Work Productivity Philosophy

In pressure times like these past weeks (i think it should be months for me, that is), I'm trying to compile a formula work philosophy to be as effective as I could in everything that I do. Below is a list in progress, not in order of importance. Some of them I took from GTD and ZTD. Disclaimer: these may or may not work for you. I'll be adding to this list as I stumble on new things.

1. Remove distractions to gain focus - e.g. we have to close those extra windows or applications or browser tabs and leave only those that are needed for the job at hand.
2. If it can be done in 2 minutes, do it immediately.
   
3. Just get started - the first step may not be that big or grand, but it takes the first step to build momentum
   
4. Momentum is important so do not break your momentum - resist temptation to switch or take a break if you're not that satisfied or tired yet. Unnecessary breaks break momentum. Find a place where you can't be interrupted.
   
5. Be aware of your big time wasters - like unnecessary friendstering, or facebooking or chatting. Measure how much you spend time on those and choose to refrain.
   
6. Prioritize daily - look for the 3 most urgent and important tasks for the day and do it. Only then after having accomplished those 3 should you take on other tasks. Otherwise, leave the rest for the next day.
7. Aim for balance - we juggle many projects/responsibilities. To focus fully on only one of those projects/responsibilities means delay or disaster for the others.
   
8. Balance by focus on small steps - Find ways to be daily aware of the status of what's happening on each of those projects/responsibilities. Determine the next small step action for each area and allot future time for it.
   
9. Write down everything that worries you - Exhaust them out of your mind. Once you've written them, you will be tempted to forget them because you already have a list that you can go back to.
   
10. Everything you do involves a risk, even doing nothing - Avoid paralysis by analysis. There will always be an amount of possible failure in everything that we do. So why bother worrying too much when we can never be too sure anyway. Decide early on if you are willing to accept that failure if ever it happens. Then be ready for the ride.
    

Thoughts from "Soaring in the Business World" Conference

It's been a long time since the last time I blogged. I had very busy weeks. But anyway, I'd like to share some pointers I learned from the Kingdom Business Conference themed "Soaring in the Business World" held last December 11, 2008 at PICC.

One of the messages that I liked most at the conference came from Leif Hetland. He shared about the three D's that we all have to live with and should expect in our businesses and life in general.

1. Disappointments - things do not and will not always happen as we planned or as we expected them to be . People sometimes don't perform or respond as we wanted them to be. The execution of plans don't always go smoothly. Sometimes the equipments that we use don't function properly at the exact time we need them the most. We should learn to understand that frustrations are part of our daily lives and to be so occupied with them will only stress us.
   
   
2. Discouragements - closely related and sometimes interchangeably used with disappointments, but discouragements happen when we begin to lose hope or lose courage to move on in an endeavor, plan or pursuit. It is inevitable that we will make failures and mistakes along the way. Failures for some are the source of most discouragements. Sometimes it's the circumstances around us that will zap the resolve in us, e.g. the global financial crisis. We must learn to expect that every now and then, there will be times that some stuff will drain away our emotional strength to pursue things. If we don't know how to rebound from discouragements, we will be slowed down and accomplish fewer things.
   
   
3. Distractions - there will always be opportunities and problems that will take away our focus from the things that we should be doing. Some ideas and opportunities are attractive enough to cause us to divert our overall road map or direction. But the question is: Is it really the right decision at this time? If we get easily distracted, we might get too thinly spread or lose momentum. Everything that we do will require portions of our time, effort and money. The focus and timing by which we invest these resources will determine the measure of our impact and output.

Points to remember:

1. The Three D's will come on a daily basis.
2. Expecting them coming, makes all the difference as to how we will respond.
   
3. Stay cool, recharge, ignore or refocus.
   

If we learn how to deal with the three D's in our businesses and daily lives, we become like eagles soaring above the storms.

The Designer, The Developer, and The Marketer

Have you read the book E-Myth Revisited by Michael E. Gerber? It's a book for those who would want to enter and succeed in business. The author said in the book that everybody who goes into business is actually three-people-in-one: The Entrepreneur, The Manager, and the Technician. I would not discuss those personalities here. But I want to share an idea something similar to that. I'd like to propose that those who would want to succeed in the web must at least be composed of three persons or a three-people-in-one man/woman: The Designer, The Developer, and The Marketer (not in rank or importance).



The Designer - he's the visual person. The one who decides everything pertaining to the aesthetics of a web property, from colors, to fonts, to images and icons, to the the layout and positioning of all page components. He knows Photoshop and Imageready and all other design editing tools. He's the guy who goes out of the way to make the web pages visually pleasing, interesting and impressive. He's more like Steve Jobs and not Bill Gates. Without the designer, a website looks unprofessional/amateurish, out of trend, bland, and visually boring.

The Developer - he's the code guy. He can be the front-end or the back-end. He builds the structure/skeleton upon which the web property stands stable. He knows CSS, Javascript, AJAX, PHP, MySQL, e-commerce integration, call out all other IT-jargon and abbreviations coz he's the programmer and also the tech-support guy. He cares more about the features and functionalities of a site than the color of the fonts. He's happy when the forms are foolproof and error-free. Without the developer, I wonder what would Google and YouTube look like. It's like saying what would buildings look like without architects and engineers.

The Marketer - he's the business guy. For him it's the content that matters. It's the traffic that matters. It's the ranking that matters. He's the blogger, the SEO, the social networker. He directs what should be communicated to the audience. He cares which product should be featured on the homepage. He cares about the copywrite, the marketing words that convinces the minds. He believes that "Content is King" and all else are pawns or rooks or knights. He either creates the content or hires suppliers. He visits all directories and every networking platform there is to promote his store. Without the marketer, the website will just be out of sight.

