Instead of spending a year searching for a block of 200 hours to work on a project, invest thirty to sixty minutes each day on it. After a year you will be surprised how the small blocks of time add up to hundreds of hours or productive, quality work.
Whether choosing which car to buy, which job to take, who to date, or which sandwich to order; there is no shortage of endless information and data that you could consume, tabulate, study and otherwise obsess over. Fear of making the wrong choice prevents us from acting on a decision. So one reason we gather and consider all the data we can accumulate is to have re-assurance that our decision was “sound” and “smart”, even if the results turns out less satisfactory than we expected.
Using the deep-data and indecision combo to buttress the fear bad decisions is bogus. Here’s why you are better off making decisions quickly.
1. Reduce stress.
Pending decisions get thrown into your mental bucket with to-do lists, goals, chores, and worries. A great way to battle feelings of being overwhelmed and disorganized is to reduce and simplify the amount of stuff you are juggling. One easy way to reduce: eliminate pending decisions. Make them and move on.
Not only will you be less stressed, but so will people that are awaiting your decision.
2. Reduce uncertainty. Increase value.
Certainty is a major component of value. Don’t know if that car is going to start every morning? It’s less valuable than a reliable car with certainty. Don’t know if hurricanes will hit during an October cruise? It’s less valuable than a February cruise when the weather is more certain.
It’s the same with people. Every pending decision on your plate has introduced uncertainty thereby reducing your value. Your “I don’t know yet” is less valuable than a “No” or a “Yes”, than an “A” or “B”. Whether the answer is yes or no, A or B, you can instantly increase your value by making those decisions now.
3. Learn quickly.
You only learn what really works by doing it. Learn faster then the other guys in business and you have a competitive advantage. Learn faster in life and you’re able to fit more into life.
Got any decisions on your plate?
Last week, I introduced a tongue-in-cheek “Time Management Plan (and System)“. Though a dig at our over scheduled, over committed and under focussed lives; this plan is real. And it works.
The Plan
0. Divide the day into three parts: “sleep”, “work”, and “play”.
The System
1. When it is time to sleep, sleep soundly.
2. When it is time to work, work with focus.
3. When it is time to play, play with passion.
Notes
Why does this work?
The alternative is what I suspect all these people that are “always working” are really doing. Spending a lot of the work day on unfocussed web surfing, Twitter, and blog reading and then staying up all night because of too much work – resulting in getting no sleep and then not being able to focus on work the next day. This time management plan breaks that vicious cycle.
Effective Time Management Should Be this Simple
When it is time to sleep, sleep soundly. When it is time to work, work with focus. When it is time to play, play with passion.
Not only can it be this simple, but it should be this simple. To get the most out of your day – and therefore your lifetime of days – they should look like this.
This circle represents the 24 hours in your day. I might not know you. Yet I can accurately, honestly, and without fail say that your day is 24 hours long. That might be the last thing we agree on.
Back to the image: In the image at left, the day starts in sleep, goes clockwise around the circle, and ends in sleep. This image has three time-slices: sleep, work, play. It’s likely your day doesn’t look like this – yet. To understand why it should though, we need to look not at the slices, but at the lines between them.
Transitions
The lines between the time-slices are not simply borders of the slices. The lines between time-slices are times of transition. There is actual time in those lines. When you roll out of bed in the morning and start your day, this transition time is the time you spend getting ready to do your first thing. Whether that be exercise or work or watching the sunrise or reading or whatever. There is time and energy involved in this transition.
This transition time is useless. It’s not rest. It’s not thinking time. It’s not recharging time. It’s not productive. It’s not making you a better person, earning you money, gaining you rest, building new skills, experiencing new experiences, nor exploring new thoughts. It’s simply a cost of being alive and active in a modern culture.
The time you spend getting ready in the morning; showering, picking out clothes, and brushing your teeth is maintenance work and/or waste.
These transitions can be physical (commuting, getting dressed) or mental (“switching gears”, “getting in the zone”). Either way, they take time and energy for little to no direct benefit.
Triathletes practice and prepare to minimize transition time. To be able to quickly switch between swimming and biking, a triathlete will have their helmet unbuckled, their bike pointing the right way, their bike shoes ready to slip into. But life isn’t a race. We don’t want to be spending our days trying to beat a personal record for fastest shower and shave. So, if our transitions are not going to get much faster, let’s make them fewer.
