I’ve written before about how I track my hours on pretty much everything every day (originally in a spreadsheet, later just in a journal) as a means of spotting inefficiencies and opportunities to systemize and/or outsource, but this week I took it a step further.  Or backwards.  Not sure.  Anyway, I tried to log my hours for the week in advance.

Basically I wrote my schedule for whole the week on Monday and then tried to adhere to it.

Here’s what was awesome: my goals got a lot more realistic. Instead of just “complete project X, I’m sure I’ll come up with a way,” I had a look at how many hours I was actually going to devote to it.  I’ve done things like “spend 5 hours on project X” before, but actually assigning those hours to specific times and days brought me a new level of clarity.

Also, I really liked how much less I had to, for lack of a better term, think.  Each morning, I not only knew what I was going to be working on that day, but also the day after that, and the day after that.  So many “what ifs” and “potentials” and “just in cases” magically vanished, and I was a lot freer to focus on the task at hand. There’s a potential cure for “entrepreneurial ADD” in there, I think.

Now, what sucked? Actually following the plan.  The first two hours of the day were great, and the stuff I got done then made it worth it in itself, but things drifted a fair bit after that.  And that’s OK, it’s the first week I tried it, so there are going to be setbacks.

To do something like this successfully, it’s imperative to shut off the phone and email programs. And cover up the voicemail indicator.  I lost a good amount of time because I couldn’t resist answering the phone, which blew the whole schedule up.  That said, one of the calls was for a drop everything, last minute deadline opportunity to pitch for a lucrative project.  The kind of “what if” call that explains the entire tendency to want to answer the phone every time, but also the kind of call that really doesn’t happen that often.  For this kind of scheduling system to work, I need to decide if I want to pursue that kind of work.  Ever. (Still waiting to hear if I got this one…)

Basically, scheduling the week in advance isn’t normal behaviour, and as such it requires some abnormal changes.  I’m still not sold on whether or not it’ll be worth it, but it’s deep enough in the “don’t do what everyone else does unless you want to get what everyone else gets” category that I’m going to try it for another week or two, or maybe at least until I can get an 80% schedule match, so I might have some more insights to share soon.

Just don’t call me to ask about them.

(Oh, and in case you didn’t notice, daily posts are done, partly because I didn’t schedule them in, but also because I think the practice was more valuable for me than for you, so I’ll stick to my journal for that and work on different content here.)

A one day break from, well, anything can easily become a two day break, which leads to the few days break, which leads to the “why not make it an even week” break, which quickly and nearly effortlessly can become an indefinite hiatus.

It’s true of fitness, habits, and yes, business.

One of the challenges to running your own business is that the hours are defined by you.  There’s no boss looking over your shoulder, no card to punch at the start and end of the day, just you.  Sure, your workload might dictate your time, but that’s a workload that was chosen by you as well, and when you get to, oh, I don’t know, Christmas/Hanukkah/Festivus/etc where in most cases the workload eases down while the rest of the world takes a break, it’s easy to take a few days off and then watch that time expand slowly.

In my case this year I took the 24th to the 27th off (yes, I’m aware that covered a weekend and two statutory holidays) with today, the 28th, being a slow “ease back in” day where I let my mind and body purge some of the excesses from the past few days.  But it very nearly became a full week, because I made the critical mistake of not actually scheduling a return date.

There are some who say that year end is the perfect time to double down and work straight through to gain an edge over your (presumably) slacker competitors.  I think there’s greater value in planned rest and recovery, but beware if it’s not strictly scheduled or you might find the time off was a lot longer than you thought it’d be.

Photo by Dan4th Nicholas

I’ve spent a lot of this week working on a new marketing program for January.  This is a good time of year to do that kind of thing, since most people are either on holidays or thinking about them, so getting a decision on a project during this window is like pulling teeth (though I did get one approval today, so add dentistry to my skill set…)

The thing is, spending a few days on something other than my core billable activity feels weird.  That said, I have mentors who say that working on marketing is the only core activity I should be doing, ever, but at this stage it feels like I might be doing it to avoid “real” work.

In other words, my marketing activities might be procrastination in disguise.

I’m pretty sure they’re not, but it’s been on my mind, especially as this project goes on and on for seemingly forever (I’m great at estimating technical work, but this is video and copywriting, which is new for me.)  Am I simply hiding from a slow period by “working on marketing?”

I think the answer comes from logging my work and measuring results.  There’s a cost to acquiring customers, and a cost for running campaigns, even if the only expenditure is time.  I’ll be able to directly measure the feedback that this upcoming campaign generates, and the key is to see if it’s working.  If it’s not, and I find myself spending time working on another system that’s almost the same, then yes, that’s procrastination.

