A Framework for Happiness

The greatest enemy of happiness and fulfillment is minutia.  It’s all too easy to drown in the trivialities of life and lose sight of the light that is our true aspirations. In a prior post on Time Management highlighted the importance of having clear priorities in order to apply your time efficiency (importance>urgency).  Since they I’ve had many discussions about just how to go about establishing these priorities.   Over time this has evolved into a very simple one page framework:

This is designed to be filled from the bottom up – with each layer building on the one before it. 

• Ethics - At the core is ethical boundaries.  What are things that you need to always or never do?
• Motivations - Then think about your motivations and their result (your legacy).  What do you want to look back on at the end of your life?
• Activities – What do you want to spend your time doing in service of your motivations and bounded by your ethics?
• Relationships – What are your most important relationships that you need to nurture? What relationships do you need to develop to support your activities?

A book I’ve found invaluable in thinking about all of these areas is True North by Bill George.  A staple at HBS’s Authentic Leadership Development class.  The book includes interviews with a large number of the greatest leaders of our society and tells their stories in a series of vignettes. 

 

While by no means a complete roadmap to the rest of your life, this simple framework can serve as an invaluable compass.  When I have some time to myself I’ll think about my priorities in life and fill out the boxes.  Then I keep the framework on my wall and look at it every today to ensure that I’m spending my time on the most important things in my life. Not the most urgent minutia of the day.  That’s happiness.

Less Noise More Signal: Training your Brain

 

Let’s face it.  We’re all addicts. 

The brain naturally desires the path of least resistance  From YouTube binges to Facebook obsessions our inner Id is always trying to take the easy way out.  It’s the mental equivalent of eating cotton candy all day long.

All the digital activities the mind gravitates toward tend to utilize a minor percentage of your processing power.  The more time you spend engaged in this type of activity the more your brain becomes accustomed to operating at this low level.  The more you engage in passive activities the harder it is to snap back to doing more active mentally challenging tasks.

It’s not a respite – it’s a relapse.

The mind operate off of a baseline and resists any deviation for the better. Each time you indulge in the guilty pleasure you train your brain to get lazier.  However, over time, it’s also possible to train your brain to gravitate to be active and seek out stimulation. 

Furthermore, from my experience (admitted backed by no science)the minor use of brainpower is the most pernicious state of being.  You don’t progress (learn/grow/build) and you don’t rest (recover/reenergize).  It’s a no mans land of passive decline.

So what’s the answer? Clean living! Remove the passive engagement portion of your life.  Train your brain to work or rest.  Not muddle in between.  You’ll find you get more done, feel less stressed, and will increase mental acuity.

Some tools to help you on your way:

BlockSi  - A pretty good parental control toolset.  Block your most addictive sites (youtube/hulu/netflix etc).  It’s not bullet proof (since you’ll know the password), but having to go in and un-block something or open a new browser type will help break a habitual activity (alt-tabbing to FB/favorites).

RescueTime – A great desktop app that tracks all activity on your computer.  It provides analytics that let you know where you spend your time.  This is your answer to ‘where did the day go?’.  Also – it will help you align your intended priorities with daily activity (how much time do you spend on email vs eclipse/powerpoint/excel?)

Dubious?  Try it for a week.  It will be hard to stick to it 7 days straight, but at the end you’ll be amazed at how quiet the voice of temptation has become.

Boston Founders – CustomMade

This week began in the best way possible with a tour of some amazing startups all clustered around Kendall Square (my backyard!). 

