Posted by Duff OMelia
Fri, 07 Sep 2007 15:05:00 GMT
For the past year and a half or so, I decided to spend less time consulting and more time creating businesses. For a long time I knew that I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but I wasn’t really spending any time doing it. It took me a few years actually to make the realization that if you want something to happen, you need to spend some time working toward the goal in a disciplined way.
So I had decided to spend about 30 hours consulting per week rather than the typical 40. I would spend the other 10 hours creating businesses. Now that I’ve been doing this for awhile, I’ve come to some conclusions.
It’s amazing what can be accomplished in about 10 hours per week. I’ve been quite surprised about it. Here’s what I mean. Let’s say I have a project that I think will take about a month to complete if I were working on it full time. At the normal 40 hours per week that would work out to be about 160 hours for this project. If I only worked on it for 10 hours per week, I would have thought that it would take me 16 weeks to complete the project.
It turns that it’s been taking me much less time than I anticipated. I would have thought that because I was working 1/4 of the time, I would only accomplish 1/4 of the work. Instead, it seems as though I’m accomplishing much more than 1/4 of the work in that time. How is that possible? Why is it that I feel so productive for those 10 hours?
I think it’s because there’s a whole bunch of time during the week that I’m not working the project. By the time I’m ready to do some actual work on it, I’ve spent a ton of time mulling over things and making determinations about what the next steps should be. These determinations are often not even conscious thoughts. But by the time I’m ready to pick up that project again, I feel like I’m ready to code like the wind.
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Posted by Duff OMelia
Wed, 28 Feb 2007 15:22:00 GMT
I’ve been wondering about how much of our mental state is based solely on our expectations.
Consider this. The day begins and I plan on accomplishing 10 specific tasks. By the end of the day I’ve only achieved 6 of them. I can feel discouraged. I can feel like a failure. I can feel as if I just wasn’t very productive.
Now change the scenario just a bit. The same day begins and I plan on accomplishing 4 specific tasks rather than the 10 I was predicting before. I work just as hard and I’m just as productive so I get to the end of the day and I’ve accomplished those same 6 tasks. I feel great! I’m an efficient machine. I accomplished 2 more tasks than I thought I would. Can anything stop me?
The only difference between the two scenarios was my prediction for how much I thought I’d accomplish. I worked just as hard and just as efficiently but my mental state at the end of each scenario was markedly different.
It’s interesting to me that we know that we’re not clairvoyant yet our mental state can be affected by our ability to predict the future.
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Posted by Duff OMelia
Wed, 17 Jan 2007 16:30:00 GMT
I just read the following about joy from The Life You’ve Always Wanted by John Ortberg:
We all live with the illusion that joy will come someday when conditions change. We go to school and think we will be happy when we graduate. We are single and are convinced we will be happy when we get married. We get married and decide we will be happy someday when we have children. We have children and decide we will be happy when they grow up and leave the nest – then they do, and we think we were happier when they were still at home.
And this:
When we celebrate, we exercise our ability to see and feel goodness in the simplest gifts of God. We are able to take delight today in something we wouldn’t have even noticed yesterday. Our capacity for joy increases.
Some take home lessons for me:
- Yes, I need to place some emphasis on setting goals for the future and working today to help achieve objectives tomorrow. Not as much emphasis as I’ve been placing, though. I shouldn’t be so focused on tomorrow that I’m missing the wonder of today.
- I need to start taking much more notice of the incredible things that happen on a daily basis right in front of me.
- Joy in life and achieving goals aren’t tied together. One is not dependent on the other.
This is the day which the LORD has made; Let us rejoice and be glad in it.
- Psalm 118:24
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Posted by Duff OMelia
Wed, 15 Nov 2006 13:29:00 GMT
There has been much written in the area of setting goals for one’s life. It seems that most successful folks attribute some of their success to the fact that they had very clear, very big, and very specific written-down goals.
Most people think way too small. If they’ve even established some goals, those goals are often much smaller than they should be. People seem to underestimate their potential and this can often contribute to a lack of fulfillment in one’s life. To combat this tendency, many authors would say that your goals should be ginormous. They should be so huge that you have no idea how you’re going to accomplish them. Dream really big dreams and you’ll achieve much more than you thought possible.
This all makes sense if you’re talking about long term goals – 30 year goals, 10 year goals, 3 year goals, and 1 year goals. For these kinds of time frames, I think that having incredibly huge dreams about your future helps you. I can see very little downside to having goals that are seemingly beyond your reach – when you’re creating your long-term goals.
