Life is busy, there is always more work to be done no matter who you are or what you do.  So how do you keep yourself productive and happy?  After more than a year and a half of being out on my own and having to motivate and discipline myself, I’ve realized something very important: I actually do more work than I give myself credit for.

Time flies.  I remember weeks and months when I look back and feel like I’ve accomplished nothing.  You never finish everything that you want to do – and that can get very discouraging very quickly.  Here’s my secret to combating this:  Write everything down.

This is nothing more than the time-tested-teacher-approved todo list.  Here’s what I do differently.  It’s so simple anyone can do it:

• Write down EVERYTHING – Make a list of all the things you need/want to do.  Not matter how small.  Keep this list in a place that you can reference anytime and all the time.  It doesn’t need to be complicated.  I just use iCal.  Right from the get-go you’ll feel a huge sense of freedom and security since don’t have to keep everything in your head.
• Make a DIVIDER – This is the core of the secret.  Everyday when you wake up, look at your list.  Now choose the TWO things you really want to accomplish today, put them at the top and draw a line below them.  Don’t be greedy, two is the magic number.  It’s reasonable and achievable.  There usually are good days where you can accomplish more than those two depending on how big those things are, but if you finish two things everyday, you should feel good about yourself.
• CELEBRATE your successes – we’re so hard on ourselves a lot of times.  Every week take just 30 seconds to look back on the list and review what you’ve done.  Now pick the item that you’re most proud of and take 30 more seconds to sit and embrace that sense of joy for having done what you set out to do.  A great side effect of this is it always helps me answer the “How was your week” question I get every time I see my friends.  Two birds with one stone – awesome.

Hope that helps some of you recapture those precious minutes.  Life is short, make sure you make something out of yours.

The soul of the lazy desires, and gets nothing,
But the desires of the diligent shall be fully satisfied.

It wasn’t so a year ago, but now, with Twitter’s 300%+ growth per month and endorsements by celebrities like Shaq, Oprah, Ellen, and Aston Kutcher, it’s clear that Twitter has become mainstream and important enough to warrant some serious thought.  So what’s so novel about Twitter?

A quick google search on Twitter will find you countless articles on why twitter is effective – ease of use, marketing value, follow/fan structure, real time, recommendations, etc.  Even the big brands – Microsoft, Yahoo, Google, etc are taking a good look at how to leverage and capitalize on what Twitter has built – better recommendation systems?  better real time search?  better marketing presences?  The possibilities are endless.

I won’t regurgitate what any of those articles have said – they’re all good, but I’m going to argue that the most compelling thing about twitter is not real-time, not recommendations, or anything stated previously, but something much much more basic – Relationships and social capital.

Think about it.  Ever since we were in grade school, we’ve had an innate understanding of a couple things: 1) You need to make friends to play with at recess.  2) You make friends and get to know your friends by the stupid things they say or do  3) If you catch your friends or anyone saying something incredibly stupid, you can use it for many useful things – conversation starters, jokes, or even blackmail.

This is social capital at work.  The more you know about your friend’s likes, dislikes, quirks, pet peeves etc, the more you’re in a position to capitalize on that knowledge.  This is nothing new.  We’ve had the means to learn about our friends before through f2f conversations, IM, status messages, facebook, etc.  What twitter has allowed us to do is expand and scale that beyond the imaginable.  We can now not only talk to our friends, but also listen to our friend’s thoughts (things they may not say to us f2f) as well as expand beyond our friends to people or even brands that we may admire or find intriguing.  This is eavesdropping at it’s best.

Knowing everything there is to know about someone gives you power.  This power is social capital.  And twitter has made this both convenient and painless.  That is the novelty of Twitter.

The web has always been social, from the days of its first invention to relay information to today, but what’s really powered the social web isn’t quicker and more convenient tools like IM, Facebook, and Tweets, but faces.  Faces, seemingly trivial, are the fuel to explosive user engagement – why?  Because you only get faces (users only upload their pics) when they genuinely trust your site and when other people see that they’re on a site that other people trust, they also put up their pictures.  It’s a network effect at it’s best.

Take a really simple example.  Look at my news feed on facebook:

Now compare that to my feed on LinkedIn:

Dramatic difference isn’t it?

Face to face communication has always been the bread and butter of human interactions and with online social media becoming what it is today, it’s coming one step closer to imitating the ‘real world’.  Will technology ever replace f2f communication?  Most likely yes.  Who knows what kind of magic we can invent a decade from now… holograms anyone? 

… until you launch.