For the first run through though, it’s solid marketing work, plain and simple.  Projects like this should be big enough to be capable of generating a measurable result, but small enough that if it’s a total failure (as many early lessons can be) then I haven’t lost too much in terms of sunk time.

Truthfully, this one’s a bit larger than I’d like, but I’ll be able to track if it was worth it in a fairly short period of time, so there’s a good outcome either way – there’ll be more customers, in which case I’ll double down on the program, or it’ll flop and I’ll know if I’m “hiding” from tougher work if I catch myself wasting time doing more of the same.

Photo by Nathaniel F

I think I’ve tapped into another one of those obvious things that need to be spoken aloud before they become obvious.

In business, and in life, we know what to do, on at least a basic level, to get the results we’re looking for.  I’m going to use diet for my example on this one because it’s something most readers can relate to.  And with diet, if you want to lose weight, it comes down to eating less than you need.

BUT, there’s a clever trick.  It doesn’t matter what, because it’s different for everyone.  Maybe you drink a big glass of water or eat an apple before each meal.  Or maybe you have a magic number of calories that you burn at the gym every day to hit your quota.  Or maybe every meal needs 75% of your plate to be salad.

Whatever.  If losing weight is the outcome, then the clever trick is the mechanism you use to get to the outcome.  And it’s not miraculous, but it’s soooo much easier.  You’ve got your magic bullet.  And one fantastic day, you achieve your goal.

And you stop using your trick.  Gradually, over time, it stops becoming a ritual.  You got what you needed, you decide to use that mental space to tackle another goal, or you just get bored with it.

And results start to decay.  Things start to backslide.  Maybe you notice it early on, which might be even more dangerous: “oh, I know how to fix that, no problem, I’ll start tomorrow.”  And that becomes “oh, I’m almost back where I started, but it’s still not as bad as it was, and I know the clever trick, so I’ll get to it in a bit, no problem.”  And then you’re at that spot where you’re in worse shape than you were, and the urgency just isn’t there, because obviously it’s not important to you or you wouldn’t be in this mess (these are the tricks our minds play so we can stay sane.)

Through goal achievement, we’ve inadvertently set ourselves on the path to greater failure.

Three possible ways to avoid this:

Set unachievable goals. OK, maybe not, or you’ll never feel like you’re getting traction, but continually moving targets can work.  Keep your eye on the next goal achievement mountain, or if there’s no more progress to be had, like in weight loss when you get down to an ideal weight, shift the goal to maintaining a streak of using your clever trick.

Make it someone else’s problem.  Lots of things can be systemized and delegated. Not everything, but lots.  Once you’ve gotten your mind wrapped around a process, see if there’s a way that you can get someone else to do it for you, an be accountable for it.  Now you can’t get to failure, unless you forget to make sure things get done (and that can be delegated too.)

Get ongoing coaching.  External accountability can not only take you to the next level; it can help keep you there.  Think about it at all phases in the goal achievement process, and remember that it might need different resources in the beginning, middle, and ongoing stages.

I’m convinced it’s not just me; many of us seem to have trouble holding on to gains in various areas of our lives that would be so easy to maintain if we’d just keep doing what worked.  Awareness and planning for this are key to ensure your efforts aren’t a total waste of time.

Photo by cdrussorusso

TED Talks have been around a while.  The current intro video says there’s something like 900 available online.  I can’t say for certain which one I watched first, but I was an early adopter, subscribing to the podcast feed, and so on.  In recent years, I fell away from them, mostly because (and I realize how much I let others drive my decisions here, but it was expedient) I kept hearing people at work talk about them, but their lives never seemed to change as a result.

Lately we’ve been tuning back into them, having cut cable and needing something to fill some gaps in the day (and the Apple TV makes it easy) and I’ve noticed something interesting about TED talks.  Two things, really.

The first is that some of them contain Really Interesting Information that I can use to shape my future actions.

The second is that the bastards put dates at the beginning of them.

As an admitted data hoarder who also, by his own admission, had a chance to watch all of these much earlier than, say, right now, this is crushing at first.  To watch a video that’s been online for 2, 3, or even 5 years now, and see a nugget of wisdom that could change the next day, week, or even lifetime of my business, well, that hurts a little.

Like I should have stopped goofing off training and implementing to watch one more thing.

And the key, well, one of them, is that the information might not have meant as much as it did right now if I hadn’t watched it with the set of experience and problems that I have facing me right now.

The other key is to remember that the entire extent of human knowledge has been available long before the advent of the modern internet.  If you’re a data hoarder, there’s a good chance you’ve visited a library in the past (insert large number) years, so let me remind you that the sheer physicality of it all reminded you pretty quickly that there’s a ton of knowledge out there that you’ll never ever get to, ready or not, and any pretense of simply trying to keep up with the “new stuff” is a pipe dream and, keeping with key #1, a distraction.