First stop was at CustomMade.where we met with their CEO Mike Salguero.  Mike is a Real Estate Professional turned artisan curator.  They had a great story of finding a under-used website that enabled makers (people that create furniture/jewelry etc.) to post their work and attract business.  After some furious fundraising they bought the company, built up the user base, and moved into a transaction mode (where they take a commission on the maker’s transaction).  This transformed the business from an small online bulletin board into the leading marketplace for custom goods worldwide.  Some key takeaways from this conversation:

• Transactions > Fees. While certainly not universally true, the transition from charging a monthly subscription to taking a commission was an infection point.  This makes sense to me since with the former – the makers take on all the risk. In the latter model the risk is aligned to the makers’ success.  If they don’t gain any value from the site it’s free.  And, if they do make some sales I’m sure they are happy to give a small piece to CustomMade.
• Customer is all about the inflection point. You do thousands of little updates every single day, and one of them will hit.  For Linkedin this was the big button to connect address books.  For Hotmail this was the ‘sent from Hotmail’ tag.  It will be trivial and you won’t know before hand what it is, so just keep the ‘innovation flywheel’ spinning!
• TopGrading – test people in situation to find the best employees.  Need to find someone versatile?  Move their interview room 2-3 times and see how they react.  Mike loved getting this insight early on.
• Culture first – Mike liked people with passion and without ego.  He was a proponent of protecting this no matter what. 
• Motivate your team with customer stories – Mike loved telling stories of how much makes loved CustomMade and customer loved the products they received.  Especially hiring folks passionate about the mission this was the core motivator.
• SF>Boston.  Sorry Beantown, but the talent/funding pool in SF is just so much bigger its hard to compare.
• Be super aggressive about asking for help.  Certainly something I took to heart.  There are a ton of amazing folks with experience in Boston who can and want to help. Go find them and get helped!

Priority > Urgency

Time is the most precious of commodities.  However, the vast majority of people I know are unable to effectively manage their time and allocate this limited resource to the most important tasks.

The biggest challenge here is confusing urgency with priority.  Urgent issues are one that need to be dealt with right now!  If you don’t act now, the opportunity disappears.  The pressure of an exploding opportunity often spurs us to action.  At HBS we fondly refer to this as FOMO (Fear of Missing Out).  On the other hand, items with priority are those which are truly important to you.  The stuff that matters.

As responsibilities and opportunities grow (and they inevitably will over time) the number of urgent tasks will quickly grow in volume to consume your enter life.  Without careful thought this can lead any but the most deliberate to spend their whole life blocking and tackling the urgent minutia – and completely missing what truly matters to them.

So how is one to avoid this trivial existence?  Triage.  Just like in any good intake ward – there are firm rules for who to treat first – the same should exist for your life.  Take a day and make a list of the most important goals in your life (build a great company, find a spouse, grow my relationships with close friend/family).  Then, be ruthless.

Every opportunity should be compared against that list of what matters to you.  If it doesn’t fit into one of your life goals.  Just say no! Nothing is  more liberating psychologically and nothing will make you more effective at the things that matter.  High volume mediocrity is still mediocrity.

If you’re a young employee – this is especially important to keep in mind.  Everyone will try and dump thankless work on you.  Don’t take it.  If you don’t gain anything from doing minutia (and if you’re at a big company you won’t).  Just say no. Don’t do things just because you are asked to.  Take  a strategic view.  If it doesn’t help you in the long run Go find better things to do with your time that will make for a great resume bullet point.

As a parting thought, I’ll share one of the most insightful questions of my first year – posed by Shikhar Ghosh. If you’re around 30 years old right now you have 50 years left.  Another way to look at this is 50 years x 50 weeks – you have 2500 weeks to live. 

What will you do?

Super Simple Scrum

In my last post I discussed my process for task allocation using a calendaring system (ie Outlook). However, in order to do this successfully you need to be equipped to successfully estimate the amount of time a task require. In the engineering field there are countless methodologies to aid in this effort for developers, but my favorite is Scrum.

One of the core elements of Scrum is the calculation of a ‘load factor’. Before doing a task you estimate how much time you think it will take. After the task is completed you record how long it took you.

Load Factor = (Reality-Estimation)/Estimation

Initially this number will have incredibly high variance, but over time, your load factor will start to stabilize. This will enable you to revise any of your initial estimates. For example, My load factor is currently around 1.5. This means I’m consistently overambitious and underestimate the time required for a given task by 150%. So, next time I try to estimate a project – I’ll do my standard estimate and then just multiply it by 1.5.

