Hanging out on Twitter this morning, @jesseblayne made a remark about getting started. I replied with a more or less a blog post’s worth of info packed into 140 characters. This that blog post.

First, some benefits:

1. Writing makes you think, thinking helps you learn.
2. Having a list of tasks you know took one hour is incredibly valuable, you know what your time is worth.
3. Saves time over the long term. You do your thinking ahead of time allowing yourself to rapidly complete tasks.

I have a system that works really well for me, and could work really well for you. It requires a bit of work, but it’s not hard. And it requires a timer. The work is broken down into hour chunks, and this is non-negotiable. The whole system depends on being able to walk away from a task in an hour.

The system is multi-staged. There is a natural progression from forming an idea to executing it.

Let’s get started.

When I have an idea for something, or I need to get things done, here’s the typical sequence:

1. I write, draw or jot down lists on scrap paper. I have a bunch of B5 paper left over from a previous project, or I’ll fold letter size paper in half, 5 1/2 by 8 1/2. Folding A4 in half is B5 is I recall correctly.
2. These notes are then (or later) entered into a web application task list. I use the Trac system, same as WordPress (just coincidence, Trac is a good system.)
3. The Trac tasks are triaged and refactored into ~1 hr chunks. For example, I’m working on a new chapter for Blog Post Engineering (Repurposing). This was initially entered into Trac as a single task, but that’s too long. I need to spend about 10 minutes and break out all the section of that chapter as separate tasks of about 45 minutes.
4. Execute! Once the tasks are chunked down into small pieces, it’s easy to select something interesting to work on.

Write it down

There is something magical about writing things down. It makes us think at the same time as taking action. Synergy. There’s probably weird neurological changes happening, neurons firing, synapses connecting. Or whatever.

All I know is that when I write it down, I learn it better.

I suspect most bloggers are the same (or they wouldn’t be bloggers).

Enter into Trac tasking

I use the Trac system.

You can use anything you want. Basecamp is great system if you’re collaborating; I’m using it for a couple of projects.

The key thing is that following up your writing with a little data entry further locks the task into your mind. It makes you think about what you’re doing. In other words, the data entry itself isn’t all that important, it’s the thinking that’s most important, and entering the task into your todo list (or whatever) makes you think.

Triage and refactor into 1 hour chunks

This is what an hour’s work looks like to me:

1. Review previous hour’s tasks, check for pointers to next tasks
2. Review Trac tasking
3. Do the work. This should take between 30 to 45 minutes.
4. Document the work, triage and refactor as necessary. Documentation is best accomplished as you work. It makes it a lot easier to keep track of what got done, and you capture really important details along the way.
5. Task out the next hour. Once your finished with the actual work, you should have 2 or 3 little tasks that get you started into the next hour of work. Write these at the end of your hour summary for review the start of the next hour.

Execute!

I cannot explain in words how phenomenally productive this system has been for me. Once the tasking is down at the hour level, I don’t have to think. I know I can pretty much tackle any task and an hour later, I’m done with it. Or if not done, I’ve made enough progress to feel really good about it.

I suspect it’s not really the exact system that matters. The important part is I’ve found a system that fits how I work, my attention span, allows me to balance the fun stuff (graphics and coding) with maintenance and testing.

Handling open-ended tasks

Sometimes, a task goes into the system that turns out to be a minor career.

For example, about a week ago, I needed to run rake db:migrate to synch up my data model with the MySQL database for a little Ruby on Rails project.

4 hours later, this has turned into figuring out which of 4 possible combinations of MySQL are installed on the Macbook. Not fun. This task still isn’t factored properly. When it is, there will be a blog post somewhere on how to figure out which of 4 MySQL installations one needs for which purpose.

Post from: There Is NO Box

Tasking into hour long chunks

I’ve had several screencast tasks hanging around in my todo list.

So I just spent an hour and scripted 3 of them. They will be much easier to make now that I know what I want to say. Each are written “out by the numbers.”

Sam Carpenter of CentraTel pounds repeatedly on the notion of linearizing your systems. This is a great notion. It works because it’s true, processes proceed one step at a time.

