For people who actually write down their annual goals, achieving balance and working smarter nearly always rank within the top five. It’s no different for me. And yet here I sit writing a blog that’s well over due to the Biz Box folks (Sorry!) because I find myself constantly overwhelmed with tasks. The only thing I have yet to give up is sleep. Sound familiar? Do you know what I mean? At the beginning of the year I promised myself I would separate my work from my life and attempt to live a more balanced life. I began re-modeling my house, spending more time with my kids and even trying out a new relationship. People in the psychology world say we need this sort of “balance” – thus far, it has been a disaster for me, resulting in a huge backlog of work and more stress in my life.

I haven’t taken this goal off my list just yet but I have given up trying to change entirely; I know when to admit defeat! What I’ve come to believe is that more people are integrating their careers and their personal lives, resulting in an evolution for many people. Gone are the days of an 8-5 routine that we as Americans have lived by for generations.

A few examples of this trend include:

• We are connected 24/7 with either a laptop and/or a Blackberry device
• Corporate wellness centers offering “napping services” are beginning to pop up
• Companies such as Google offer every “non-essential” service an employee needs to make it easier to integrate work and life and remain productive
• Our personal, office and cell phones can be integrated into one device allowing us to always be there when a client, child or significant other needs something
• New types of high speed wireless networks such 3G, 4G and Wi-Max are about to integrate everything we do on the computer and phone and offer unlimited access to knowledge

So what have I done? I no longer consider getting to work at 8:00 a.m. of great importance, and 5:00 p.m. comes and goes like 2:00 p.m. I have taken the time to organize my home so I can watch the morning news in a corner of my flat screen TV while working on emails or a presentation. If my kids are at home and they need some time for something, it gets integrated into Outlook. When I am at work, if I need to order some tile for a bathroom project, I do it right then, when I have a moment. I work harder during the day, incorporating my personal life when necessary in a secondary way, and I work less at night, where my personal life becomes my primary focus.

Working smarter and finding balance really means:
1) Listening to our bodies and knowing when to slow down or do something else
2) Don’t get stressed out if you need to take a call at 7:30 p.m. in the evening – it happens
3) Stay connected and answer emails on the fly. It is more important to stay on top of things than to have total separation of work and home

So what about you? Tell me – are you resisting the change of our new 24/7 connectivity? How are you evolving your life into this new work culture?

Also.......One rule I do have, I never answer an email or phone call (unless it is extremely urgent) when in conversation with someone else.

Call me Bruce X and heed me well. In an earlier incarnation, I used to be just like you – sprinting along the pathway of my strategically chosen career. I wanted to have it all, and I was intent on obtaining it. Oh, blissful ignorance! Little did I know the impending torment that was in store for me. But, wait. My story starts way before this.

As a kid, I always knew I wanted to be a lawyer when I grew up. After all, from a young age I could manipulate the truth to my advantage (usually directing blame to my sisters for some offense I committed). I had an uncanny ability to make statements that were entirely true but conveyed an opposite meaning. So, when mom’s favorite lamp was in shatters on the floor and I was accused of breaking it, I could honestly say, “I never even touched that lamp.” Truer words were never spoken, because it was the football I kicked from the living room that actually touched the lamp. That, my friends, is the essence of being a lawyer – to find ambiguity, and then to exploit it to your own advantage.

I enrolled at the University intent on proceeding to law school as quickly as possible. But when I couldn’t get “Rhetoric and Argumentation 101” as a 1st semester freshmen, I took “Theatre Arts 101” as an alternative. (I thought I might as well get a head start on honing my courtroom theatrics.) Alas, this is where the seeds of occupational discontent were planted. By the time I graduated, I was ambivalent about the lawyer gig and wanted to take a stab at show business.

I ventured into the comedy-club scene in L.A. But two unanticipated, insurmountable obstacles prevented any chance of my success as a stand-up comic. First of all, at a height of only sixty-six inches, people couldn’t really tell that I was standing up. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, I wasn’t funny. Consequently, I got out of show business before anyone knew I was in show business.

