Eliminate It Minimize It

It's a Tuesday in Michigan, and I am at a picnic table in the shade at Lake Arvesta Farms with a power bank, a laptop, and nowhere I'd rather be.

Kip is fifteen now, and his two hockey friends are somewhere out there — wakeboarding, probably, or navigating the obstacle course on the water. I've seen them three times today: early lunch, an ice cream stop, and now I'm waiting on pizza. That's how it works at this age. They need me to feed them, not follow them. So I set up in the shade, opened my laptop, and worked.

All day.

The breeze was steady. The weather was genuinely idyllic. A client asked a question and I answered it on the spot — screen recording right from my phone, sent from a picnic table at a water park. One thing after another. And I kept thinking: this is lovely. This is truly, absolutely lovely.

Here's what I want you to notice about that: it didn't look like anyone else's version of a good day. Chris is with Tad today on a separate adventure — fifteen and ten don't mix well, and we've learned to divide and conquer instead of insisting on the family unit that produces a conflict loop by noon. There was no photogenic togetherness. No coordinated adventure. Just a teenage boy doing teenage things, and me at a picnic table getting real work done in the shade of a rock quarry.

And I designed it to feel exactly like this.

Which is what I want to talk about: the things that don't work. Not in a problem-solving, fix-it-fast kind of way — but in a longer, more intentional way. What do you do with the parts of your life or your business that frustrate you, drain you, make you want to check out?

Eliminate it. Minimize it. Design around the things that don't work with who you are.

Here's my real example. I was on a Women in AI call recently and they were discussing Microsoft certifications. Fascinating conversation. And I was genuinely curious — right up until the moment I remembered the corporate client where everything was Microsoft. The Teams threads. The shared documents. The sheer friction of a system that does not work with my brain. I was miserable. Professionally, genuinely miserable.

But I couldn't ask a Fortune-whatever client to switch their operating system. That wasn't the answer. So I eliminated it — from my business entirely. Now I ask about tech stack early in every client conversation, on purpose. It's a deal-breaker question. If the answer is Microsoft, I want them to find someone who loves that environment. I mean that enthusiastically. That person exists. I am not her.

Sometimes the off-ramp takes a minute. My Microsoft client — I knew I was done, but I had a project to finish. So I finished it. Gave it everything I had. Kept my inner tech angst exactly where it belonged: with me, not with them. And the moment it was done, I was done.

If something in your world feels frustrating, meh, infuriating, flat — write it down. Talk it out. There is always a version of this where you eliminate it or minimize it. The how will look different for everyone.

But you don't have to keep doing things that don't work with who you are.

The Scenic Route is where we talk about what it actually looks like to design a life that fits. No highlight reel. No perfect days. Just honest conversation from wherever I happen to be — including, today, a picnic table at Lake Arvesta Farms.

Listen to The Scenic Route →