(Disclaimer: All of this advice is from my personal experience running Eggsprout and probably won’t apply as much to larger VC funded companies)

Pre Launch
If you’re a software startup, which I’m guessing most of you are, you know that before you have a live product what really matters is… getting a live product.  Nothing else matters.  Don’t hire marketing people (you have nothing to market).  Don’t hire business developers (you have no business).  Don’t hire PR managers (you have no news), accountants, lawyers, customer reps, etc.  You get the point.  There may be occasional times when you need to do some legal stuff, some marketing stuff, or other business type things, but it’s so little, you should do it yourself.  You’ll learn something.

Post Launch
This is where it gets interesting – after you have a live product, you can’t go without business people for several reasons:  1) You’ll get feedback from customers  2) Businesses will reach out to you for partnerships  3) You’ll realize you’ve got a lot of things wrong.

#1 and #2 are pretty self-explanatory.  People will now start to talk to you and find you interesting.  You need someone with their head in the space and some business savvy to talk back.  #3 is a little bit less obvious – and I’ve only learned it through living it.  You probably got a lot of things right with your launch, but once you start talking to other people and hear their needs, you’ll realize you’ve done a lot wrong.  And by wrong, I mean, you’ve prioritized something that’s not so useful, or deprioritized something someone really needs, or missed or didn’t see an opportunity.  You’ll have a lot of ‘Why didn’t I think of that?’ moments.  Every startup goes through the same things.

Eggsprout
After we launched Eggsprout, I’ve done no coding and no project management.  Our team has reshifted our responsibilities to allow me more time to be the ‘business person’ – do biz dev, sales, marketing, customer support, investor relations, public relations, etc.  And boy is it important.  I can’t even count the number of times I’ve come back with new insight into our customers or opportunities and refocused or reprioritized things for the team.

So for all you techies out there who believe business people are pretty much useless (I used to be one of them) – make sure you have someone or can hire someone that can pick up that role after you have a product.  You don’t want to run a startup that’s isolated from the world and wonder to yourself why your traffic isn’t picking up.  Biz people are important. 

Free stuff sells.  I was just at Denny’s free grand slam breakfast today and even though I’m not a big fan of standing in lines for giant breakfast with over the top calories – I went.  How can you say no to free?  (The wait time was actually much shorter than I expected and they were very fast in terms of service.  Props to you Denny’s)

In business, free is good.  When we approach recruiters with the concept of Eggsprout, they’re always amazed at our concept of free job posts and free resumes.  On the big job boards – they go for hundreds of dollars a piece for job posts and thousands a month for resumes.  That’s a big contrast from free.  And it sells – because we make it such a no brainer.  What do you have to lose for trying us?  Just 5 minutes of your time.

My suggestion – in whatever business you’re trying to build, always offer a low-cost option.  It could just be a free trial, a basic package, or even a free place for people to connect with you and your brand (like a forum or blog).  Structures like these allow you to obtain new customers quickly at a very low cost.  You’re thinking this is pretty obvious stuff – and it is – but I really didn’t understand the power of free until I found myself dropping my plans today to spend the 10 minutes driving and 15 minutes standing in line just to get my little piece of the grand slam deal.  It’s powerful.

Want to get better than free?  Pay people to use your product.  It sounds strange, but that’s exactly what Google Adsense and Microsoft Live Search rev share does.  That’ll be a post for another time.

This is probably old news to alot of people, but Eggsprout is live – as of last Thursday.  Sorry for posting here so late, I’ve been swamped with awesome feedback, encouragements, fixes, meeting requests, etc ever since launch.  The entire team stayed up until 7:30am to get it out and it was EPIC.  Many stories to tell the grandkids haha.

If you haven’t already checked us out, the site is here.  We also got some good coverage from John Cook (the most amazing Seattle Tech reporter ever).  Story is here.

I’ll be splitting my blogging efforts between here and the eggsprout blog.  Hopefully that means I’ll be blogging more often in both places – and not less.    Alright, back to work.

I’m sitting in my room looking out the window right now and all I can see is flurry of snow.  For those unfamiliar with Seattle weather, lemme tell you that this is extremely rare.  In the past 16 or so years I’ve lived here, we’ve only had one single day where we got 4 inches of snow.  This time, we’re nearing 8-10 inches and it’s been snowing every other day for at least a week.

You know you’re getting old when snow becomes more of a nuisance than it used to be.  Even though part of me is giddy with excitement and is dreading the feeling of dissapointment when it’ll all melt away, the other part of me is trying to calculate the lost in economic productivity from all the companies around here – including ourselves.