Which leads to the following observation: there is a cognitive difference between creating a process and following a process.

This is a no-brainer, really.

What’s more important is how these activities are monetized.

1. Creating processes is a high dollar skill. It takes time, effort, and experience to create working processes.
2. Following a procedure takes much less time, effort and experience.

By “monetizing,” I mean how these activities get invoiced.

Figuring stuff out should be invoiced at a high rate, provided the activity is novel (that is, you can’t outsource it). In other words, figuring out what to build is high dollar.

Actually building it is low dollar.

Whether the high dollar person needs to know all the details of the low dollar activity is a different discussion, and there are strong cases to be made on either. Ultimately, it depends on the nature of the work involved, and the expectations of who is doing the work and who is paying for it.

Think about your current blocker, that task you need to get done, but for some reason it’s not happening. Can you take a lateral approach?

Write down the very first thing that you need to do, even if it’s as simple as opening your web browser to log in to your project management system.

What’s your second step?

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Creating versus performing a process

Reviewing the results of 2009, it’s clear that speed of implementation can be divided into two parts:

1. Initiation, how fast to get started. Initiation is easy to understand, if you can’t get started on something right away, or at least Real Soon Now (for real), you’re unlikely to succeed at it.
2. Execution, how fast until payoff. Getting to payoff is lot trickier proposition, and in business, this is where most of the action appears to be.

Here’s an example.

Person A had a great idea. And got started on it right away. Initiation proceeded smoothly and quickly. The great idea consisted of creating a resource useful to small businesses and solo entrepreneurs. This idea was good. Still is good. But Person A’s strategy was to create the resource first, using that for “proof of technical capability.” Now, the resource is built, and Person A is prospecting for customers. But not making many sales.

There was no speed of execution here.

One year later, Person B had a similar idea and is already making a lot of sales. Because instead of building a resource, Person B built a list of customers. Then, when Person B had the Great Idea, it was simple to sell the idea to the customers already on Person B’s list. Having a large list of prospects who are already “bought in” trumps technical capability.

Speed of execution was rapid.

Discussion can go several directions from here.

Knowing what to build

Ben Saurez (“7 Steps to Freedom”) openly discusses one of the “dirty little secrets” of direct marketing: make a promise and collect money before building a product. If the amount of sales is unprofitable, just refund the money. Back in those days, people expected to wait up to 60 days for product delivery.

These days, your product better download instantly.

There are ways, legal ways, to measure interest in a product other than pre-selling it. This is not the place for that discussion.

Upshot: knowing exactly what to build speeds implementation.

Messenger matters more than message

The internet provides ubiquitous exposure. People aren’t very good at evaluating “what” but they feel they are better at evaluating “who.”

Here’s the break down. Given:

1. purchasing from someone with hundreds of thousands of words of content proving capability, or
2. purchasing from someone who they feel they “trust,”

trust will win every time. Even when it’s wrong.

Vital business lessons

Work on trust-building as much as capability-building.

Find a balance between the trust and capability to allow speed of execution.

Post from: There Is NO Box

Speed of Implementation: initiation and execution

Here’s the deal: the web allows consumers to publicly vent, complain, point out, and generally make their dissatisfaction about a product or service known.

And you know what?

99% of the time it doesn’t matter at all. All it does is make the complaining person look like… a complainer.

I just had an experience on another site where I mentioned a serious deficiency in the service in an article. The vendor wrote in a comment that, basically, I wasn’t using their system correctly.

Ok, I’m an idiot, I’m cool with that.

In the next round of emails, I find that no, in fact, they don’t understand what I’m trying to do.

It dawned on me that I was about to get sucked into something that was going to be a complete waste of time.

Solution is easy: delete the vendor’s comment, delete my observation in my article, declare victory!

The vendor looks smart, I look smart, it’s a win/win!

Later, I’ll just quietly find another vendor to handle those tasks. No fuss, no muss.

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Frame-controlled by a vendor

Note: This article was first published on Oct 28, 2007 @ 19:21. The material is still good. I’m republishing to bring it forward for tax season, and for testing the behavior of RSS on republished material.

Undoing multiple reconciliations in Quickbooks may roll the internal opening balance for a reconciliation to $0.0, despite whatever value the initial register entry. Here is one way to deal that.

1. Go to the first transaction.
2. Note amount of first transaction.
3. Note that date of the first transaction.
4. Start the reconcile.
5. For an initial balance of 0.0, choose the
   date of the first transaction for the
   reconciliation date, and the amount of the
   first transaction as the Ending Balance.
6. There should be only one relevant transaction
   on or before the reconciliation date, viz.,
   the opening balance. Reconcile that.
7. Proceed as normal for reconciliation.
8. Field tested.

Note: Quickbooks only allows undoing the “last” reconciliation. What this means is that it only backs out reconciliations one at a time. This really threw me, and resulted in me hiring an accountant to square away a set of poor reconciliations. But it is possible to back out at least 8 months of reconciliations in an account, taking it all the way back to the beginning.

Post from: There Is NO Box

Reconciling Quickbooks $0.0 opening balance

Mmmm....

Since you’re surfing it anyway, surf it with a purpose instead of wasting time looking for Paris Hilton’s latest antics (we miss you Paris!). Use that time to check up on your personal and business status. Check bank account balances and sales figures. If you’re a software developer, do a pass through yesterday and last night’s commits.

A really cool way to make this easy is to set up Firefox (or any other tabbed browser) to automatically open all the web pages necessary for due diligence through a single bookmark, or even better, make the morning due diligence your home page.

Here are the pages that my “Home” page launches in Firefox:

• Gmail (of course)
• clicktime.com for time tracking.
• The Trac website for my main project. This is where I read through the latest subversion commits.
• My personal PBWiki.
• The BaseCamp page for the project above. This allows me to check up on overall progress of the project.
• Bank account page. I do most of my banking with one, large (and nameless) bank, which has an excellent web interface (making up for lack of customer service).

As I mentioned, all of these links open as a set of tabs as my browser “Home” page. It’s very convenient, and I highly recommend this to anyone who is going to be drinking their coffee first thing in the morning in front of the computer come hell or high water.

There’s more!

As it turns out, I have more than one project going. For each of these projects, I have a set of tabbed browser pages that are invoked by a single bookmark. For example, my other coding project is invoked with these tabs:

• Trac pages (I really like Trac).
• Basecamp
• The project web site.

Other projects include a writing project and Collab21. Having everything necessary collected in one set of browser tabs is incredibly useful, and really allows me to leverage my time. I find it a structure that is conducive to creativity, without imposing a large burden of overhead. Note also that these are mostly web applications as well. Very convenient!

Lastly, I ask myself: “Have I communicated with customers today?”

How are you spending your morning? Is this productivity technique useful to you? Why or why not?

Post from: There Is NO Box

Morning Due Diligence — Making that first cup of coffee count!

Here’s how you deal with emotional issues of getting tooled by self-appointed arbiters of the internet and the new social media applications. That is, when you get “policed” by the chattering classes.

First, let’s examine how the real world works. Consider:

• Fact: If Brad Pitt does it, he’s cool.
• Fact: If you do the same thing, you’re a chump (putting it nicely).

A large number of people tout social media tools as breaking down barriers to communication between people.

A real, and very chilling side effect: you’re never more than a few clicks away from being ostracized.

When your every move, every piece of communication is subject to world-wide, public social scrutiny… you’re back in high school. Or worse.

As in high school, if you can’t score points, keep your mouth shut (fingers away from the keyboard) and focus on what you do best.

This is as old as the internet. Go back and read through some of the usenet flame wars for historical examples.

Here’s another example, a bit of hurt feelings in blogistan back at the dawn of sponsored tweets. In my opinion, both parties are being silly here. Matt Cutts needs no reason to follow or unfollow people. Shoemaker shouldn’t care one way or another.

Here’s concrete action you can take when you’re too emotionally wrapped around social media:

• Close your feed.
• Unfollow everyone not in your audience.
• If anyone bitches, they can just unfollow you. Or block them.
• Go do something else for a while. Like walk the dog. Or tell your mother you love her. Or both. I guarantee it will make you feel better.

I post publicly on twitter as @websiteweekend, my current business brand. You can also find me on twitter as @doolin, which is a very private, blocked feed. If I don’t know you personally, I won’t accept your request to follow me.

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Dealing With Self-Appointed Internet and Social Media “Police”

For a while, I was posting regularly on financial and economic matters. The need for that passed as the news became common knowledge. That is, the problems became real for ordinary people, not just for nutjobs screaming from the fringe.

But it’s not over yet. Even if the recession is officially over, the recovery will be anemic for years, until all the bad debt is either inflated away, or those liabilities are sold for market value to customers paying (essentially) cash money.

There are many things we can do individually. Most of these things are actions that the government and large corporations are panicking about. Unfortunately, large corporations and the government are working at cross-purposes to us, the taxpayers, who have to take care of ourselves no matter what the economic conditions or the tax rates.

Here’s a few things to consider:

1. Vote against every congress person that voted for the bailout bill. The bailout just “kicked the can” into years hence. When the bills come due, they will be bigger. That’s just math.
2. When possible, vote for congress people over the next few years that will reinstate all the financial controls we dismantled allowing this to happen.
3. Move your money to locally owned banks with no exposure to any of these “toxic instruments.” I do not know which these will be.
4. Stop spending and start saving. We have a deep recession coming in any case. There is nothing we can do about it. Everyone stopping spending and starting to save could result in a real depression, but the powers that be haven’t really left us any choice in the matter. The national economy isn’t as important to me as my personal economy.
5. Save for retirement, but don’t plan on retirement. That option is closing for people of middle age. I spoke with a woman at work last year, and she has lost over 50% of her life savings. She won’t ever retire. She can’t.
6. Get out and stay out of debt. Not only have so many people lost so much in their retirements, they are also in debt that they will never, ever be able to work their way out of.
7. Make sure you are prepared for disaster, which could be financial or from earthquake or whatever. Keep a couple of weeks water on hand, and month’s worth of cash. ATM only work when there is electricity and cash inside. Financially, I believe that danger has passed, but if you are in California (or Pacific Rim), you are still earthquake prone. Be prudent. Hedge for “worst case.” It won’t hurt, and it will make you feel better.
8. Bust your ass at whatever job you have, and get a second job if you can. My father was able to find work all through the Great Depression. He would work for whatever they paid him, he had to support his mother.
9. Be glad if you aren’t chained to a house you cannot afford. I was infuriated I was priced out of the market for so many years. Now I am delighted I am not sinking under that weight. If you are chained, I personally won’t fault you for walking away. It’s what the bank would do, so you should consider it too.

I suspect very strongly the world is going to look very different two years from now. This may not be a bad thing. It certainly provides those of us that were never able to stake a claim in the current system the opportunity to carve out a niche in whatever is coming.

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Actions you can take that help your personal economy and make you feel good

I’ve purchased every edition of MS Office from before Office 95 through Office 2003.

I’ve rarely used any of them. They have always been “required” purchases because everyone else uses them. This isn’t “peer pressure” because I don’t really care how other people format documents. Well, maybe it is peer pressure… of the most intense sort: use Word or go home.

What I usually use is LaTeX.

But LaTeX isn’t really that good for laying out – fast – publications such as ebooks and the like.

I take that back. LaTeX is superb at ALL typesetting tasks… but learning a new layout style in LaTeX is time consuming, and personally, I need to get with the WYSIWYG world because it’s what everyone else is using. Very difficult to outsource document preparation in LaTeX, not that many people do it. I’m sure I would find it much easier to learn WYSIWYG document preparation is I liked. But I don’t. I loathe it. It’s infuriating.

In any case, OpenOffice fills the breach.

The problem is that OpenOffice is painfully slow.

It’s so slow that the fanboys blame the users: “You must have a virus on your computer.”

No. It’s like this: OpenOffice is painfully slow.

What these evangelists don’t get: when OpenOffice is the most painfully slow application on my computer, that’s called a “clue.” The clue is… it’s not my computer that’s slow.

Why am I using it?

Several reasons:

1. Document format is open. While I don’t have any desire to muck around in OpenOffice’s XML, it’s nice to know I could if I needed to. In fact, if the file got “corrupted” somehow, I could fix the XML easily using a validator such as tidy. I’m sure I have Word files hanging around somewhere that won’t ever open again.
2. Image handling is much nicer than MS Word. Word sucks in your images, turns them into bitmaps, and you’re stuck. It really sucks. There may be a way in Word 2003 to get around this problem, but if there is, it’s complicated and obscure enough to NOT be useful. OpenOffice reads your images from disk. This means that if you want to use dummy images to lay out a document, you can easily swap images later, OpenOffice won’t mind. Won’t even know.
3. It’s free. Costs no money. This is probably the least important reason for me. If Word would handle images how I want instead of locking me into how Word wants images, I’d probably switch. If the Word file format was open (open for real), I’d switch immediately. The problem here is that Microsoft’s insistence of “openness” doesn’t equal usefully open. Just examine Word’s HTML output if you want an example. It’s horrible.

Why I loathe OpenOffice:

1. It’s slow. Really, it is. I’m working on a 70 page document right now, and it’s just not responsive at all. Sure, it would help if I weren’t teaching myself how to do visual layout. All these formatting experiments resulting in “Not Responding,” but is that really the way to inspire users?

   Let me put it another way… I’ve had time to write this entire blog post interstitially, while waiting on OpenOffice to do whatever it does. As I write these very words, I’m trying to scroll through the document… and it’s bogged down, “Not Responding.” That’s no good. And yes, I’m using the Navigator widget too. I really am:
   

   

   Unacceptable.

For final lay out, I’ll have to switch everything to Word and tweak it all again.

Other options in this space don’t matter. Word is what’s used, and that’s that. Go try and outsource document preparation. Professionals want your work in Word. Not in OpenOffice. Not in Google Docs. Word.

I can tell you partly why this is, too.

When you outsource to Eastern Europe, China, India and like places, you’re going to working with people who – with almost 100% certainty – don’t pay license fees for software. They use ripped copies of Office, InDesign, Photoshop, everything we pay Big $$$ in the West. I know this from experience.

This has been my experience to date. Tell me I’m wrong, I’ll link to you, maybe even send you some business if you’ll work with me in OpenOffice and Scribus.

Otherwise, I may just head off to Office Depot and get the latest copy of MS Office. I hate to have to do that, but I need to get some work done, not spend my time waiting. My time is worth money. A few hours wasted time covers the cost of MS Office, hands down.

OpenOffice just segfaulted on me. I can’t recall the last time I had ANY program segfault.

The upshot:

• OpenOffice handles things “The Right Way,” but it’s too slow to be used for serious work on long documents.
• MS Word locks you into all kinds of bizarre structure and behavior, but it’s very fast in comparison to OpenOffice.

Parting shot: These results are for me, on my computer. Your results may be different, for you, on your computer. But I’m not you and I’m not using your computer.

Post from: There Is NO Box

OpenOffice vs MS Word: Which is better?

I was walking around the block just a few moments ago, in lieu of actually getting real work done, and my big toe started to twinge. The big toe on my right foot just felt all jammed up. Kind of making me limp a little bit. As it turns out, I jammed this same toe some 12 years ago, on a 5.11a sport climb in the Obed River (Tennessee) Gorge* called (I swear I’m not making this up) “Dick the Impaler,” a couple hundred yards downstream from Tieranny Wall.

I distinctly recall what I was thinking at the crux, about 2/3 of the way up this relatively short route: “Well, the worst that can happen is I’ll take a lead fall.” Curiously, I also recall that I didn’t think I was going to make the move. It’s not that hard a move for a person with longer legs or better reach, but it was just at the limit of my reach, and I decided to dyno.

