Last week I shared some startup co-founder tips. In addition, there are some personal/professional productivity tips that I’d like to share that might be contrary to a lot of folk’s GTD/productivity philosophies.
Emails are for losers
Jason and I have simple ultra-prioritized weekly and daily goals. The rest of the team do as well. We have twice-daily standups (10am & 5pm) that keep everyone on the same page, accountable, and efficient. And personable. We don’t send emails. We use Google Docs for any detailed information (e.g. specs), and use comments for offline discussions.
Important trumps interesting
I try to always focus on what’s important, not what’s easy or interesting. I’m currently leading everything product-related, and everything technology-related at Stereotypes. That’s a lot of hats. I’ve spent most of my career as a front-end developer (PHP/Javascript/CSS/Flash), but the last few years I’ve been ramping up more on iOS work, as well as deep serverside API performance/scaling (PHP/MySQL/EC2). This means that redesigning our blog template is fun and easy. This means that experimenting with different Gearman control panels is new and interesting. Experimenting with different iOS networking stacks is nuanced and challenging. However, what’s important is that we get our next build out to the test team on time, and that we finalize the text for our App Store description. These tasks are neither easy nor interesting, but need to get done. When you’re working in a startup, you don’t get carrots nor do you get sticks, you just gotta do it.
Hermit out in small doses
Working from home means being a hermit. It’s subtly saying, “leave me alone”. I don’t “hermit out” more than 40% of the time. Working from home 2 days a week allows me to have 8-/10-/12-/14-/16-hour blocks of uninterrupted coding time. And that’s important. However, being with the Stereotypes team, and being around other like-minded folks (like the Dreamit crew in Austin, or our Secret Clubhouse compadres) helps us iterate quickly on ideas, validate assumptions, and guess what: be happier in my day-to-day.
Exercise is a net productivity benefit
As echoed in every article about startup life ever, working out is important. What took me a while to realize is that exercise is a net productivity benefit. Even if it takes me 2 hours to get to the gym, workout, get back, and cool down, guess what—the rest of my day will be much more productive, and my sleep will be more restful. Preach!
