Most of the activities we do today involve dealing with other people, either directly or via some intermediary person or communication medium (like the phone or the Internet). The quality of such relationship depends on the quality of the communication that we can establish and maintain, yet the attention span of people is decreasing dramatically and you have less and less time to make the first impression and make it right.

Today it is black Friday and the whole North American nation launches into the holiday season with a shopping event that has no comparison elsewhere. Yesterday I went to some shops and noticed that everything had been prepared for this major event. You had whole isles closed out and big cardboard packages full of new goods that nobody could open before today.

It looks like the preparation for a major battle, where all forces have been brought to the field and every general (store manager) has prepared the best tactical layout to meet the sudden assault that begins at 5 am and continues until late in the evening.

Today I spent some quality time with my wife Maria in reviewing my business and setting the objectives for the year to come. It has been an important moment because, despite all the things to do, I have taken the time to actually stand back and review everything I do or that I could do and lay it down in written format on a white board so that she could also review it and give me her opinion. She has been with me all along this incredible American journey and has enough good sense and business experience to advise me or at least help me better clarify my true objectives.

I am reviewing my business activities in these days so to develop a more orderly and effective way of managing them. I also need to recruit some help that can take over some of the things I am still doing personally and that absorb too much time. I have discovered that in order to do that I had to better clarify all of my current activities in relation to the main goal of my business and I also had to review such a goal compared to what has been working best this year.

The holiday season is upon us and the mind goes to this incredible year and the incredible challenges and opportunities that came with it. And I have a confession to make: once upon a time I was a well paid technical journalist, people would depend on my articles to know what was hot and what was not in the computer field. I even became editor in chief of a very successful monthly magazine, with testing labs, full time staff and all that.