Minimize the Number of Transitions
Now, I’m not saying don’t take a shower and get presentable each morning. Please do. (Although Bill Gates had been known in the early days to be so excited about his work that he’d not want to waste time on a shower. Steve Jobs has been said to wear his signature black turtleneck and blue jeans every day as a way to “save time choosing what to wear”.)
What I am saying is that some people’s days look like the image at right.
Look at all those lines! All of those blue transition lines are time and energy lost. It’s prime-time that seeps and leaks, little by little, out of your day. Those transition slices are the reason you get to the end of the day and say “where did all the time go?”. Remove those transition slices and you gain back time. Being conservative, if each one consumes one minute, and by rearranging your day you eliminated fourteen of them, you would gain back fourteen minutes in your day.
(Besides being time wasters, those transition zones are motivation and focus killers which lead to feeling unproductive and overwhelmed. I’ll talk in much more detail about this when we get to the topic of focus and anxiety.)
Simpler Wins
This model is simpler and better. It would be better even if all it did was minimize time lost. Yet there is so much more. In this ongoing series of posts I’ll be covering all the other reasons to keep your day to “Sleep, Work, and Play”.
p.s. I’ll also talk in detail about what I mean by “sleep”, “work”, and “play”. Stay tuned.
The Problem
According to Techcrunch, Twitter, CNN, Facebook and other major and reliable sources, we are “never not working”. We don’t take vacations. Lunch breaks are a thing of the past. Everyone’s out of shape because no one is playing. No one is sleeping. Everyone has trouble focussing at work because of lack of sleep and the guilt of not playing enough. That’s what they say.
The Solution
In response, a multi-katrillion-dollar time management industry has sprung up. I think I found a solution to all these problems and so am breaking into that industry today. Introducing my Time Management Plan and System.
The Plan
0. Divide the day into three parts: “sleep”, “work”, and “play”.
The System
1. When it is time to sleep, sleep soundly.
2. When it is time to work, work with focus.
3. When it is time to play, play with passion.
Too Revolutionary?
I have heard that there was a time when some innovative and daring people lived their lives like this. From what I hear those experimenters were quite successful, productive, profitable, and happy. But it seems all of their lessons learned and productivity gains made were lost to a new generation that has a strong bias against such a radical idea.
What do you think? Is this too crazy? Too difficult? Too late?
In re-reading 4-Hour Work Week I came across this quote:
There’s no difference between a pessimist who says, “Oh, it’s hopeless, don’t bother doing anything,” and an optimist who says, “Don’t bother doing anything, it’s going to turn out fine anyway.”
Either way, nothing happens.
- Yvong Chouinard, founder of Pategonia
Like a lot of other people, I read Derek Siver’s blog and Twitter feed (@sivers). I find him to be a highly interesting guy and the best living example of following one’s passions. As you can tell from the notes below, this is the LessConf presentation that I got the most from. Here are some notes of his talk.
The Jewelry Shop Owner and the Performer
Derek kicked off his presentation on profit models with a couple stories. Derek has a friend who owns a jewelry shop in a tourist area. The shop had good traffic, but not great sales. Awareness and marketing were evidently not issues, because of the relatively healthy traffic flow into the store. Yet, the store was faltering. The owner decided to take some time away to think about next steps for the shop. When the day before her vacation came, she was packing up and wrapping up loose ends, one of which was to leave directions for her staff to price a box of items at half-price. She quickly scribbled on the box: “everything here price 1/2″. Upon returning from her trip she was surprised to find that sales had doubled! Her employees thought she her strategy to “double the price” was brilliant. ”What do you mean, doubled the price?”, she wondered, having left instruction to do just the opposite and halve the price. ”Right here, you wrote ‘everything here price X 2′”. Upon a misreading of the hastily scribbled direction, her employee had doubled the price of the items to be tagged and shelved.
Why did doubling the price double the number of items sold? This is contradictory to traditional demand-curve models. It turns out that tourists used price as an indicator of quality. Picking up a $12 piece of jewelry to bring home to a friend or family member they might think, “this is nice, but can’t be that good if it’s only $12″. Yet, when holding a $24 piece of jewelry, customers typically thought of it as higher quality and were thus more likely to purchase.
Similarly, Derek told of a performing friend who doubled his performance price from $1,500 to $3,000. The result: he lost some recurring customers but more than made up for it with some new customers at the higher rate. Though he was performing fewer gigs, he was making the same income. He loved it! Before the price increase, he soft of performed for the the sake of keeping income coming in. After the increase, when getting paid $3,000 per performance, he found himself more excited and more into his work! Eventually his calendar became full at his $3,000/performance rate and he was still excited about his performances. [Ed: Of all the anecdotes of the day, this had the most impact to me as a Ruby on Rails consultant who often gets paid by the hour. It got me thinking of ways to double my rate in 2010. Also, the Multiplier Profit Model (notes below) got me thinking of ways to package up my knowledge and experience in different ways. All-and-all this was a thought-provoking and potentially profitable presentation.]