Well I'd like to think that it requires these three persons for a web property to become excellent and successful. What would a website look like if it's just built by the designer alone, the developer alone, or the marketer alone? I bet you have a hint. What if it's a two-man team? The Designer-Developer would focus on web standards, the usability, the beauty but the site lacks the content necessary to keep the site moving up the ranks. The Designer-Marketer would focus on the impressiveness and copywrite but the site lacks dynamic structure or user interaction; they might as well produce only static htmls and are ignorant of benefits of AJAX on user experience. The Developer-Marketer would boast of the quantity and output of their content database , but the site looks unreliable because it isn't layouted and designed properly, the page components are not in visual unity.

We could all live with not-so-good websites. But we patronize those that are excellent. As I've stated above, the three persons could also be three-people-in-one. I believe that they can also be called skillsets that an individual aspiring web entrepreneur must each develop. Disclaimer: I'm not three-in-one yet. I'm more of a designer-developer. This post and all this blogging is my way of training the newbie marketer in me.

Criteria for a BIG Idea: Pain Eliminator

I always had this mantra in mind "All I need is just one BIG idea to get rich". For Bill Gates it was the vision of his operating system on personal desktop computers. For the Google founders the big idea was the search engine and eventually AdSense. For YouTube it was video posting. The problem is how do I know if the idea I had in mind is a BIG one.

In my desire to eventually be a startup, I bought books from Amazon.com and my favorite was this book "Micro-ISV: From Vision to Reality" by Bob Walsh. I still am not finished with the book now as of this post date. One of the things that really struck me from Chapter 1 was this one criteria advised by Joel Spolsky, when it comes to evaluating ideas for software products: It must eliminate a pain. If it can't eliminate a pain, nobody is gonna shell out money for it. For Skype it was long-distance phone bills. For Google it was the pain of being not satisfied with search results from other existing engines. When I first used Google, I was happy that they produced the right results I was looking for. Though people do not pay for it, this was the reason they became popular, and eventually they had AdWords/AdWords for profit. AdWords eliminated the pain of not being found in the first page of the search results. For YouTube, first it was the difficulty of broadcasting your video on the web and secondly getting it noticed. Because it is a site focused on one type of content, YouTube was able to position themselves as the buzzword when it comes to online video content and people began to use it to upload their videos and eventually became the search engine for the video clips.

The thing is, I have to define what pain will my software or product eliminate. The pain must be something basic or something that really bothers and burdens my target market. If the idea eliminates a pain that's not that nagging, my product would just be doodad to my clients.

Catching Up

It feels bad when you know you're not growing in your knowledge and skills when everything around you, both people and technology are accelerating at the speed of light. I'm a programmer and a designer, but it seems everything that I learned for the past three years are already obsolete. I need to catch up.

Three things I'm doing now to catch up:

1. Exposure - Read books. Visit websites and articles. Even if I don't understand the terms, I just allow myself to be bombarded with the words until they make sense to me. Sometimes I have to resist the phrases "it's hard to learn", "it would take so much of my time". I just have to say "Every journey starts with a step" and almost always, the technology I thought to be difficult to learn is not that difficult at all.

2. Experience - knowledge is not enough. I have to find a way to use and apply those knowledge or else I'm doomed to lose them or forget them. It's important to have a mindset that it's never gonna be perfectly done the first time. I'd have to accept the fact that I'm gonna make mistakes and that making mistakes and solving them are the best way to learn.

3. Associate - I learned that the above steps 1 and 2 would be maximized and accelerated when I do step 3. Having people around you who can teach and coach you brings you faster to the race frontline. It's simple, when we surround ourselves with people who are updated with the latest trends and tech buzz, we get updated as well. In a way, their ceiling becomes our floor and that's acceleration. I am currently a member of a Philippine web and technology club, DigitalFilipino.com. I tell you, I'm glad I did.

Don't lose the dream

I had this funny experience 3 years ago, when I just had the enthusiasm to take my start-a-software-company dream seriously. I've read business books and articles on the Internet, and almost all of them would say that I must have a business plan... And so I bought a simple paper notebook and began to write my business plan.

This was on a January and I was fresh from Christmas vacation. I'm from Davao, Philippines. That time, I planned to go back to Manila by ship so I would have a long period of being alone and the sea would be a wonderful backdrop for my creative reflective thinking. It would take 3 days to travel from Davao to Manila by sea. During that 3-day stay at the ship, I had the pleasure of detailing my business plan, from the target market, user interface sketches to the use-case functionalities to the business model. I wrote all of them on that notebook. I wrote and scribbled most of the time during that stay and so I decided to place the notebook and the pen underneath my pillow so that I don't have to take it out from my luggage bag often. When we ducked Manila port, everyone was busy preparing their things for departure and so am I. You might have experienced something like this yourself on one of your trips. I folded my clothes and every other stuff on my bedroom and placed them on my bag. It didn't enter my mind that I hid my notebook and the pen under the pillow, and just because I saw that my bed was clear I thought I had everything in my bag already. I realized it only when I was on the bus and I wanted to browse my business plan, only to find out it's not in my bag.

I was angry with myself. That time I got discouraged with the wasted effort and for some reason didn't want to rewrite the business plan. My enthusiasm dropped dramatically. And for a time, I shelved the dream just because of the incident. We'll good for me, I may have lost my business plan notebook, but I certainly haven't lost the dream yet. I forgot what I wrote on that notebook already. I was afraid somebody on the ship would eventually find that notebook and copy my business idea and start it. Thank God, nobody in the Philippines have started my business idea yet. I will not be revealing my business concept on this blog, until I have started it already and I have my beta release.