I was soon enrolled in a prestigious law school, pretending with all of the other soulless automatons that I was going to be a lawyer for “the good of society.” But a short 3-years later I was arguing in Divorce Court that my client should have custody of the yellow bath mat. And when I wasn’t mired in marital dissolution disputes, I was defending a product manufacturer from wrongful death claims, arguing that purchasers knew or should have know that the vegetable chopper would explode when it was plugged into an outlet; thus, they should have anticipated the trajectory of the flying stainless steel blade; so, if they failed to duck, then their decapitation was the result of their own slow reflexes.

I was a good lawyer, a very good lawyer; but I was also a very unfulfilled person. For more than two decades, I tried to find passion in my life from my profession. I even left the mercenary Litigation Department and changed my specialty to Estate Planning and Probate. (Something seemed nobler about helping people plan for death. As a side benefit, the risk of a malpractice lawsuit is less if your client is dead.) Despite shifting my specialty and changing law firms, I was never passionate about being a lawyer. As much as I wanted lawyering to be a motivating force in my life, it was always merely a way to earn a living. Granted, it was a good living from a monetary standpoint, but for me, lawyering didn’t provide me with a life worth living. I grew increasingly depressed when I realized that I was doing something that I didn’t like to do simply for the money. (There is a strong analogy to prostitution, but I prefer not to dwell on the comparison.)

My malaise as an attorney never made me suicidal (although there were times when my wife want to kill me for my whining). But it did make me more introspective than most lawyers. (For many of my brethren and sistern of the bar, they can easily ignore their feelings because they don’t have any. That’s what makes them good lawyers.)

After years of self-examination, and a series of post-lawyer entrepreneurial endeavors, I’ve begun to understand that you don’t need to find your passion from your career, just so long as you find it somewhere. Instead of finding your passion in your work, you might discover that your job allows you the ability to find your passion in other endeavors. For me, I’m passionate about helping people find their passion, whether it arises from their occupation or from non-work related activities. That is the foundation for my company ConversantLife.com (that I’m passionate about but receive no income from – continuing the cycle of earning a living from passionless but worthwhile work).

I’m grateful to BizBox and Slate for the opportunity to blog about the passion/work interconnectivity. Yes, they are connected, even if your passion is not derived from your career. I have come to learn that I could have been an even better lawyer if I had given myself the freedom to let my passion flourish outside my legal profession. Alas, I’ve learned this lesson too late, because my law license has expired and I refuse to take the Bar Exam again. But if my insights can be helpful to you, then I’ll consider my litigation-induced ulcer to be worthwhile.

The people you want to hire do not need motivating. They’re mature adults and probably have the energy level they’ll have for the rest of your relationship.

So, it’s not about motivating. It’s about alignment of goals.

Most of us have wondered many times; is this a job for the carrot or the stick? Let’s see…the carrot or the stick?

The fact is that smart people don’t respond -- on a long-term basis -- to either the carrot or the stick.

If the relationship is a simple, “You give me “x”, and I’ll give you “x” reward.”, it won’t be long before someone is scamming your process.

Conversely, if you threaten smart people with the stick, they’ll find another place to work.
The key is to find out what they want to do. Deep down, when they’re honest with themselves – what do they really want to do? Once they determine that and communicate it, you can see if it’s aligned with the company’s needs. If you don’t have common ground then just be honest with each other – life is too short to pretend otherwise.

However, once you find their passion, and know that helping them get to where they want to go will also work for the company, and then you’re on solid common ground.

So, OK, Joe, you’ve changed the rhetoric from “motivation” to “alignment”. Now what?

Once you have goals, you build the process around those goals. At The Phelps Group we have an annual process that starts with a 360 review by at least 6 of the people an associate works with. The associate can then fold that feedback into her/his individual performance objectives (IPO) which state what they’ll do in terms of the quality of client work, the generation of revenue for the agency and the agency’s environment. Our associates are encouraged to meet with the coach in their discipline, or their team leader once a month in a 1-2-1 and review their progress toward their goals. The coach or team leader is not there to judge, but rather to “hold a mirror up” for the person requesting the 1-2-1. A critical exercise in this meeting is to identify the obstacles preventing progress, and then work on ways to eliminate them.

This process, followed diligently will help the individual create and hone their goals. It’ll reveal and remind them of their progress. And it’ll clear the path for more achievement. The result is higher self esteem, raised confidence, greater productivity and a more transparent relationship between them and the company.