Business Models
Derek shared his frustration with people that go after the number of users as a metric of success, or love to brag about how their solutions are FREE! There is no business model there, only a feel-good metric that will not make money. Only a step up on the business-model ladder are those businesses that blindly follow the profit model of their competitors or peers. Derek’s talk was meant to get us to think of a larger variety of profit models.
Why?
It’s important to consider and implement a variety of profit models for competitive advantage and for diversification. If you have all of your profit tied to one model, then when the industry inevitably changes, your entire revenue stream could be destroyed. By diversifying among two or more profit models, you are better protected from industry changes.
Profit Models
Derek next went into an overview of a wide variety of profit models. Here are notes on three of them. [Ed: These notes lose a lot of impact without Derek's drawings. Maybe he will post them.]
Customer Solution Profit
This is where you spend a lot of time, effort, and money up front to customize a solution for your customer in order to have long-term, sustainable, stable revenue in the future. Initially, you lose money as you spend unpaid time getting to know the customer and building and implementing a custom solution for them. In the long-run though, that up-front effort helps you win customers, keep customers happy all while keeping your support costs low for those customers because your solution is so well implemented.
Derek used the example of Hostbaby. As soon as someone signed up, they would call them and hand-hold their new customer through getting started. It was a lot of up-front work, but once the Hostbaby customer was set up and happy, they had little ongoing support work. Using customer solution profit model helped Hostbaby net ~$2 million / year with no inventory requirement, no warehouse, little physical space requirement, and a small staff.
Takeaway: Consider how can you get to know each of your customers well up front and create a customized experience for them?
Pyramid Profit
This is where you have several levels of products, starting at one that is barely profitable but prevents competitor entry all the way up to a price level that is very high-margin, but low volume. Examples: Apple’s $59 iPod. American Express’ Green, Blue, Gold, and Platinum cards. Hotel chains.
Takeway:Consider what can you offer to people that think you are too expensive? On the other end of the spectrum, what upscale, huge profit margin offering can you put out there?
After Sales Profit
We’ve all probably had this experience. You do heavy research on selection and pricing of a big ticket item like a laptop, appliance, or car. Yet on the way out the door after purchase, we’ll buy add-ons without any research or price-comparison at all. For example, we’ll buy a laptop and then choose from a limited selection of laptop bags at non-competitive prices. At the time of checkout of the big-ticket item, we are at a low price-sensitive moment for small-ticket items. What’s a $200 floor-mat add-on to a $30,000 truck? What’s a $70 computer bag when you’re already spending two grand on the computer? Price sensitivity is lowest when your purchase price is high and selection is low.
Takeaway: What tiny but profitable thing can you ad onto someone else’s big ticket purchase?
Multiplier Profit
This is when you have one skill set or product re-packaged in multiple ways. The up-front development cost of the skill or product is fixed, yet you profit from that skill or product by offering it in different forms. This gives you a broader reach, more diversified customer base, and increased profit.
Takeaway: In what ways can you re-package and re-sell you primary work product?
[Ed: As I eluded to earlier, in my field of software development consulting, this is one of the most intriguing profit models to consider. For consultants, this is probably one of the most under-utilized yet promising profit models. When we learn something new in our work, or become an expert at a technical skill, we should package that knowledge up in ways to share beyond hourly consulting.]
——-
Tips:
- Consider doubling your price. At the least, experiment with your pricing.
- Don’t blindly follow the profit model of your competitors. Differentiate and diversify instead!
- Consider each of the profit models Derek presented, asking yourself the takeaway questions.
- For more profit models, check out The Art of Profitability by Adrian Slywotzky and Derek’s detailed notes on that book.
Thank you, Derek, for attending LessConf and for your talk.
Next up here at LessConf, David Hauser (@dh), CTO of Grasshopper.com on Branding.
David founded Grasshopper.com, described as a quality product with “really ball-sy advertising”. Grasshopper is beyond the startup stage, about 50 people. First, David showed this great video.
How? The “core values” most companies have are BS. Of course you want people with honesty, respect, hard work, blah, blah, blah. Core values need go go beyond that.
Why? Why work here? Why buy our products? Why from us and not others?