Hey, data hoarder: you’re going to find information that you need that was available well before you found it. That’s OK. You found it, and the real test is what you do with it now.

Photo by dfulmer

Newsflash: nothing you do yourself is sustainable.

At least not forever.  Even allowing for some pretty cool medical breakthroughs, whatever you’re doing now isn’t going to be possible for you to do in 150 years.  For other efforts, a time scale is a big help.

Because just about everything is sustainable, at least for a short enough period of time.  And sometimes a short period is all you need: late night deadline crunches, big pushes in the week before a launch, and so on.  As long as you factor in some downtime for when it’s over, sprints like that are just part of the game.

It’s the never-ending sprints that are a problem, in business as well as most other things in life.  The most common area I see them in, and yes, feel them in, is the case where you haven’t yet built an organization to scale, and you’re doing everything yourself.  And usually that means everything.  Hell, even when you start to get a bit of leverage, those initial steps of delegation can take more work than just keeping on by your lonesome, which is why lots of people fall back to plan A and never make it further.

So: massive effort.  I’m a fan, as long as there’s an exit in mind.  Either the project has an end date or there’s a sequence that’s clearly laid out to pass the work on to other people (and/or automated systems) before the question of sustainability comes up.  Have that date, and that plan, firmly in mind before you start, and you might come out the other side relatively unscathed.

Neglect that plan, or ignore the fact that you’re missing the deadline, and you’re putting yourself in a position of increasing desperation as you try to keep things afloat with rapidly decreasing stamina.

Photo by jared

Regular practice is a powerful thing. Whether it’s daily exercise, meditation, journaling or blogging, or whatever else you might do on a recurring basis, these habits provide framing for the rest of your day and allow you to exercise discipline in small doses.  They are transformational.

And they hurt like hell to implement.

I’m talking pain like frustration, mostly, though if you start an exercise program the pain can be quite real at first (today’s post was inspired by my new running practice. I may not be able to walk tomorrow!)

I’m convinced that the reason most people don’t have more practices in their lives – positive ones, anyway – is that they disrupt far too much of your current routine when you start them.

Take the running one, for example. I went out first thing this morning, and it felt fantastic.  I was pumped.  The endorphins were racing for hours after.  And around noon, I crashed.  Hard.  Trying to nap on the office floor hard.  My body simply wasn’t used to the exertion.  And it cost me a few checkmarks on the day’s todo list.

Even the non-physical routines can cause uncomfortable disruption.  For example, you might not budget your time properly for the rest of the day, so this new commitment you’ve made to, say, meditating causes you to miss making three important sales calls.

Really, it’s no different than any other change in your life or business.  When I hire someone new, I always (always!) forget how much extra work I have to do to train them for the first week or so (leverage notwithstanding.)  A new practice is no different, and for it to survive the first three sessions (let alone the 21 days they say it takes to become a habit,) it’s critical that you recognize and schedule room for the disruption when you get going.

But the rewards of having multiple practices in place, if only the sheer leadership points they confer, oh, that makes it very worth the effort. Just plan accordingly.

Photo by Crystl

I’ve spent the past several months now posting five times a week here, and I’ve recently started extending that practice to a few other ventures, both blogs and email newsletters.  All told, I probably write between 3000 and 5000 words a week on various topics, which I guess would work out to a decent book’s worth of writing a year (minus the need to edit etc.)

And I do it all effortlessly; I just sit down at the keyboard and away I go.  Zero writer’s block. Sure, I spend part of the day planning topics in the back of my mind, but overall it comes pretty easy to me and I don’t get stuck.  Here’s why:

A few months back I was studying the work of an internet marketer who mails his list twice a day, a commitment that I’m not nearly ready to embrace, and it’s a frequency that I don’t think my markets are ready for anyway.  (I’m pretty sure it was John Alanis, but one trick to keeping throughput up is to avoid extensive research.)

So, (probably) John put it something like this: how many emails do you send a day?

And that opened the door, through which I kicked my writer’s block, never to return.  Forget about emails received; I easily send 20 to 60 emails every day, averaging a paragraph or so each.  And somehow, they always just flow out of me.  Yes, they’re often replies, so they’re in response to a stimulus of some kind, usually a question.  But how hard is it to come up with a question or topic?

Once I had that mindset locked down, writer’s block became a thing of the past.  All I need now is a headline, and I can put 300-450 words together no problem.  Then I find a picture to go with them (I haven’t found one yet for this post, but I’m thinking a hammer smashing a block, because hey, literal much?) off of Flickr (I have a Creative Commons search bookmarked,) and I’m done for the night (these posts are usually done the night before, then postdated to some time in the morning.)

So there you have it – blog posts are just like emails, which I already know how to do. Writer’s block cured.

What do you do every day that’s similar to something you want to start?

