Home sweet Arizona

April 11, 2017 1 Comment

As most of my friends/fam know, I’ve spent the last three or so years moving all over at a somewhat frantic pace (god knows my mail can’t keep up with me!). It was all spurred on after a hasty and messy breakup, moving home to recoup and then moving into my first—and most beautiful—apartment. I lived in downtown historic Troy, NY across the street from my best friend, down the road from my favorite yoga studio, and in a building full of happy, amazing women who I became good friends with over time. After that I jetted off to live in San Antonio for a month with my sister, brother-in-law, and their corgi; decided I wanted to move there more…

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The 8 Project Management Standards I Hold Myself To

November 27, 2016 Leave a comment

After another year of freelancing, building client relationships, dealing with both great and difficult projects, working with incredibly strong partners, moving halfway across the country, and a whole host of project management/tech events, I’ve really refined my approach to work that I take on. I’ve found that all of the work I do and projects I take on have patterns that are shared across contracts. Certain things are important to me in how I work, how others interact with me, and it’s become a core foundation in how I work—the principles that shape what I do. I look at these core principles as my personal set of project management standards. This core approach is something that I think we should…

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End of year wrap-up: using apps to track my year’s productivity

January 4, 2016

I’ve signed up for a number of premium accounts over the year for productivity apps and trackers—part of the semi-realistic appeal of an ‘organized self’ that I strive for as a project manager but never quite attain. I thought I’d try to make something of it this year, as well as data from all of the apps I use to track things like my steps, books I’ve read, music, and more. This was my first full year of freelancing and working from home, and I hit some big milestones for myself as the months went by: April-May 2015 – went to 2 conferences (shout-out to #CreateUpstate and #PeersConf!) and took my first full vacation since I’ve started working for myself (actually,…

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What’s in a name?

August 26, 2015

After many instances of pronouncing my Twitter username and this domain for friends and colleagues, I’ve realized I never included an explanation of this anywhere public. A super short history “Talkanatalka” began in college as a name/username for most of the things I did online. An ex-boyfriend of mine suggested the combination to me and I really liked how personal it was to me, but also mysterious in meaning. What it means My family is Ukrainian (both sets of grandparents immigrated over from Ukraine before my parents were born) and in Ukrainian, my name is Natalia (or some variation of that—I answer to any similar name in Ukrainian company), which then gets nicknamed to Natalka. In Ukrainian, that’s Наталка. My close…

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