So, in an effort to stay productive, we did the only thing reasonable in weather conditions like this.  Build snow-eggsprout!  Here it is:

Our baby

Closer view

My bro Ian and I behind giant snow-eggsprout

And that’s only from the first day of snow… there’s plenty more now.  Alright, hope all you Seattle-lites out there stay warm.  Merry Christmas and Happy new year.  =)

A slight digression from my usual Startup theme’d posts, but I just finished Deathnote and it was AMAZING!  What if you could kill anyone by simply writing down their name in a notebook?

Sounds disgusting (that’s what I thought at first too), but watch the first few episodes and you’ll be hooked.  Every episode is non-stop smartness all the way until the end.  I seriously believe my IQ has increased many points after watching this.  Make sure you limit yourself somehow though or else you’ll lose days of sleep without realizing it.

Highly recommended.

It’s 2008.  We’re officially in a depression – my house price is dropping like an airplane that’s lost its engines, I lost so much money in my portfolio I’ve stopped caring, my friends are all losing their jobs, and every conversation I overhear revolves around doom and gloom.  But something different happened today, something I want to share:

I have a rental home (don’t get into landlording, many stories to tell here, but I’ll save it for another time), and recently I’ve had a pretty bad moisture problem.  Water is getting into the bedrooms, soaking the walls and carpets, and mold and shrooms have grown inside the house.  It’s any homeowner’s worst nightmare, and it costs an arm and a leg to fix.  Needless to say, it has not been a very pleasant few weeks.

But its fixed now, I’ve had at least 5 different people come inspect/fix things.  I’ve been informed that a majority of the problem is inadequate drainage of water from the roof, so today, I reluctantly decided to climb on the roof, rake the leaves, and unclog the drains.  It’s messy, it’s stinky, and it’s hard work.

I know this might sound cheesy, but as I was standing there on top of the roof, a weird feeling overwhelmed me – a feeling that anyone who’s been on top of a mountain looking across the vast landscape might know.  That after all the doom and gloom, all will be well with the world.  I saw all the little houses around me, the large trees that had been leaving their leaves on my roof looked less intimidating, the cars parked on the sidewalks looked like toys, and in the distant, I could see cars busily continuing their daily routine.

Standing on top of something big makes you see the world from a different perspective.  It mights you feel small, and it reminds you to stop worrying about all the tiny problems in your life.  What if your startup fails?  What if that round of financing doesn’t close?  What if your competitors are faster than you?  Just stop worrying.  Because in the end, the world will keep turning, and everything will be all right.

I suggest you try out your roof too.  It’s fun.  And it feels good.

Read more startup lessons from bma…

Startups are time consuming.  At least 10 hour days, 7 days a week.  Not because you have to, but because you want to.  At this rate, even the greatest of the greats will burn out.  So how do you prevent yourself and your team from burning out?  Here’s a couple strategies we’ve tried, maybe some of them will help you:

4 hour sprints: Creative people (developers, designers, etc) need time alone to get things done.  Sure, teamwork and discussions are necessary, but studies have shown that context switches and interruptions – even in the form of someone asking a quick question – actually do a lot of harm to productivity.  That’s why every day, we have 2 large blocks of time periods around 3 to 4 hours each where everyone puts on headphones and just works on their part.  It works like a charm.  A lot gets done.

Eat together: We also cook together, but just eating together works too.  A lot of really good things happen when you eat together – you learn about each others quirks, you have extra time to discuss stuff, you get everyone comfortable with contributing, you can talk about stuff completely unrelated to work, etc.  Teams that eat together, stay together.

Play: Wii’s, Xbox’s, guitar hero, super smash, etc are a must.  No better way to relieve the stress and take your head off that annoying bug than kicking each other’s butt in an epic game.  Ah, so many stories to tell.

Work from home: Find people that work well by themselves and can motivate themselves even when not at ‘work’.  Working at home is one of the best things ever – you’re more relaxed, you dramatically lower the chance of someone interrupting you, and you’re on your own schedule.  This also has the strange benefit of making it so ‘work’ never ends. 

We’ve played around a ton with how we work as a team and have settled on something that combines the 4 of the above items.  We work together and meet 2 to 3 days a week.  Usually M, W, F, where a typical day contains of: cook breakfast, work 4 hours, cook/eat lunch, smash, work 4 hours, go home, shower, work 4 hours.  All the rest of the days (weekends included), we work by ourselves at home and stay on IM for any immediate needs.  Works really well for us, but I’m sure every team is different.

It takes a long time to find that “team rhythm” but once you’ve found it, it’s a great feeling.  Cause things get done.