Are you listening? Well you should be. I wanted to take a second to talk about being engaged with your clients, colleagues and potential clients. I guess you could call this a soapbox topic, but I guess you could also call a blog a soapbox :)

In our culture things have changed, even from when I was a kid, which wasn't that long ago! How you ask? Well when I was a kid and I wanted to hang out with one of my friends you had to call their house, and then if they weren't home you had to leave a message on a machine, then you had to...WAIT! Can you imagine it? Waiting for someone to respond to you? To make it all worse, if you weren't in the house when they called you back the whole thing started over again!

What's the point of this story? Well, if you're anything like me you got just a little anxious thinking about the idea of people not responding to you right away. That's important because you're clients think this way. If someone can't get a hold of you, how are they supposed to hire you? In an era of cell phones, e-mail and Facebook you need to make sure you are engaged.

I will end my rant with this idea: people who are engaged are relevant, people who are relevant don't fade away. If you want to stay busy, to stay in business, you need to be relevant. If you want to be relevant you need to be engaged with the people who want to work with you. There are a million ways to engage with people: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Ello, behance, and the list goes on and on, you need to be a part of that. I have a personal policy that if I am awake (which is a lot) I will respond to an e-mail within an hour of receiving it, most of the time half an hour or less. Some of the people I respect the most still have this policy despite being exceptionally busy...and you can too.

So that's all I needed to say, be engaged. If you're struggling, drink a cup of coffee, then be engaged...and be awesome, because that is what we were made to be. Finally, here is a picture of an engaged person, or something like that.