I’ve run into some trouble when trying to apply these principles to daily goals. There’s a major downside to setting goals that are too big when you’re working with a daily time frame. That downside is discouragement.
I’ve had many days when I’ve felt disappointed at the end of the day. Some days I’ve felt unproductive. Other days I’ve felt like I just didn’t get nearly enough done as I should have. It’s pretty easy to feel like a failure if your daily goals are too big. Disappointment comes from unmet expectations. The failure I was feeling was not because I didn’t accomplish enough that day. It was because I didn’t accomplish as much as I thought I would at the start of the day. If my expectations for the day are unrealistic, it’s a recipe for continual discouragement. Discrouragement can then lead to other problems because it’s tough to be optimistic when you’re disappointed.
I’m not arguing that you should low-ball your daily goals. I’m not saying you should turn into a daily sloth and only set a few easy goals each day so you can feel accomplished and stay positive. This wouldn’t be living up to your potential.
Instead, I’d argue that a daily goal list should be broken down into 2 sections:
- The first section is the must-have list. This is the list of things that you need to do every single day no matter what. These things ought to be done regardless of what happens that day. If you’re in a coma, then you don’t need to accomplish the must-haves. No other excuse holds any water. It’s the section of your daily goals that you’re not willing to compromise on. If the things on this section aren’t done by the end of the day, you don’t go to sleep until they are.
- The second section is the nice-to-have list. Every other goal you have for the day is in this list. It’s ok to think bigger here because everything in this list is gravy. It’s nice if you get them done but it’s certainly not the end of the world if you don’t accomplish every nice-to-have goal for the day.
This type of approach builds up your confidence and leads to more discipline in your life because you form the daily habit of always doing what you say you’re going to do that day. It also encourages you to stretch a bit with the nice-to-haves.
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Posted by Duff OMelia
Tue, 17 Oct 2006 10:02:00 GMT
I’ve often had days when I wonder if I’m making any progress at all toward some long-term goals. It seems pretty easy to think this way given that the goals are long-term and we often only consider the hear and the now. These
questions of progress can do some good. They can also hurt.
The downside of these thoughts is that it’s easy to draw the conclusion that no progress is in fact being made. If no progress is being made, what is the point of doing all of this work anyway? Will I ever see a payoff for my labors? It doesn’t seem like it. Maybe I should just quit. Perhaps that long term goal made no sense. Maybe it just wasn’t for me. It would probably be better if I invested my time in other pursuits. These negative thoughts are not helpful.
The upside of questions of progress is that they can cause introspection to occur which can lead to significant breakthroughs. Perhaps it feels like no progress is being made because the path needs a slight adjustment. Perhaps I can work smarter on this goal and bring about its achievement sooner than I thought possible. Perhaps I need to set some shorter term goals to give myself more feedback about the progress. Or perhaps it really is time to assess the worthiness of the goal and whether I’ve learned anything that causes me to question its value.
Most goals that really matter are the long term variety. Achievement of these goals matters because it often takes time and energy to do great things. It takes time and energy to change yourself enough such that the achievement of some goals is even possible. Simply put, achieving long term goals is hard. It’s much easier to quit. It’s much easier to not even establish long term objectives in the first place. As is often the case, the difficult path leads to the more rewarding outcome.
Here are two examples I’ve been thinking about recently:
- I have spent about 3 years learning to trade the stock market. I’ve often wondered why it’s taking so long to become an excellent trader. I’ve often wondered whether I’ll ever get it. I’ve often felt like I wasn’t making any progress. The reality, though, is that a ton of progress has been made, even though it often doesn’t feel that way. I didn’t know anything about the stock market a few years ago. If I really look back in time, it’s easy to see the progress. If I consider where I’ve come from, if I consider where I started, the progress becomes evident. So will I ever get it? I’m quite confident that I will because I’ve had an incredible mentor. This ensures that the things I’m doing every day to get closer to that goal do in fact work. Hundreds of other people have taken the same steps and become excellent traders. It takes time. It takes patience. And it takes a ton of perserverance. This is one of those goals I never plan on giving up on. I plan on pursuing it for the rest of my life.
