Calm yourself using lists, picking your battles and paying for simplicity
Thoughts and ideas from the last few weeks.
1. Use ads to test what works
Google, Facebook and Twitter ads are great ways to test the value proposition of what you are building. And to find out what it is that people care about. Even if you don’t have anything to sell yet. Need to decide on a name, catch line, logo or hero image? Set up A/B tests as ads and see what versions lead to higher click rates. It’s a great thing to do at all times, so you can slowly keep improving and refining your offering.
2. Idea — Starting a Mantra meetup
I’m building an app that helps you record and remember what you’ve learnt from books, podcasts talks etc. When thinking about marketing I had the idea to start a monthly meetup. Where we have 30/40 minutes of people talking about ideas and concepts they came across recently, followed by discussions, networking and drinks. Think small TED talks for smaller, more relatable ideas. I’m imagining the talks would be around self improvement, startups, design and tech. Mainly because that’s what I like ;)
3. Start building your audience and influencer relationships now
Whatever your idea or business, start talking about the relevant things on social media now. Engage with influencers and start building those followers. You don’t want to start from scratch by the time you actually have a product to promote.
4. Find the simplest solution, even if it costs
I find regular posting and maintaining of social media to be a complete ball ache. I get really into it for a week and then give up for the rest of the year. So finding the simplest solution that makes it super easy, is critical for me to keep doing it. I recently upgraded my Buffer account so I can run all my social through the 1 app, before I was using a mixture of the free version of Buffer and TweetDeck. But even only running two apps was enough to put me off doing it every day. Damn laziness!
5. Making lists calms me down
I end up writing lists for the same things over and over again. For some reason it feels really good and calming. I thinks it’s to do with clarifying my thoughts. Either way, give it a go and see if it works for you. My preferred tools are Evernote and Trello. Evernote I use for brain dumps, Trello is good if you want to prioritise the list afterwards.
6. Don’t publish something the moment you finish it
When you have just finished a blog post, drawing or anything else that took you a bit of time, you feel great, excited that you just finished something awesome. But don’t publish now! You need a to come back to it a little later, after that euphoria has faded a bit. Then check for edits. I had this recently with a sketch of mine. As soon as I finished it I got super excited and published it straight away. Afterwards I noticed a whole bunch of stuff I wanted to adjust, but I had already published to the world.
7. Put some good effort into planning your RPG campaigns as the Game Master
I recently started my first Role Playing Game campaign as the Game Master. I’ve played a lot of Dungeons and Dragons over the last year, but was never in charge. This campaign was based off the Discworld RPG, which is super awesome! I know the Discworld series incredibly well, so already had a great base of knowledge for the world and how it works. I spent around 6 hours planning for the first session and it was well worth it. I was mainly planning and building Non Playable Characters and potential situations that could occur, depending on what the players wanted to do.
I do a lot of improv so didn’t want things to be too rigidly planned out. When it came to our location and maps, I decided on using Realtime Board and sketching out what the characters could see as they progressed.
Realtime Board worked great for this as I could use my iPad and Apple Pencil to draw and the players would see the changes in real time. I’ve used roll20 a lot in the past, but it’s capabilities to draw like this are pretty laggy and buggy.
If you’re into RPG’s and haven’t tried the Discworld one, I highly recommend it.
8. Pair programming is super useful, but slow
I’ve recently been leading a lot of pair programming sessions for the first time. In these sessions I was screen sharing with two other developers, going through some React code and building some new features. Describing my process as we went along, as well as talking through and implementing ideas the others had. I found it really interesting to describe my thinking as I was coding. It’s not something I’ve ever done before. It makes you take a moment to really think about whether you’re doing something in the best way. The whole process is a lot slower than writing the code alone, but I definitely feel the resultant code is structured much better. It’s also a great way to teach and learn.
9. Pick your battles
I need to keep reminding myself not to get into certain conversations with some people after a tipple or two. No one is getting anywhere or developing their ideas, it’s just not fun or constructive for anyone. It’s just so tempting to call people up on something when you think they are being outrageous. But there’s a time and place for that, which is certainly not when everyone’s been drinking.
10. Reuse reuse
I can’t stop reminding myself about the importance of building super generic components and abstracting away business logic as much as possible. The pair programming I was doing really helped that and made me realise I could be better when coding by myself.
11. Pick good names, and don’t be afraid to change them
Naming components, functions, classes and methods are super important. It’s one of the critical factors in making code easy to understand at a glance. So spend a moment or two just to make sure your naming really does make sense. And don’t be afraid to change the names once you’ve written them. Even if it involves a bunch of find and replaces. The clarity you achieve makes it worth it.
That’s all folks
Thanks for making it this far! I’m a freelance developer and startup guy, checkout my website for more on what I do, social links and to get in contact https://charliejackson.com