Ideally, your load factor will fall over time as you become more aware of your personal bias and begin to adjust. However, many people (myself included) – especially those with large variation in task types (in a day I’ll do anything from coding to design to door to door sales) may never get to a low load number.

Luckily, the load factor has you covered. It’s a great tool to reduce the uncertainty of planning from the inaccuracy of your guess (one project) to the volatility of your load factor (over several projects). While I initially started using this system to estimate consulting work (where cost overruns are a serious client issue), it has proven so useful I apply it to every aspect of my life.

Time Management Process

Life is complicated. As we accumulate responsibilities and relationships throughout the development of our professional and personal life the challenge of keeping track of it all mounts.  We all need a system, and here is mine:

Input generally comes in person and over email. If it’s in person I just make a quick note and send myself an email to get it into the stack.

Once I’m on my laptop I’ll go down all of my email items and decide to delete, delegate, or allocate.

Delete – I just don’t have the time or interest to do this.

Delegate – This is someone else’s problem. Rely all to the email to loop in the assignee and then delete.

Allocate – any task I commit to doing has to go on my calendar.

While, this may make my schedule look like a bit of a mess (see above), it prevents over commitment. Also, if the task has any notes (i.e. ideas I have or notes from a customer call) I’ll input them directly into the calendar item. If I have a meeting I’ll input the email correspondence leading up to the meeting right into the calendar item for easy recall on my iPhone when I’m on the move (great for sales).

If a work item is taking longer than expected, is recurring, or needs to be shifted – I simply shift the calendar item. And, in any given day I’ll usually have an hour or two of unplanned interruption, so I plan my schedule with a hour lunch and an hour before sleep that I can use as buffer.

Using calendars in this way enables you to force an allocation process in your life and provides a chronological record of notes (easier to recall/review). Stay organized my friends!

Book Report: Rework

I’ve long been a fan of the 37 Signals folks.  They really are the heralds of the lean movement.  The build super simple tools to run small companies and they do it using the best practices in the lean movement.  So, I was excited to dig into their book: Rework – a compendium of their best practices.

The book is organized in to 87 lessons that read like blog posts (just a few pages a piece).  Here are my seven favorites:

1- Scratch your own itch – build a product you will use.  Customer research becomes easy and part of your company DNA when you are the customer.

2- Interruption is the enemy of productivity – whether meetings, calls, emails, or colleagues stopping by – these little interruptions make sure nothing actually gets done.  I’m a big fan of arranging my work/communication in blocks. I will code or write for 3-4 hours with my phone off and outlook closed.  It’s good practice to carve out this time for your company on a regular (ie daily) basis.

3 - Go to sleep.  While everyone differs, my world revolves around sleep. Sleeping less makes me stupid and careless – often to the extend that I’m only creating more work for myself down the road.  Sure there are times where you need to pull an all nighter, but usually those events are preventable.  If you’re up all night – you’re doing it wrong.

4 - Welcome obscurity.  I think many misinterpret the lean startup methodologies to mean that you need to launch and build a product asap.  This often leads to a team maintaining the wrong business.  Lay out your theses and do the least amount of work possible to validate them in obscurity.  By the time you’re hunting for PR your business should be rock solid and ready to scale.  If it’s not spend more time on product and none on promotion.

5 – Press Releases are Spam.  Many young companies go chasing big press as a marketing mechanism.  Rework points out that they get far more customers from blogs/trade publications than big media.  In my experience I’ve certainly found this to be true.   I’ve gotten more useful leads from the HARBUS (the HBS student paper) than CNN.

6- Do it yourself first.  I’m a huge fan of this mentality.  I’ve done every job at my startup.  I know what it entails so I know what person I need and I can be a better manager (since I actually understand what they’re doing).  Also, if anything goes wrong, I’m never left helpless or blocked.  I can always pitch in to make sure the show will go on.

7 - Test Drive Employees.  Despite working at Microsoft – famous for their love of the brainteasers and intellectual horsepower tests – I don’t find that relevant to finding good hires at all.  If I’m going to hire for a position I look for comparable experience (ie this person has successfully done a similar job in the past) and then I watch them do their job.  Whether this is a 1-2 hour coding session where they work on a current company problem or even a weeklong period making sales calls – taking the time to watch someone work before hiring is the only way to make sure you’ve got the best candidate.

