Archives / December, 2008

‘Twas the Night Before Christmas – New School Investor Style

Forwarded from my partner Chris Wand.  An Investor’s Rendition of ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas (by Travis Cocke) ‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the land Not a banker was lending, not even “Gold-Man” Foreclosures were hung by the courthouse with care In hopes that Hank Paulson soon would be there. The Bankers were nestled all snug in their beds While visions of bonuses danced in their heads. And my teachers in their offices and me in my room Had just settled an argument about the depth of the gloom When out on Wall Street there arose such a clatter I sprang from my bed to see what was the matter Away to the computer I flew like…

meeting overload

The last couple of months have been tuff ones for me. I’ve felt constantly behind (thus the lack of blogging consistency) and most days consisted of running from one meeting to the next (typically 10 minutes behind). This has contributed to my feeling both burned out and feeling that I was letting too many things fall through the cracks.  This was evidenced by 1) my inbox growing most days, not shrinking; 2) waking up at 5am to try to work on #1; 3) an over-reliance on multitasking (walking to a meeting, on the phone while responding to email); 4) my wife never being able to reach me during the day; and 5) generally feeling stressed and off-balance. My week off…

off-grid

I just returned from a full weeks vacation "off-grid", by which I mean that I neither checked voicemail or email, took any work related calls, etc. I was reachable, but made it pretty clear that this was for emergencies only. No nightly checks of my email, no popping upstairs for a quick conference call, no calling into the office "just to check in".  Having zero willpower when it comes to this sort of thing I aided my quest to be off-line by leaving the laptop at home and turning off the data feed to my cell phone (I couldn’t imagine resisting the temptation of taking a peek at the hundreds of emails that were piling up if I saw them…