I was just about to dive into my normal Saturday night routine with the kids, when suddenly my husband appeared with tears in his eyes. He choked on the words as he told me that our totally healthy, beautiful 3-month-old nephew, Shilo Eliezer of blessed memory, had died in his sleep that morning. The funeral would be in a few hours.

This weekend, as the rockets from Gaza began landing in Southern Israel again and my family experienced this tremendous loss, I felt the need to express my sadness and anger at death. This weeks’ blog was supposed to be about things I would tell my 25-year-old entrepreneurial self. I finished it already in my mind, just had not typed it out (one handed typing on a smart phone with a sick kid sleeping on me was not happening). After thinking about the things I wanted to tell my entrepreneurial self, I thought again about the things I needed to tell my regular old self. The things I forget as I hurry through life. The things we all could use a reminder about every now and again.

A post related to technical documentation/management will fill this space next week, but in the meantime, thanks for reading and allowing me to grieve and express in such a public way. 

These are the 10 life lessons I especially need to tell myself tonight. I hope you also find them useful.

1. There is actually no such thing as a deadline. Well, there is, and it is called DEATH. Otherwise, the date is an arbitrary line in the sand that someone - somewhere - drew for something. There is always a little bit more time or someone else in the project, thing, event, occasion, episode, document, deliverable or whatever it is that can or will be moved. Do not run your life on DEADlines, rather on LIFElines. If you are a boss, make sure the people who work for you can enjoy life around the schedules you give them. If not, be prepared to rearrange. People have lives to live in addition to their jobs.

Year after year, people around the globe make the same old New Year’s resolutions… lose 10 pounds, spend more time with the family, exercise more, quit drinking/smoking/swearing etc. etc. etc. How about some Technical Writing Resolutions this year? Here’s my Top 10:

9. Reduce stress: IMHO, the best way to reduce on the job stress is to learn and use your personal job metrics to correctly plan work, schedule tasks, complete projects and plan for the future. So if you don’t already know them, learn your metrics. (I’ll explain how to calculate them in my next post.) And if you if you know them already, figure out at least three ways to improve on them.

8. Evaluate your worth: Figure out what you bring to the bottom line in your organization and quantify it (so you can ask for a really great bonus at the end of the year!).

7. Spend more time with family: Take your vacations and take your down time. No one ever got to the pearly white gates and said, “Hey, wish I had spent more time at the office.”

6. Exercise more: Get your tush out of your office chair and stretch. Being a technical writer does not mean you have to sit and vegetate in front of your screen all day. You won’t always have this job, but you’ll always have the same back. So take care of yourself.

For the next three weeks, I am going on vacation with my family. I’ll be checking my email and working part of the time, but I hope to spend the majority of my days with my kids and my extended family. My trusty assistant will make sure that all of our customers’ and writers’ phone calls are answered and that any documentation emergencies will be taken care of in my absence.

I’ve tried to take a handful of vacations throughout the years, most of which end up with me working full-time but from a remote location. This year, I’m really hoping that our excursion will be more vacation and less work than in the past. And with that in mind, I present you with the start of my Top 10 list of what NOT to say to me (or anyone, for that matter) before or during summer vacation: