I’d watch it all the time because it is actually useful for finding out what a large segment of the world is doing.

As a kid, I went to other kids’ houses to see what I was missing. As an adult, I have always lived in big cities where you end up knowing what’s on TV even if you don’t have one. Probably in a large part because of the ubiquitous advertising. And when I found myself falling behind in those big cities, I could easily pick up a magazine.

Now that I’m in Madison, I need to take drastic measures. I am not buying a TV, but I am doing the next best thing: A subscription to People magazine. I know a lot about this magazine because it is laying on every available table top in New York City even though no one wants to admit to actually paying for it.

Knowing what’s going on in popular culture is important. It’s the world we live in. To be oblivious to popular culture is to snub one’s nose at the majority of society. And how can you claim to have good social skills if you are not interested in the majority of the people in this world? Good social skills means being interested in what makes other people tick.

Think about this in terms of work. It is clear that in order to get along with your co-workers you need to know how to understand what they want and how to give it to them. And in a large study of workplace preferences, Terry Bacon, reports in his book, What People Want, that good management means good social skills. “Most people leave a job because of their boss,” says Bacon. What makes a good boss? Someone who is concerned about what other people care about.

So either you need to know why Britney’s head is interesting this week, or you need to start caring more about popular culture. Being socially competent isn’t about just the brainiacs, or just the culture snobs. Social competence is being able to relate to anyone, and that means caring about a wide range of people.

I had a teacher in college who spent a semester convincing the class that reading the Iliad is important because all other college freshman are reading the Iliad and it is part of the common experience of college life — something to talk about. People magazine reflects the common experience of adult life. You can say that People isn’t that good, but you know what? Neither is the Iliad unless you like wars.

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Make life more stable with more frequent job changes

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It used to be that finding a good paying career was the path to adult-life stability. Those days are over. What we think of as stability has to change, and how we get to that stability has to change.

Here’s a summary of the new employee of today’s workplace: Most will change jobs every two years. Most will start their adult life by moving back in with their parents. Most say that money is not their number one concern in evaluating a job.

You think it’s a recipe for instability, right? But what else is there to do? Work at IBM until you get a gold watch? There are no more jobs like that – companies are under too much pressure to be lean and flexible (read: layoffs, downsizing, reorgs), so workers have to be, too (read: constantly on the alert for new job possibilities).

In fact, stability is a big goal for new workers today, precisely because the old paths to stability don’t necessarily work.

For example, staying in one job forever is today’s recipe for career suicide. At the beginning of one’s career, it is nearly impossible to find something right without trying a bunch of options. After that, you will experience more personal growth from changing jobs frequently than staying in one job for extended periods of time. And if you change jobs frequently you build an adaptable skill set and a wide network which are the keys to being able to find a job whenever you need to.

Another example of the fact that common paths to stability no longer work: Professional degrees used to be viewed as a safe path, but now they box you into uncomfortable spots. PhD’s are having lots of trouble finding work due to the documented glut of qualified candidates, and the MBA is not a huge help to your career unless you go to a top-ten school. Doctors are having a hard time working a schedule that accommodates kids and pay back school loans, which is creating a surge in interest in the field of opthalmology – probably not what your parents had in mind when they were encouraging medical school.

The lack of stability is affecting people across the board: “All well-educated workers, even those at the top, are at much greater risk of economic reversals than they used to be,” wrote Jacob Hacker, professor of political science at Yale.

Finally, tried-and-true paths to financial stability are no longer reliable either. This is the first generation that will not do better financially than their parents. Anya Kamenetz describes in her book, Generation Debt, that young people today are in a much worse financial situation than their parents were, so the expectations for stability have to change. This financial situation is due to increasing college costs and decreasing parental ability to foot the bill. And real salaries are decreasing for entry level jobs. So new workers start life with more debt and less ability to pay it than their parents’ generation.

So it’s not surprising that the new vision of stability is not a house, two kids and pension. Most young people are priced out of housing markets in the cities they want to live in, like Boston. San Francisco and New York are seeing an increase in one-child families because people can’t afford two, and there are no more pensions. Period. The goals are more fluid – and they do not focus on old tropes of financial success like a house and a 401K.

Key values today are time and relationships. Stability means knowing you can get yourself work that is fun and accommodates those values. The stable people are those who can manage to consistently get work they enjoy that pays their bills.

It used to be that you worked really hard and paid your dues so you could retire rich and do what you love. But we know now that most people don’t really retire, so paying dues in order to get that is nonsense. Stability is knowing you have a life where you can do what you love, during your whole life, not just at the end.