As the new year rolls in. These are great lessons to live by – the top two will definitely make my list of resolutions!

Borrowing Library e-Books on your Kindle

While certainly not news, I’ve just learned how to borrow books from my local library on my Kindle.  Mind Blown! 

This program, offering in partnership with Amazon.com, Overdrive, and local libraries, provides much of a local library’s collection deliverable direct to your kindle. 

This program is available is a large number of systems including New York Public Library, Toronto Public Library, and Boston Public Library.  A full list can be found here: http://overdrive.com/About/Partners.aspx#Libraries

Since I’m in Boston, BPL was my first stop.  Their program is open to any student or resident in Boston (however, there was no verification so it seems pretty open…).  The entire process from signup to download of my first ebook (Rework) took about 3 minutes.  Their guides are not clear, so here’s a quick 3 step guide to get your borrowing ebooks like a boss:

1. Get an ecard (http://www.bpl.org/general/circulation/ecards.htm).  This enables you to access all BPL electronic resources. 

2. Head over to the over to http://bpl.bibliocommons.com and do a search (ie Rework)

3. Click Request This Download

4. The link will take you to Amazon – just log in and download your book!

Now that I’m back to reading something other than HBS cases this has been a life saver.  Amazon and BPL my brain and my wallet thank you!

Super Simple CRM

From my last couple posts I got quite a few questions about how to keep track of your interactions as you sell.  There is certainly a full range of CRM (Customer Resource Management) software, but I find if your team is small (1-3 people) a simple spreadsheet in Excel works just fine. 

The goal is to create a document that is simple enough you can make a habit of keeping it up to date.  Heavyweight systems tend to be more laborious to use and reduce the frequency of data input (which is key). 

In it’s simplest form I keep a sheet with following columns:

• organization name
• email
• first name of contact
• last name of contact
• website
• status
• notes

An example of what this looks like from Flock is as follows:

To create your first sales list you can usually just rely on the web (Google searching) or some select industry directories (in our case Yelp was quite useful).  This will help you fill out the majority of the fields to create a record for each potential customer.

As you send out your first emails, make a note of that in the ‘status’ section.  I usually keep this field short and tied to major stages of development (emailed, heard back, agreed, contract signed).  All the other information I input into the notes section.

When inputting information it’s a balance of ease of reading vs ease of writing.  I fall heavily on the side of ease of writing because I want to ensure that I get all the information in – even if it is in a messy context.  If the information turns out to be important later on (ie this becomes a key customer) I can format the information then.

As I engage in sales meetings I’ll usually just jot notes on a legal pad as I’m talking with the customers and then transfer it to the excel sheet as soon as I get home.  If I don’t happen to have a paper/pen handy sending yourself emails via iPhone work just as well.  For each meeting I take notes in two phases:

1. During – While engaging with the customer it is important to write key issues/follow up items you’ve agreed on down.  I’ll usually come in with a few agenda items jotted down as headers and fill in notes under those headers as we talk.
2. After – Once the meeting is over, I’ll immediately write down everything I can remember about the customer interaction.  This is critical to maintaining a consistent interaction each customer when you are meeting with hundreds. 

The nice thing about an excel sheet is it is very easy to review.  Every week I’ll just run down the list to make sure I’ve had a chance to check in with every customer with a current issue.  All the dormant relationships (sales that closed or failed) will be contacted every few months).  The biggest mistake I see new sales people make is failing to maintain consistent contact with their customers. 

Also, if you’re in a startup environment where you are just starting to understand your sales pipeline this list will serve as a record of your sales experimentation.  You’ll instantly be able to look down you list of closed sales and see from the notes what characteristics of your interaction of the customer made the deal work.

The whole mantra here is KISS (keep it simple stupid!).  When you start selling create an excel sheet.  Update that sheet after every meeting.  If you can do that you’ll be well on your way to delighting your customers!