Photo by razvan.orendovici

24 hours in a day. Less if you’re selfish enough to sleep.

This is the Big Trick, increasing the number of hours you “work” without actually doing them.  I first got a taste of this when I co-founded a podcast for a local non-profit.  Boom, 300 hours of outreach for every hour put into it.

But it took a while for that to kick in.  When we think of leverage, it’s common to think about people, but people are generally the last step in the process to leverage mastery in a self-funded business, from what I’ve been seeing.

Here are a few ways where I’ve been gaining leverage without having to recruit, train, or sell to people:

Mass emails. When I collect an email address, they get automatic followup emails.  No, it doesn’t look like its fresh from me (people are so used to this that when I do send a mail by hand to these audiences, I include real time sports scores, which is kind of like a nicer version of including a photo of me holding the day’s newspaper, hostage-style.)   But modern software means I can send these mails on a schedule, and automatically turn them off or switch the sequence up based on actions people take.  It’s a massive time saver.

Screencasts. I have a Goto Meeting account, but I hardly ever use it directly unless I need to run an idea by a client.  Generally, I record screencasts and send them over for people to review before they ask me a single question.  As a tech guy, I’m sensitive to any app that takes an iota of my CPU cycles, but I leave Screenflow running most of the time so I can record stuff on the fly with minimal friction if I think it’s something I need to share with my team.

This blog. Again, a hint into the “why do this every day?” question – I post these things every work day, and just like the podcast example I started with, I get read a zillion times more than I read.  The “average time on site” stat in analytics is a massive teacher.  Trust me, it’s an incredibly cool feeling when you can multiply the number of visitors per day by the average time per visit and it’s more time than you spent making the content.  It’s even cooler when that total time per day is more than the 24 hours that exist in a day. And then you get to calculate multiples. From an academic “building a business” perspective, it’s obvious, but when stuff gets real and it really happens, it’s damned inspiring.

Voicemail. Oh how I love voicemail.  It’s the cheapest virtual assistant you’ll ever have.  What, $4 a month for a machine that’ll record your messages and email them to you?  Why would you ever answer the phone and take that away from yourself?

Oh, and webinars (with recordings) are next.

Don’t get me wrong, getting people involved in your business is awesome, but automated tools are way cooler, because you can focus on duplicating what you already do without having to learn human psychology to get people to actually repeat your process.

Whether you have a job or a business (or a business that’s a job,) leverage is what’s going to take you further.  Do you have it?

I’ve been thinking about food and nutrition a lot lately, in part because the takeout options around my office leave a lot to be desired.  There are four grocery stores within a ten minute walk, which in theory is cheaper than prepared food, but without full kitchen facilities it quickly becomes a game of annoying compromise and the most convenient options aren’t anywhere near the most productive.

By productive, I mean the foods that’ll avoid triggering a food coma after you eat them, and manage to keep you sharp throughout the day.  Staying away from simple carbs is part of the battle, but so is getting enough calories in at the right pace to tide you through to the next meal.

Maybe I’ve thought about this too much, but maybe there’s some science I’m missing out on regarding the best nutrition choices for high-thinking desk work.  I hate needles, but from time to time I think about an IV drip that’d deliver the very best food for my brain, directly into my veins.  Extreme?  Well, yeah, but a productive day at the office is that important to me.

In lieu of that, I’ve been looking into adopting a regular habit of sports nutrition products, like Vega Whole Food Health Optimizer, which I’ve already been having for breakfast for most of this year. It’s easy to digest, which means the food coma shouldn’t happen and I’ll have more energy available for thinking.  The downside is that eating the same thing all the time can be boring.

That said, boring also means easy to decide.  Eating the exact same thing all the time, with the proper motivation behind it, can be a good balance against the annoyance of trying to figure out what to have to lunch (no joke, maybe it’s just me or my location, but I’ve lost half hours at a time deliberating between the options at the various groceries near me.  You want to talk about boring, desktop kitchen improv wins every time in that category.)

The other thing I’ve been worried about, if I go much further down this road, is if keeping to a set food routine will sap my discipline too much.  Discipline is like a battery, and it needs to recharge regularly.  There’ve been some cool studies about people who did some simple task requiring self control, and then later were much worse at performing some other unrelated task requiring further discipline.  This is where rigorous time tracking kicks in – if my number of breaks and time to complete tasks starts to go up, I’ll know I need to back off on the monotonous food plan rigidity.

It’s early in the process, but so far it makes sense and seems to be working out – good cars need good fuel, and so on.

Oh, and stimulants including caffeine and energy drinks are all fair game, as far as I’m concerned.  I find I don’t suffer from a crash from these, and they increase alertness, which is what it’s all about.

(And yes, this is one of those “oh, you’re thinking of starting a company? Here’s what that can do to your brain” cautionary tale posts…)