The new way to find a good job – one that creates this stability — is to change jobs. A lot. And to keep an open mind about what a job really is, because what it is not is a lifelong commitment to one company.

Here are ways to use frequent job changes to create stability in your life:

1. Build up a strong skill set quickly.
Go to a job to work on a great project, and leave when your learning curve flattens out. The faster you build up your skills to create an expertise, the faster you will be able to set yourself apart from everyone else, and find good jobs quickly.

2. Get good at making transitions.
There are moments in a person’s life that typically throw everything out of whack because you can’t continue working in your job. Sickness, relocation, unexpected wrenches in one’s plan. When you are used to changing jobs, and you have taught yourself to deal with work transitions, then when your personal life requires huge transition, your work can accommodate that instead of get in the way. Changing jobs will be easy.

3. Make the most of the in-between-jobs time.
You can use job changes to make transition less risky. It’s very hard to know if you’ll like something until you try it. If you have been in corporate marketing for ten years and you want to try entrepreneurship, that feels like a big risk. But if you think you might like to start your own business but you’re not sure, taking a pause in between jobs to try this new business isn’t such a risky move at all.

4. Get out of paying your dues.
The idea of paying dues worked fine when there was actually payoff (think: Retirement communities in Florida funded by pensions.) But today paying dues doesn’t have nearly the payoff it used to, and in fact, creates instability by creating unreasonable expectations for a job you become overly invested in. So get out of paying dues by changing jobs frequently. Laura Vanderkam, workplace reporter for USA Today, wrote a book called Grindhopping about how to hop from job to job as a way to avoid paying your dues.

5. Keep your finances in order.
As long as you keep your overhead down, so that you don’t need a salary that requires 100-hour work weeks, then job hopping is actually a way to ensure financial stability. You know you are not going to stay at a job forever, and you don’t know when it will end. But you will always able to get work when your needs or your company’s needs change if you are good at changing jobs. This won’t be true, however, if you are a financial mess and have enormous overhead.

The best financial security today is to have great job hunting skills that never stop. Go to the best job, do it until you find another best job. This is the kind of person who will always be able to get money when they need it.

And don’t let people tell you that job hoppers will get penalized in the marketplace. Generation Y is job hopping every other year, and they are in incredible demand throughout the workplace. Demographics are shifting, and forcing hiring practices to shift as well. Take advantage of this. Create a stable life by getting good at changing jobs.

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Beware: Incoming poem

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My friend Dylan sent me a warning that poetry can ruin your career.

But before I knew that, when I was a blogging beginner with no idea what to post, I posted workplace Haikus. And my career was not ruined. So here’s another poem, from my friend Ben:

Employed

She just wants to be employed
for eight hours a day. She is not
interested in a career; she wants a job
with a paycheck and free parking. She
does not want to carry a briefcase filled with important papers to read
after dinner; she does not want to return phone calls. When she gets home,
she wants to kick off her shoes and waltz around her kitchen singing, “I am
a piece of work.”

by Beverly Rollwagen, from She Just Wants

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Friday smorgasbord: Summer jobs

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The first summer job idea is you better get one. If you are in college, now is the time to gather experience so that you will have some idea what you want to do with your life when you get out of school. Graduating from college is a very hard transition. One way you can make it emotionally treacherous is to try to support yourself with a job when you have no experience in a job.

There are lots of different strategies to take when you are looking for something to do in the summer. But each strategy has one thing in common – starting now is better than starting later.

There is wide consensus that you really must be doing something in the summer that teaches you real world experiences. So don’t sign up for summer school thinking that businesses will be impressed. Surely you already have enough school under your belt. Eighteen years, right? Summer is the time to try something new.

Look for something that will help you grow personally and professionally. Even if you don’t have a great startup idea in your back pocket, you can still think big. You have good reason to demand that your summer job be fun and stimulating — there are enough jobs out there that you don’t have to take a terrible one.

Also, don’t restrict yourself geographically. When you have two kids and a mortgage then relocation is terrible. But in college, relocation is an adventure. Apply for summer jobs all over the country.

1. Get money to go to start a company.
You have to have an idea, but if you have a good one, Y Combinator will give you about $15,000 to move to Cambridge, MA and be surrounded by people like you doing the same thing. This is a great way to learn how to build a startup. The arrangement is friendly and supportive, and even if your company doesn’t get off the ground during the summer, you will learn a lot.

Relatively few women apply to do programs like this one. So I am taking a moment to encourage women to try it. Starting a company is not only about being able to program a computer. It’s about being able to see an unmet need and find a solution. Apply by April 2.