- Another long term goal has led to questions of progress – Soapadoo. I would like Soapadoo to be a very successful business that provides a ton of value to people. I want it to be so remarkable and useful that folks can’t help but tell others about it. Soapadoo certainly hasn’t achieved these goals yet. If the site were truly remarkable, the traffic to it would have exploded. At this point, there’s been a steady rise in traffic each month, but it’s certainly not viral by any means. Are these Soapadoo goals achievable? I believe so, but I don’t know for certain. Does that mean I should give up? No! Hear’s why – I haven’t even been trying for very long. A few months is just not a long time when it comes to creating a business. It takes time to refine a business to be what customers are looking for. It takes time to market a web site. It’s easy to start a business and then wonder a few weeks later why it hasn’t been an incredible success. If you listen to successful entrepreneurs, it often takes months or even years for an entrepreneurial venture to gain some traction. Overnight successes are rare.
So, for me, I need to keep plugging away every day. I need to ensure that the things I’m working on every day take me a step closer toward these long term objectives. I need to be disciplined and determined.
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Posted by Duff OMelia
Mon, 11 Sep 2006 07:42:00 GMT
I recently learned a few lessons about planning and achieving long term objectives.
I used to do very little planning. I’d spend all of the available time I had on a daily basis working away at both short term and long term objectives. I’d just work and work and keep on working and have no end in sight each day. As you might imagine, this lack of planning approach didn’t work. I worked my tail off and never felt like I had achieved much.
Then my wife Kelly helped me to understand that it would be much better if I broke my day down into time slots. Each time slot was an amount of time I desired to spend on each goal every day. A basic time boxing approach. So there were time slots for Bible study, for consulting, for trading and learning about the stock market, for creating businesses, etc. If I didn’t get too much done during a time slot, that was ok. I did my best that day using the time I had available. I didn’t need to keep beating myself up about not accomplishing enough. I was spending the time I had intended to spend, I was living consciously, and I was living my life with a long and steady marathon pace that worked.
There have been weeks though when things didn’t seem to work out very well. Last week was one of them. I think I’ve just now realized why. You see, last week was a busy Soapbox week. I released a new feature that bloggers started talking about. (CenterNetworks, TDavid, Schulzone, TheStuffedDog, and my friend Rafe) There seemed to be so much that had to get done. So I bulled through and did those things. I was really enjoying it and it was stuff that was fun to do. I had started sprinting to accelerate the “creating businesses” goal because that’s what needed to be done that week. This sprint was at the expense of the other goals. That extra time I spent sprinting had to come from somewhere. I knew at the time what I was doing but I justified it by saying things like “it’s ok… I’ll catch up later…” Or, “sometimes these things take precedence…” Whatever. It boils down to not sticking to the plan.
I was able to make a ton of progress in one area of my life. But the other areas were neglected. So I got to the end of the week and felt like I couldn’t keep up with things. I felt like life was so hectic and overwhelming. I felt like I wasn’t accomplishing the things I had set out to accomplish. Some of the balls being juggled were hitting the floor. All of these feelings were completely justified because I HADN’T accomplished the things I had wanted to. I HADN’T made some progress toward each of the objectives. Some of the objectives were completely abandoned on a given day. Zero progress on that objective.
This “sprint on one goal at the expense of others” is not a good idea for me. It worked much better when I took a disciplined, long term approach and completely time boxed each of my activities for the day. Then I always got to the end of the week feeling like I was juggling all of the balls successfully. I was taking a step each day toward each of the goals. No balls were ever hitting the floor. No feeling of being overwhelmed. No feeling of a hectic life. I had taken the finite amount of time I had, broken it up into sections, and worked for each of the sections. I did the best I could with the time I had been given.
My friend Joe said it well – ‘Long lasting self-discipline is better than doing things in spurts that ultimately don’t stick.’ Joe was talking in the context of losing some weight. I think it’s a generally applicable principle of goal achievement.
Another realization I had was that there are things on my daily list that MUST get done and there are things that are nice to haves that I really enjoy working on. I realize now that I need to completely finish the must-haves before even thinking about the nice-to-haves. If I do them in the other order, the time slots for the nice-to-haves often get extended leaving less time for the must-haves. I think it’s a much better approach to finish the must-haves first and then know that anything else I accomplish that day is gravy. It’s almost like I need to work on the must-haves to deserve the opportunity to work on the things I’m really looking forward to doing. I’m working toward that reward which makes the must-haves more enjoyable.
I’m no longer going to justify the sprint. The marathon approach seems to work better.
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Posted by Duff OMelia
Sun, 16 Jul 2006 10:45:00 GMT
The folks at 37 Signals recently published a book called Getting Real which has had a pretty significant impact on how I develop software. 37 Signals has been quite successful in creating simple, useful web applications. I’m trying to imitate many of things they’ve done because what they’ve done works. Why try to create my own system from scratch when I can imitate something that’s been shown to work?
