Stepping away from my usual content today to share a few raw pages from my journal. Every couple of years, I hit a professional dry spell as my business transitions. On a bright spring day like today, it feels right to talk about the quiet incubation periods that happen right before the growth. This is 2/5 Notes in my mini-series on navigating the dry spells...

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LinkedIn eats up a 💩ton disproportionate amount of my time during a dry spell. I hate the platform despite it still remaining an evil necessity. primary tool for prospecting leads for my nonprofit clients— and a key tool for business development.

I still network online and IRL, but everyone still insists on heads-up for events and meetups via LinkedIn. Unless they’re sending it via Facebook. Which… don’t get me started.

I hate the monopoly LinkedIn has on my professional social sphere. I detest the premium hold places on professional quality time. I enjoy networking less and less the more the necessary it becomes through any medium that makes me feel less real as a person.

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One thing I picked up a few years ago from other nomadic consultants while I was moving through dry spells and empty phases: downtime doesn’t have to mean no action or no connection. So, to remove the ick from LinkedIn during my own dry spells, I actually spend a bit of my time networking with and for others.

I liken it to friends who scour the personals, the recipes, and the obituaries in way. Some strange combination of reading for pleasure. But also a chance to absorb more of the life around the network that’s outside of my immediate, necessary zone. In doing so, I often find neat pockets of energy, inspiration and optimism.  

Even devoting just a few minutes or an hour a day to seeing who’s offering work or their own skills, and noting it down as I come across people who are actively looking to fill those needs– truly rewarding. And you can’t put a price on that. So I don’t.

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For better or worse, LinkedIn is till that place where everything you'd expect — client requests, founder needs, individual appeals, company updates, personal calls for help— all sit uncomfortably and inaccessibly next to one another. But the way that content moves now and is found now is different. 

Job-seekers post into it and hear nothing. Founders make personal appeals and get minimal traction. And both sides end up concluding, reasonably, that the effort may not be worth it. That's not a personal failure on either end. That's a structural problem with how the platform now moves — or doesn't move — content between people who actually need to find each other.

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I won’t rant about the structural and algorithmic shift over time where visibility does not reliably translate into circulation. Things appear but they don't necessarily travel. They sit. They stall. They don't propagate the way people still assume they do. The platform has always been screwy.

But knowing I’m doing something/anything reminds me that my own instincts and intuition are still sharp, even when they’re in less demand at certain times. 

So when I'm in there doing my own networking and business development, I'm also watching for things I can pass along. Not broadcasting. Not resharing for visibility. Just taking something I know — an opening, a lead, an opportunity — and sending it directly to a specific person who fits it. One to one. No layer in between. The way social networking— and networking— once were. 

You hear something useful, you pass it to the person it fits. The motion is the same. But the impact is greater. It's a rule of the road I picked up from people who'd been doing this longer than me. And it's one I've appreciated both as a giver and as a recipient.

#SpringDrySpell 2/5