2. Experiment in social entrepreneurship.
Experience just announced a fellowship program that matches students with non-profits for the summer. The students not only get paid to do good, but they also get paired up with mentors from management consulting firms, which really makes this is a great learning opportunity. The fellowship program was only recently announced, so you may benefit from the fact that a lot of students don’t know it exists. Apply by March 1.

3. Call someone you want to work for.
Really. Just try it. The trick is to call someone senior enough who can make an independent hiring decision, but junior enough that there are not three layers of assistants protecting him. The person you call will be flattered, and mostly likely will listen to you.

Tell this person about what you can bring to the company. (Probably your most appealing offer will be some combination of your wet-behind-the-ears enthusiasm for working and I’m-younger-than-you flair for technology.) Also, tell the person your goals for the summer, so the person can understand how they fit in. Then ask for an internship. You just might get one.

What if you try all three of these ideas and they don’t work? Keep trying. You will spend a lot of your life job hunting. You may as well get good at it now, before your life depends on it.

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Branch out to find work you love

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When you look for a job or change careers, what you’re really looking for is a way to improve things in your life. But it’s hard to figure out what will really make things better and what will only make things worse.

There are some things we all know: People who are in love are happier, and people who are chronically unemployed are less happy. But most of us aren’t dealing with such clear-cut extremes.

Most of us ask ourselves on a regular basis, “What’s the best kind of work situation for me?” Yes, we’re all unique, but in truth we aren’t as unique as we think we are. So there are some rules we can all live by when looking for work we’ll love.

Liking What You Have

Forget the deep analysis. Our brains are simply not optimized to figure out what we’ll like. Instead, they’re optimized to figure out how to like what we have.

This helps us on an evolutionary basis: We eat what’s available, we take care of whatever kids we get, and so on. It doesn’t help us in a job hunt, where we have to guess what we would like if we had it.

Daniel Gilbert, a professor of psychology at Harvard, spent his whole career studying this sort of problem and published his findings in “Stumbling on Happiness.” Gilbert concludes that we’re basically unable to know if we’ll like a job until we try it, so self-analysis and market analysis aren’t going to get you very far. Start trying stuff.

You don’t have to quit your job to try things. Try new stuff on the weekend, volunteer for a project part-time, or ask for a temporary appointment to another department, for example. Be creative in how you learn about yourself. A job change doesn’t have to be now or never — it can be a process.

That said, here are some guidelines you can use for deciding what you’re going to try:

• Don’t go to grad school for humanities.

You would have had a better chance surviving on the Titanic than getting a tenure-track professorship in the humanities. The competition for these jobs is fierce, and very few corporate jobs give preference to someone who has a master’s in, say, early American history.

• Don’t be a lawyer.

Suicide is among the leading causes of premature death among lawyers. You can tell yourself you’ll be different, but statistically speaking, you probably won’t be. And while most lawyers don’t kill themselves, this doesn’t bode well for law being your dream career.

• Look for control over your work.

You might think that a manageable workload makes for a good job. But stress doesn’t actually make for a bad job. In fact, some people do very well in high-stress situations. Some even do their best work that way.

What drives people to burn out is when they work very hard but can’t meet their goals. The people most likely to burn out from their jobs, then, are those who are supposed to help children in helpless situations (at hospitals, for example) but can’t stop the pain.

Entrepreneurs, however, are known for working 18-hour days, and frequently love their work because they’re accomplishing something that excites them.

So the most important thing about enjoying your work, according to Alan Krueger, a professor of psychology at Princeton University, is having control over it — when you do it, how you do it, and what you accomplish. “People really like to be able to control the thermostat themselves,” Krueger says.

• Work where you can find a friend.

If you have one good friend at work, it’s a really good bet that you’ll like your job, according to a Gallup study published in the book “Vital Friends” by Tim Rath.

Take a look at the place you’re thinking of working. Do the people there look happy? Workplaces that promote friendship are more productive, and more fulfilling.

There are a lot of ways to judge whether or not you’ll be likely to make a friend at a new job. But one factor we often forget is architecture. Office space that promotes collaboration and taking a moment to say hi is space that is good for making friends.

• Don’t work with jerks.

Conversations that are insulting have five times the impact on your day than positive conversations. Unfortunately, we have a great memory for the unpleasant. Daniel Gilbert’s research supports this, but Bob Sutton, a professor at Stanford University, specializes in the jerk at work.