This is the heart of mentoring. Many of the books I’ve read about successful people talk about the advantages of mentoring. When you find a mentor, you can typically save yourself years of time because the mentor can help you determine which parts of your study are important and which don’t matter. I’ve seen this in my own life in learning how to trade the stock market. I’ve been learning how to trade for 3 years. If I didn’t have a mentor, it probably would have taken me a decade to reach the point that I’m already at. It’s ridiculously efficient to learn from the successes and failures of a mentor.
Learning from published material is certainly not as great as having a personal relationship with a mentor. Even so, you can learn a ton from folks you don’t know personally. This is what I’m doing with the 37 Signals guys. I don’t know them personally but they have affected most of the decisions I make when developing a web site. I’ve already started to see some benefits of their approach as I’ve developed Soapbox. Rather than trying to guess what my customers want, I’ve been focused on releasing something that provides people some value and letting them drive the features they find necessary. It’s been interesting to see that a feature I didn’t think would be useful has been suggested by an enormous percentage of the people who have used the site. Person after person made the same suggestion. I can now see the advantages of having that feature.
If I wasn’t imitating 37 Signals, it would have taken me many more months to release Soapbox and the site would have been much more complicated and harder to use. Getting Real is an excellent book that could help your business even if you’re doing something other than software development.
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Posted by Duff OMelia
Wed, 03 May 2006 07:54:00 GMT
It’s something we’ve all heard before and it’s something we’ve all said at some point. In a previous post, I wrote about not needing a ton of money to create a business. Instead, we can use our time and energy to get things started. The question I’d like to address is how do we find the time to achieve the goals we’ve set out to achieve when it feels like there’s not enough time in the day?
I’ve come to the conclusion recently that if you want to achieve a long term goal, you’ve got to spend some bit of time on it every single day (or better yet 6 days a week.) If you’re not taking a step toward that goal each day, that goal just never seems to get accomplished.
Here’s an example. For many years, I’ve had a goal to create a business of some kind as a way to move past the idea of exchanging my time for money. I’ve wanted to create a running system that provides value to people and compensates me more passively than consulting would. It’s been on the goal list for a whole bunch of years. No progress though. Nothing done for a long time.
Then recently I decided that I was going to spend approximately 2 hours per day creating businesses. In the past month and a half, I’ve made great progress toward creating a business. It’s a wonderful feeling knowing that I’m taking at least a step or two every day.
Will the business work? I don’t know yet. I plan on creating another if it fails. And then another. And another. I plan on failing and learning from those failures until a business that I create works. It’s perfectly fine to fail as long as I learn from the failure. I feel much less pressure now because my ego is no longer wrapped up in the outcome. It could be 10 years before I create a successful business. If it takes that long, I could be an expert in how not to start a business.
Where did I find the time to spend about 12-15 hours per week creating businesses? It was pretty simple really. I wrote my current schedule down on a piece of paper and then I figured out which parts of my daily schedule I wanted to change to accommodate the 2 hours per day. The time had to come from somewhere. I had to give something up in order to add something new. I decided that I was no longer going to spend 40 hours per week consulting. I was only going to spend 30. That gave me 10 hours extra per week to put toward starting businesses. I found another 10 hours per week by deciding to work at home rather than driving to an office every day.
I would think most people would say something like they can’t just decide to go to work less and they can’t just decide to work at home. Well, they certainly could if they wanted to but that’s not the point. They just need to find something else in their schedule that’s less important than the goal they’re trying achieve. Is watching 4 hours of TV per day more important than achieving your long term goals? How about other leisure time? Can you give some of that up? Once you get down on paper exactly what you’re doing every day, it becomes a pretty simple exercise to identify the areas that can be expunged.
Other people in the world find time to achieve big goals. Ginormous goals. Michael Dell has the same 24 hours that we do. Where did he find the time to create Dell Computer? Steve Jobs doesn’t get a 35 hour day. Yet he manages to head up Apple Computer and Pixar. How do the successful business owners in our society find the time to achieve such big goals? They don’t do what the masses do. They’re not getting drunk in a bar. They’re not watching every sporting event each week. They manage their time and they choose to spend their time differently than everyone else. They’re able to delay gratification and work while everyone else is sleeping. It’s not evil to watch a sporting event. It’s just a choice you’re making about what’s important to you.
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