I have a bad habit of buying tech and just letting it sit.

Right now, I seriously have a brand new monitor that I bought 2 months ago, sitting in my bedroom because I haven’t gotten around to installing it. It’s bigger than the one I’m typing this message on, beautiful, and most importantly, it’s meant to reduce eye-strain.

Why haven’t I installed it? Because I don’t feel like getting rid of my old monitor, clearing out the speakers and cleaning up the random notes and cards that have (somehow magically) taken up residence around it.

Basically, I’m letting my eyes rot because I’m not taking time to get rid of what’s old and familiar.

Thankfully, I don’t do this as much with clients. I learned pretty early that not every client is worth it, no matter how much they pay.

My big lesson came from a client who was paying me $1200 a month to stay on retainer as a blogger. That was a HUGE portion of my income back then (it’s not exactly shabby now) so even though they were unorganized, stressful, and draining, I didn’t want to cut them off. It wasn’t until they started calling me on Saturday mornings that I admitted to myself that they needed to go and I needed to start looking for a replacement.

I look back and think about all the time I wasted…time I could have been working with clients I enjoyed (or at least didn’t make me shudder every time they called).

This Keeping Clients Happy month, we’re turning things on their head and will look at how to identify clients that should be ditched, and most importantly, how to get rid of them. This week though, I want you to take some time to think about what it would be like to have a roster of clients and assignments where at WORST, they were only slightly annoying.

Do that, and next week we’re going to move on to identification.

Megan