I didn’t stick it.

Well, the lead fall was only 10-12 feet. No big deal. But when I came down, I drop-kicked the planet with my right big toe. The planet, of course, didn’t notice. My right toe was outraged, and jammed itself halfway back to my ankle, or so it felt. It hurt!

A dozen years later, the consequences of my failure remind me every step I take. Bummer.

Would I do it again? Probably.

But I would do it differently. I wouldn’t accept falling as an option and I would trust more in my ability to stick the move.

How does missing a dyno relate to life in general? Let’s take a look at the risk of starting your own business.

Fear exists for good reason

Much is made in the self-help, self-development and entrepreneurship enterprises about fear “holding you back” from your dreams… that if only you “conquered your fear,” magically, success would rush to your door in a fanfare of thunder and applause.

The upside is fame and fortune, security and independence for your family, and the freedom to Do What You Want Whenever You Want.

Why is it so hard?

Because it’s risky.

There is a reason why fear holds us all back: sometimes, there’s real consequences to consider.

Perhaps these consequences are (much) less than they seem at the time, but risk does induce fear. Risk is supposed to induce fear.

Being an entrepreneur is risky

There are many aspects of being an entrepreneur that are risky. Financial risk is probably the most obvious: failure means being broke, and maybe poor (there’s a difference), and that’s not much of an option for a lot of people. But there’s the social risk too, and I suspect the social risk of failure is as (probably more) powerful than the financial risk. Most people (90%) aren’t entrepreneurially minded, so as an entrepreneur, you have to develop the capability to operate without an “emotional safety net.”

Now, many people will do risky things while employed at one job, figuring that they can just go get another job if it all goes pear-shaped.

But what do you do as an entrepreneur when it all goes horribly wrong? Get a job? FAIL!

This is a serious business, as it requires an astounding amount of emotional energy to succeed in anything. Yet wrapping one’s identity around being “successful” is almost guaranteed to induce long term misery (ask me how I know).

Build big successes from small successes

In “The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem,” Nathaniel Branden asserts that a cornerstone of building self-esteem is measurable accomplishment. He further provides concrete advice on exactly how to accomplish measurably. As it turns out, his suggestions are excellent recommendations for new entrepreneurs: start small, and build what you can measure and touch.

For example, if you’re learning how to build a successful web-based business, you’ll need to master skills for building traffic, and for converting (selling) visitors. These skills can be mastered more or less independently, and it doesn’t really matter which skill you master first. Go with what’s most comfortable. It’s not necessary to actually master these skills either… simply becoming comfortable with the learning process, and having a method for measuring results is enough.

Here’s the process broken down, stepwise:

• Identify a new skill necessary for achieving long term goal, say acquiring readers is a skill you need to become a top ranked blogger.
• Chunk down the skill into a series of tasks that can be independently acquired, and that produce results. To acquire readers, one must provide content worth reading. Either learn to write, or find people to write for you. In any case, learning to produce content worth reading is a skill worth learning.
• Turn the learning process into result-oriented work. For example, learn to acquire traffic by learning to write articles worth reading.

At each step of this process, you’re successfully producing measurable results, viz. articles on your web site. Once you have the process mastered (which is NOT the same as having the skill mastered), start the process for mastering the next skill necessary for your long term success.

Which brings us back to the topic at hand…

Success breeds success

An old saw goes something like “Nothing succeeds like success.”

An obvious tautology… or is it?

Looks what happens when you build your success incrementally: at each stage, you have independent confirmation of competence and success. Suppose you DON’T master the art of closing sales from a web page, yet have insane web traffic because (it turns out) you’re a brilliant writer. In such cases, you have the proven chops to provide real value to a partnership or a joint venture. (Or even an employer…) And as you “breed” your success, your risk of failure starts to decrease, as do the consequences of failure.

Returning to our old saw, it’s probably more accurate to say that past success is a pretty good indicator of future success. Build your successes incrementally, pounding down the fear and loathing at each step.

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The Fear — And Consequences — Of Failure