Patience and Humility

When I established my LLC in 2021, I purchased two domains: www.patlineberry.com and www.workflowleadershipdesign.com

Since was a side-hustling solopreneur trying to make every dollar count, I directed both to one website that contained my WFLD landing page, blog, about me page, and contact form. However, I was never completely happy with that online presence.

I learned of WordPress’ values through a podcast, which is why I chose them for hosting. After a few weeks of playing around with webpage blocks, I noticed that they offered website design services. However, after completing the intake form I learned that my vision would cost at least $4,000 so I decided to teach myself through tutorials. That didn’t happen.

Fast forward a few years to when I have full time IT and graphic design staff at work. I’d of course never ask for personal services on the clock, but did ask around about freelance work. Ironically, I had people great at either discipline but not both and with zero revenue, could not justify double the labor. Cursed bureaucracy!

As I slowly iterated on a website, I quickly honed my productivity stack and iterated on notetaking solutions. I pushed the family into shared Apple notes, gave Evernote another try after eight years, really got into Milanote for a bit, and finally landed on Notion. Turns out, I’m an architect.

And then I learned that Notion pages can be published to a custom domain. Welcome to my dilemma…

On one hand, WordPress has been difficult to configure how I envision but has blog post integration with LinkedIn and email subscriber (God bless all 85 of you!) management. I purchased my domains through WordPress and their “one step better than free” plan is very reasonably priced. On the other hand, I continue to geek out on Notion the more I learn, it has become where I write, and the built in AI is turning my notes into a queryable small language model. However, it only publishes static pages and would require a less reasonable plan upgrade plus a custom domain fee.

Over time I noticed two of the people I follow split their personal and professional online lives: Cal Newport and Paul Graham. Perhaps they understand something from further down the road than I am. Perhaps I should be more intentional with separating my personal opinion and professional resume. Their income clearly depends on being intentional and I hope to one day join them as a way less famous consultant.

So in the spirit of this being a reversible decision but having no one to delegate it to, I chose to experiment with both! Yes, it’s more expensive. Yes, it’s two things to manage. But perhaps I’ll figure out how to combine the best of both into one.

Editor’s note: As I was about to publish this, WordPress’ customer service began disappointing me. Both sites are now hosted on Notion but the construct remains the same. Total cost increase: $26

Patience and Humility is now a high level overview of my personal and professional interests, with links to dive deeper for those interested.

Workflow Leadership & Design, LLC (one of those interests) is now how I advertise to the public, will hopefully soon again serve clients, and one day collaborate internally with teammates. Each one of those groups will have different access permissions.

I hope you enjoy and welcome your comments on both sites!