Sutton warns that if you work with jerks, you become one. His book gives advice on how to make sure you don’t end up working with these toxic people, and his web site gives you a way to test yourself to see if you’re a jerk yourself. After all, if you’re the jerk, you’re going to have a pretty hard time finding an office without one.

Work Life vs. Life Life

As you search for your new career, collecting advice as you go, remember that the stakes aren’t as high as you might think. A job is not your life.

Your personal life is your life, and your job supports that. The people who are most overwhelmed with career choices are the ones who think a career makes a life. So don’t be afraid to try a lot of options, and don’t be afraid to relax a little.

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Redesigning a blog is about communicating with the designer

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When I was a new manager, one of the steepest learning curves I had was how to adapt my communication style for the various groups I interfaced with: Technical, creative, executive. Fortunately, I had learned from my days as an arbitrage clerk that each group of workers requires a specific type of communication, so I spent a lot of time listening carefully to how other people talked.

So it makes sense that these tips on how to redesign a blog are really about how to communicate with a designer. Because good communication is essential to having a good experience doing a redesign.

1. Tell your designer you five most important things, in order.
This is what you want to convey in your blog. This will help the designer make interface choices – to help your audience focus on what you want them to see. For example, is your about me section really important? It is if you have a lot of expertise. Is your RSS information important? It is if you are aiming to build a large, loyal audience.

Also tell your designer the message you want to get across about yourself – are you friendly, authoritative, technical. This will help the designer figure out a look for your blog. The best way to get a design you love is to be really, really clear about what you want right here, at this stage.

2. Don’t ask your designer to train your dog.
Can your designer keep your dog from sleeping on your laptop? No. Of course your dog is not part of the designer’s job. Yet people dream up all sorts of non-design problems to toss over to the designer.

Problems like a boring bio, or a bad topic, or terrible category names (I have this last problem) are not design problems. If you comments section never gets used, the designer can’t fix that. Things are just going to be empty. And no designer can overcome the ugliness of a headline that is five lines long. Only you can rewrite incompetent headlines. Unless your blog is about design, design cannot compensate for lame content.

3. Don’t reinvent the wheel.
There are established conventions for blog design, and you need to have a totally incredible reason for bucking those conventions. For example, About Me is a heading and it goes on top. Just do that. Don’t bother with being inventive. It’s not worth it. Spend your energy being inventive with your content.

People want to know how to navigate your stuff as soon as they get there. I’ll learn a new navigation system to use Photoshop. There’s a lot of return on my time investment. I’m not learning a new navigation system to get through a blog I don’t even know if I’ll like. And don’t tell me that your radically new, reinvented blog interface is intuitive. It’s not. Because I intuitively look for an interface that is similar to the 55 million other blogs

4. Keep your design opinions to yourself.
There’s a reason you are not supporting yourself as a designer: You are not one. If you want to tell the designer what to design, then don’t hire one. My point is, leave the designer alone. If you don’t trust the designer to come up with something good on her own, then don’t hire her. If you think the designer doesn’t get it, then ask yourself if you have conveyed the information the designer needs.

In short, a bad design is often your own fault: You either hired someone who can’t design, or you gave bad information during point number one (above). In either case, you cannot solve this problem by becoming the designer yourself. You have to solve this problem by looking inside yourself to see where you went wrong. If you hired a bad designer, here’s an article on how to hire a better one.

5. Talk about your expertise, not the designer’s.
Instead of giving the designer instructions on how to do his job, tell him about your job. Note: This will be very difficult for people who have no idea what their goals are or how they are going to reach them. This is why good designers will not work with people who lack vision for themselves. Here are some examples:

Bad: What about blue? I really like the color blue.
Good: This design feels very edgy to me, but this blog should look like part of the establishment.

Bad: Good blog designs usually have an email me button on the top.
Good: My readers need to know how to contact me very easily, and I don’t think they’ll see the email me button where it is.

6. Know your own limitations.
With trepidation over the amount of work entailed, I agreed to add photos to my blog. I like how they look. But it turns out that my stock photos are pretty lame. And after about twenty emails from people explaining this problem to me, I have learned a bit about photos. So, like every project, you do your best at the stuff you’re best at, but there’s always room to learn. My learning area is the photos. For now, I opt for high quality, but free stock photos from sites like Burst.

One reader who complained about the stock photos is Annie. I asked her for suggestions on how to use photos differently and she sent some links. The links Annie sent showed me a different way to think about blogs. My favorite is HellomynameisHeather.

I’m annoyed that my new blog design has created a picture problem that I have to deal with, but it’s been a good opportunity to explore something new. And that, after all, is what blogging is all about.

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