Hack the Process: Mindful Meaningful Progress on Your Plans

You have to be scrappy to make it in business and in life, and nobody teaches scrappiness like Kimberly Wiefling. Hear how she went from studying Physics to working as an executive in high-tech companies to publishing books on project management and leadership for women and running her own successful business speaking and running training seminars internationally. Kimberly will share the formula she uses to structure her live presentations for maximum learning and audience engagement, and explain how important mentoring and coaching have been in her work, and tell us how she built her business one face-to-face relationship at a time.

Mindfulness might not be the first thing that comes to mind when you think of law school, but University of San Francisco Professor Rhonda Magee makes a compelling case for connecting the two. Rhonda believes mindfulness training for law students may be able to help the legal profession overcome a history of systemic bias, and raise awareness of the fundamental values that were always meant to be at the core of our legal system. In this episode, Rhonda will take us through a short mindfulness exercise that can fit into any busy schedule, and share the story of how she translated the religious contemplation she learned from her grandmother into a secular practice that she uses to help herself and her students stay grounded and focused.

Jina Bolton has gone from Web Design to Web Engineering and back again, so she understands what it takes to establish Design standards for a project and make them attractive, both visually and technically. In addition, Jina's talent for evangelizing has helped make her Lightning Design System for Salesforce popular both inside the company and across the open source community. Hear how she built on her community organizing skills, and went from hosting local meetups to creating Clarity, a conference all about Design Systems. Jina will tell us how organized a small team to line up speakers, solicit sponsors, and get the word out, all while still holding down a full-time job, and managing her own open source projects on the side.

A lot of people think of a coworking arrangement as renting a desk when you can't work anywhere else. But Alex Hillman, the founder of Indy Hall, sees it as an opportunity to build a community, and maybe even help define the future of professional relationships both in and out of physical space. In this episode, Alex will tell us how the loneliness of freelancing drove him to start looking for alternatives to working in isolation, what it takes to train a team to nurture solid connections, and how a third-grade experience with fish sticks got him started down the path toward changing the world one relationship at a time.

When Ashe Dryden gets angry, she does something about it. She writes, she speaks, she tweets, she hosts conferences such as AlterConf, and she organizes fundraising programs. And as an engineer who knows what it's like to be a member of a marginalized group, the issue at the heart of Ashe's anger is diversity awareness in the tech and gaming industries. Ashe's outspoken activism has gotten her a lot of attention, both positive and negative, but she manages to find balance in her own life by maintaining friends and hobbies outside of the tech world, and paying attention to her own needs while fighting for the needs of others. Hear how Ashe turned herself into an expert and an internet celebrity, how she structures her time, and how she applied new learnings along with the skills she already had when she got started.

Instead of asking what people do, Jenny Feinberg advises us to ask people what they're working on, what they're struggling with, or even what they need help with. That's one of the core ideas behind the quiet tribe Jenny's building with her pop-up co-working community, Make Space. Jenny took her background in feminist theory and political science and applied it to the real issues she saw in her community in San Francisco. In this interview, Jenny tells us how she incorporates rejection into her process, how she makes a space that welcomes both introverts and extroverts, and how owning her own shortcomings helps her delegate more effectively.

I first came across Daniel Coffeen when I listened to his popular 2008 Rhetoric class after the entire semester of lectures was made available online for free by UC Berkeley. His powerful and enthusiastic approach to teaching a traditional academic subject impressed me, and I've been following his career ever since--or at least I thought I had been. As I found out in this interview, there's more to this philosopher, blogger, writer, podcaster, and teacher than I ever knew. In this episode Daniel tells us how he stays motivated after more than a decade freelancing, and how he knits together the seemingly unrelated strands of his successful and distinctive career.

Our guest for this first episode of season two of Hack the Process is Alex Cespedes, who hosts Wits About You, a topic-driven podcast for freelancers in their twenties and thirties about the soft skills in life that their parents and teachers may not have warned them they'd need in order to succeed. But the advice Alex shares is applicable to anyone facing the confusion and uncertainty of making their way in the current economy. Alex tells us how the idea for his show's distinctively clean and crisp radio-like format was inspired by his own struggle to embrace, rather than overcome, one of his personal challenges. He'll also tell us how he made his show appealing enough that sponsors started reaching out to him, and how he both both built and built upon his personal network to attract guests like Marketing guru Seth Godin.

The previous episode of Hack the Process marked the end of the first season. At this point, I thought it would be a good idea to take an episode to review what I’ve discussed with the different guests, and share a little more about what my motivation was to create this podcast and put it out into the world. I’ll also tell you a little bit about what I was expecting from this podcast, and compare it to what actually came out. (I’ll give you a hint: it was a delightful surprise.)

First of all, I want to thank all my guests from the first season: Tracy DeLuca, Adam Siddiq, Pace Smith, Paula Jenkins, Malek Banoun, Vinay Patankar, Alex De Simone, Andrew Nance, Ron Lichty, Ankit Shah, Hampton Catlin, Tara Byrne, and Ryan Waggoner. I don’t know if you fully understood what you were getting yourselves into when we started, but I appreciate each of you being so candid and open with our interviews. Your generosity and honesty made the season what it was.

One of the things I like to bring to my work no matter where I’m working or what type of project I take on is the notion that it’s valuable to reflect–on a regular basis–on what you’ve accomplished, and think about how you might want to move forward based on that. I’m taking episode of Hack the Process as my opportunity to reflect on what I’ve done so far, and what I hope I’ve been able to provide to listeners.

If you’ve been following the show, this episode will be an opportunity to find out how each of the guests on Hack the Process was selected, and remind yourself about the insights, stories, and ideas they shared. If you’re a new listener, this will be a chance to find out a little bit about the people we met in the previous episodes so you can decide if you want to subscribe and go back into the first season archives to take a listen to anyone in particular.

Either way, I hope you’ll enjoy hearing more about why I decided to do this, and what I’m learning along the way. If you feel motivated to share some of your own experiences with the show, please leave a comment on iTunes.

Freelancing can be tough, but after nine years consulting as a mobile developer, Ryan Waggoner has learned some ways to make it more approachable from the start, and more profitable as your business grows. Ryan still consults with clients directly on mobile projects while also running LetsMakeApps.io, a curated daily lead service that helps other freelancers find new opportunities in design and development for web and mobile. In this interview he shares with us the patterns he's built into his daily routine to make sure his top priorities are always addressed first, where to put the focus when planning a new project, and why he thinks charging by the hour is a disservice to both the client and the freelancer.