Welcome to your Weekly Brief from The Inspired Solo!

It’s two days late but not a dollar short — in fact, not one single penny short, ’cause we have 26 items to share. Yep, you read that correctly — twenty-six pieces of fabulousness, offering sage, pithy, and way-to-the-point advice on the challenges facing today’s inspired solos.

This being Thanksgiving Week here in the US of A, we thought we’d focus on the real purpose of this holiday — no, not stuffing your face with Mom’s mashed potatoes and pumpkin pie (although who wouldn’t be grateful for that?) — but the simple, profoundly life-changing act of practicing gratitude.

Personally, I’m grateful for The Inspired Solo’s readers. You guys inspire me every day, with your courage, convictions, and creative thinking put into practice.  I’m grateful for my clients, too, who teach me every bit as much as I teach them. I’m always grateful for my beautiful daughter, for our home at the beach, for my friends — my “made family” as I call them — and for the gift of life.

And I’m really grateful for the amazing bloggers and writers whose work is featured in this edition of the Weekly Brief!

Blawg Review

The Human Rights in Ireland group blog hosts this week’s Blawg Review #239, and gives me a new blog feed for Bloglines.

Lawhacks – Digital

• MakeUseOf: A post examining a new large-display timer  for your computer called TimeMe that might help you stay on task and on schedule.
• LifeHacker: From LifeHacker readers, tips on switching browsers, wallpaper schedules, and quicklink to-dos.
• Addictive Tips: How to implement Google apps on your desktop — great free solutions for home-based and small-office solos who can’t afford the monster bills that come with implementing big-firm app solutions. (“Google Docs, News, iGoogle, Calendar & Gmail Desktop App”)
• Ernie the Attorney: More Google goodness especially for lawyers — “Google now helps with legal research”
• Write for Your Life: Use Word more effectively with Document Map for longer works, like ebooks, briefs, and pillar articles (“How to Write Smarter in Microsoft Word with Document Map”)

Lawhacks – Analog

• GTD Times: Lawyers invented the tickler system (well, you might as well have) but this post examines this familiar and still highly effective reminder system in broader contexts. (“Be Your Own Post Office”)
• WebWorkerDaily: Break your bad work habits with this roundup of tips from a smattering of experts. (“Teach an Old Dog New Tricks: How to Break Bad Work Habits”)
• WebWorkerDaily: Yes, it is one of my favorite go-to sites for great productivity and work advice. This week WWD really brought the bacon. I enjoyed this post about working in a home office when the contractors are making you nuts. Good advice that’s transferable to any situation where your space/time/attention gets invaded at home. (“How to Work From Home During Chaotic Repairs”)

Website Copy and Content

• DoshDosh – how to influence your readers with your online content (book review; “11 Ways to Influence People Online and Make Them Take Action”)
• Problogger — why you should look again at email marketing (“Email Marketing Is Not Dead”)
• WebWorkerDaily — developing a content strategy (“Taking Content Strategy Personally”)
• Computational Legal Studies — ever wonder what the blawgosphere looks like? (“Visualizing the Linkage Structure of the Law Blogosphere”)
• Legal Practice Pro — tips for speeding up your site’s load time (“Do People Leave Your Site Before It Loads?”)
• Larry Bodine — five methods for monitoring websites’ evolving content (“5 Ways to Monitor Websites”)
• Blogging Tips — how to improve your subscription rate (“6 Tips to Build Subscriptions”)
• Stephen Fry — an amazing, hour and a half long video that’s worth every single second, all about the evolution of social media (“Social Media – A Force for Good”)

Psychology of Inspiration

• Life Optimizer: Sounds counterintuitive, but this post suggests you can get more done by adopting the mindset of a couch potato. (“Work Smart by Thinking Like a Lazy Person”)
• Communicatrix: Those times between the big pushes and the huge goal-setting? Turns out they’re actually good for you. (“Burrowing Time”)
• Christine Kane: Unleash your inner Sarah Palin and “go rogue”! Politics-free, I promise. (“21 Ways to Go Rogue”)
• Illuminated Mind: Here’s a well-written post on something I’ve written about here at TIS before — the removal of the “work/life” distinction and the embrace of “life” in all its messy beauty. (“Decompartmentalizing Your Life and the Extinction of Boundaries”)

The Practice of Your Profession

• Ernie the Attorney: If you want to be a lawyer, young person (or older person!), go watch them in action. Excellent advice. (“Wanna be a lawyer? Well, get thee to a courtroom!”)
• Lawyerist: Written mostly for our other-employed colleagues, those toiling away in document review obscurity perhaps, but helpful for any lawyer — how to show your value. (“Show Me the Money: Demonstrating Value as a New Lawyer”)

Your Bottom Line

• Dumb Little Man Tips for Life: It doesn’t necessarily cost a fortune to have a good time. Dumb Little Man gives us five ways to rock your off-duty time without spending a lot of dough. (“Frugal Fun: 5 Ways to Be Social and Save”)
• WebWorkerDaily: Don’t shortchange yourself. WWD presents some smart advice on ten ways to present the topic of fees to your clients. (“10 Ways to Get Paid What You Deserve”)
• Successfully Solo: Doing well and doing good are not mutually exclusive. (“Doing What’s Right AND Still Doing Well For Yourself”)

That’s it for this week’s edition. We’ll have a few more posts to share this week, but for the most part the TIS muses are taking a break to share the practice of gratitude with our families, both the ones generated by DNA and the ones we make ourselves.

Do the same, OK? And then think about ways you can practice gratitude all year long.