The essence of the thinking here is, find out where an associate wants to go and then help them hold themselves accountable to their own goals.

A few weeks ago I got together with a friend I grew up with because he was looking for advice on creating a business entity. He wanted to know if he should create a corporation, a partnership, an LLC (limited liability company), or remain a DBA, “Doing Business As.”

Since I’ll use his business as an example for the discussion, and I like his product, and he’s a friend, I’ll give him a free plug: He sells V-Neck sweat-wicking t-shirts over the internet. The product is called Vdri, and the shirts are meant for wearing under a collared shirt, or while exercising or sleeping. I’ve been wearing my Vdri shirt happily for the last few weeks. Anyway, back to the business discussion.

In exchange for my t shirt I gave him what I think is thousands of dollars worth of legal and accounting advice in 30 minutes, and I’ll pass it along to BizBox audience as well. (Feel free to send me free samples of your business wares too!)

The decision to move from a DBA to forming a business entity comes down to
1. Do you need business and financial liability protection?
2. Is your business complicated enough to need its own bank account and credit card?
3. How do you want to be taxed?
4. What kind of employee and ownership structure do you have?

Let’s take it one at a time.....

Business and Financial Liability
What if the sweat-wicking shirt catches fire at your alumni bonfire and somebody decides to sue you and your company? I know its crazy, but it’s a litigious world out there. You definitely do not want a former customer and his lawyer to seize all of your personal assets as they seek redress over accidentally singed fibers. A separate business entity provides a layer of protection against that.

In addition, a business entity may provide financial liability protection, limiting your losses to the business rather than your personal assets.

Bank Account and Credit Card
In my experience, banks will not open business checking accounts in your company’s name without a proof of entity formation from your Secretary of State and a separate federal tax identification number, or EIN (employee identification number).

Credit card companies can be more lenient and may allow you to get a credit card as a DBA. Vdri in fact already had a credit card, but my friend has been selling enough shirts that it’s become time to open up a bank account solely for the business

Keeping business and personal financial records pretty much requires separate bank and credit cards accounts, so you’re going to need to form some kind of entity once you move beyond the simplest start-up.

How would you like to be taxed?
You’re not allowed to say “No Thanks!” to that question, even if you want to.

Here’s the basic choice: An LLC or limited partnership is not taxed on its own, but rather, passes through any tax liability to its partners or, in the case of an LLC, its members. So if Vdri becomes an LLC and racks up profitable tshirt sales, my friend will end up owing additional taxes on his personal tax return.

A corporation, in contrast, must pay taxes on profits generated by the company in any year, at the corporate tax rate. My friend would personally owe taxes only on dividends he received from the corporation, or on any salary he takes from Vdri. Profits on tshirt sales would be taxed once at the corporate level, and then again at the personal level in the form of dividends, a phenomenon known as ‘double taxation.’

Generally speaking, corporations are considered “tax-appropriate” if the business is capital intensive and needs to reinvest profits in any given year in order to grow. An LLC or partnership probably works best if profits do not need to be reinvested.

Since Vdri does not run a manufacturing plant (it subcontracts that kind of work) I think the pass-through taxation of an LLC or partnership is preferred.

(Incidentally I’m only speaking of C-corporations, not S-corporations, which may have ‘pass-through’ taxation similar to an LLC.)

Employee and Ownership Structure
Here’s where LLCs have great advantages over corporations for small businesses and entrepreneurs, and why I recommended an LLC to my friend for Vdri.

Corporations typically must officially maintain a great number of corporate positions such as president, secretary, and treasurer. Corporations must maintain records of meetings held. Perhaps most onerously, corporations must distribute profits strictly according to proportionate ownership. While this may make sense at first glance, in fact many companies have good reasons for making distributions of profit disproportionate to ownership.

LLCs by contrast may make distributions according to any plan lawfully decided upon by its voting members. I mentioned to my friend that Vdri, if it were an LLC, could decide that whoever wears the funniest hat at the annual Holiday party would reap all of the years’ profits.

Rewarding employees and negotiating with outside investors – key challenges for many small business owners – is helped greatly by the LLC structure. A corporation simply does not have that flexibility, but must distribute to owners according to strict ownership percentages.

I’m pretty sure Vdri will go the LLC route, as do many entrepreneurs these days, given its flexibility as a business structure.