Culture? Grasshopper empowers employees and every employee knows the company’s core values. 4 weeks vacation when first hired, “Summer Fridays” – 1/2 days each Friday, healthy snacks, all lead to happy and enthusiastic employees. Visualize your culture and core values – makes them easy to communicate and remember.
Publish and publicize your goals everywhere. The goals and core values come through in everything they do and in all decisions they make. ”How will this decision affect the goals and values?”
Generating Buzz. You have to be actively communicating people in conversation, not pushing the conversation on others. For example: in the chocolate-covered grasshoppers campaign Grasshopper.com did not include a letter or other information about their product. The packages had only the grasshoppers, nicely packaged, with a link to their url. The conversation was not forced onto the recipient. People receiving them created the buzz, they talked with friends, they took pictures. User-generated content was key to the buzz.
Who? They made the list limited to 5,000 and exclusive. People then were calling David to get on the list to get the chocolate covered grasshoppers.
Cost & Results: Total cost for the 5,000: $47,292 = $9.46/bag. For less than $10/bag (including mailing) they had a hit campaign. Goal was not to make a sale, but to have “grasshopper” associated with “entrepreneur”. Based on blog, tweets, user generated content, and other mentions, the campaign was a success.
Create a Movement. Don’t make it about yourself. Create a movement that is bigger than yourselves. Don’t talk about yourselves. Talk about things that relate to you to find people that can relate to you.
See the details in this case study: http://grasshopper.com/5000casestudy/
—–
Tips:
- PR is a sales function. Get on the phone and call people.
- Don’t spend you money on mugs and stickers, do something crazy different instead.
- Bad economies create lots of great companies.
- Create a movement that is bigger than yourselves. The entrepreneur video is a great example of that.
- “Small firms are 13 times more innovative than large firms.”, ”64% of all new jobs created by small business over the past 15 years., ”Small business employs over 50% of the private sector workforce.”
- Focus is critical.
Thanks David Hauser, for a great presentation.
Second up at LessConf, Colin Devroe of Viddler on “How to measure success”. Colin kicked off his talk with a demonstration of Eating Lighting (you’ll have to ask him).
Common Pitfalls and Solutions
Pitfall #1: Don’t make unfair comparisons. Comparing yourself to others leads only to following. You end up becoming just another choice. You become “a choice for pizza”.
Solution: Do fair competitive analysis. Listen to your customers and focus on differentiators. Use product feature matrixes to see what’s missing in the marketplace, not as guide to keep up with competitors.
Pitfall #2: Ignore unfair comparisons. Your product will be compared apples-to-oranges to others.
Solution: Just because something is the hot-topic of the moment doesn’t mean you need to react. If the hot-topic feature doesn’t fit your core business model, ignore it. Focus on wanting the right customers! If you choose not to ignore it, become part of the conversation even if you don’t make changes – take the chance to get in there and talk about what you are doing and why.
Pitfall #3: Popularity is rarely a good metric. Popularity is expensive and fleeting.
Solution: Take advantage of (fleeting) popularity. Measure everything (A/B testing). Retain popularity by differentiation, user investment, user engagement and personal relationships.
“One amazingly bad example”
Viddler’s self-service revenue-sharing project called “Viddler Revenue“. They spent way too long to build the self-service offering, only to find out that the industry was not ready for it. Made the mistake of unfair comparison – they looked at what others were doing and tried to copy.
Lessons learned: never stop learning (even if you fail), stick to your core business, build relationships with partners (and competitors!), and follow industry standards.
How to measure success
“Customer Satisfaction is the #1 success metric.” If you have happy customers but are not making money, then something is wrong with your business model. Customers will let you know if they are happy and will let you know how to make them happy — if you have open lines of communication and easy ways for them to contact you. And once you find happy customers, you want to duplicate them and clone them. Find out why they choose you and replicate those happy customers.
—
Tips:
- Don’t force yourself into unfair comparisons.
- Be smart about how you handle unfair comparisons made by others. Either ignore them or smartly respond, but don’t have a knee-jerk reaction.
- Popularity is rarely a good metric, it is not a goal to reach for it’s own sake.
- Customer Satisfaction is the #1 success metric.
Good job Colin! (http://cdevroe.com/ @cdevroe)
I’m excited to announce that AffilApp has been awarded the exhibition category “Ready to Earn” prize in the RailsRumble. This exhibition category prize is sponsored by and the winner is selected by Spreedly. It recognizes the entry that has
Full details are on the Spreedly Blog. Thank you to the Spreedly team for this recognition.
