Increase Your Productivity by Getting Busier

This post was originally published on 12/22/2011.

At the beginning of 2011, my work schedule was light. I could stop work on the startup early without stressing out, I took longer lunch breaks, and I spent the evenings recreating. I watched a bunch of movies that had been on my list for years, I caught up on correspondences, and I thought about and wrote more blog posts. I went to sleep when I wanted, woke up when the sun rose and generally lived it up. From the outside, I was living the lifestyle business dream, if only temporarily, while other projects wrapped up.

I was, however, deeply unhappy. After the first week or two, I found that watching a lot of movies at once was kind of boring, that I could correspond with others much faster than they could reply, and that it didn't take long to write all the blog posts I had been planning. But much worse, I discovered that for me, being productive had a large impact on my happiness and I simply wasn't efficient when I wasn't busy. Without hard deadlines and time limits, coworkers and customers, it was always acceptable to dally and watch an episode of Community. Or stay up late reading Reddit. Or hit the snooze button more than once.

Just to be clear, I didn't have motivation problems at first. I found that the less I had to do, the less I had to worry about using my time efficiently, and this led to a rapid decline in productivity. The whole slowdown process took 2 weeks.

Starting in the summer, work started picking up again. Even though I was working more than full time, I realized I was accomplishing more on my personal projects than I had when a two hour lunch break was no problem and my days ended at 4PM.

In short, I've found that the right kind of productivity (as in, working on projects/work that matters to you personally) tends to increase as you get busier. There is a linear relationship between how much you have to get done in a day and how much work will get done on personal projects.

There's an old saying that goes "if you want to get a job done, give it a busy person." This isn't a new or revolutionary thought, but the inverse is new and revolutionary: "if you want to get a job done yourself, get busier." I can't speak for everyone, but I've definitely found this to be true.

Have others found this to be true? If so, have you found any hacks that increase productivity even more?

Why You Should Refuse to Build a Company on Content

As web business models go, content is well understood: you produce something of value and then monetize through ads, lead generation, or just charging for what you produce. I refuse to start a new business based on selling content and so should you. Here's why:

It Doesn't Pay

The web has produced an extreme abundance of content. It has simultaneously failed to fix micro-transactions. This has resulted in the expected value of any specific information falling to zero. There are isolated niches in which content is still worth money, but they are becoming fewer and father between [1]. As a test of this mindset: would you be reading this right now if I had asked you to pay me even $0.10 for the privilege?

The average piece of content is worth almost nothing. This means that most people in the US can't make a living wage producing content. If you are a good developer, for instance, your time is worth many times more producing code than it is producing content of almost any type.

Producing Content is Unpleasant Work

Some people have realized that content has become too expensive to have people keep producing it. These new content companies (like Demand Media) are highly profitable while traditional content producers (like newspapers) wither and die. Algorithms will be increasingly important in content creation, and they do it just well enough to invite a click and then frustrate you into (hopefully) clicking an ad. Sites like About.com and Mahalo flood search results with just-good-enough information at scale and it's hard to beat companies that wield hundred of millions of links.

With that as your competition, you are forced to create bad/mediocre content as quickly as possible. Producing content is therefore a race to the bottom in which you must compete with the lowest paid global workers to produce bad content as quickly as possible. I don't want to make anything that sucks, much less in large quantities.

There Aren't Any Interesting Problems

You could argue that monetizing content in a sustainable way is an interesting problem, but I would beg to differ. Creating ever-more complex link farms at scale isn't my idea of doing great work. And past that problem, producing content is essentially the same process as it was 500 years ago. I do not mean to imply that creating good content is easy, but the problem is well understood, labor intensive, and has reached a level of development where success is defined more by cutting input costs than by creating better outputs.

Piracy Exists

But just for the sake of argument, let's ignore everything above. If you have a real itch to write the next revolutionary book of jQuery tutorials, there's the issue of piracy. Despite misguided legislation attempting to curb the behavior, piracy is easier today than it was when I downloaded my first MP3 on Napster in 2001. If it's easy to take from you and all you have is takeable, you are in a position of extreme vulnerability.

Again, there are content businesses that make money, but you'll notice such businesses are almost always established B2B companies operating in specialized markets where the liability of piracy is higher than the cost of acquiring material.

This Situation Is Deplorable

I say all of this with the greatest sadness. If people can't make ends meet producing good content, the world is a poorer place. I won't really miss another review of the iPad 9, but I will miss proper journalism. I just finished reading the book 1491. It was both enthralling and breathtaking in the scope of research that went into it. But reading it was a guilty pleasure because I knew the author had to take a huge gamble to write the book, and his odds of making money on his investment were poor. If societies lose people that make it their business to seek truth and produce content, those societies become worse. Watergate was only exposed because 2 Washington Post journalists spent more than three years researching and seeking truth full time. I want to live in a world where people like that can feed their children.

At the same time, I realize I'm not prepared to devote 10 years fighting this issue, and so I refuse to start a company based upon content, and I think if you realistically evaluate the costs, you will too.

[1] I can imagine a number of niche B2B content business models in which you charge for access to highly specialized technical information that changes a great deal. Perversely, one such content business model is law, which doesn't produce any economic value, law merely re-allocating resources between parties.

It's Insanely Hard to Make a Kick-Ass Mobile App

It would be hard to find a self-respecting geek and technologist who disagrees with the phrase "the future is mobile." All the coolest new gadgets are tablets and smartphones and all the biggest plays in content are on those devices. The market dominance of the biggest tech companies depends on how you use that device in your pocket or backpack.

So we get it. Mobile is hot. Mobile is irreplaceable. And most importantly, mobile is the future. But this mobile future takes software for granted.

At both Skritter and CodeCombat, we learned that because we built mobile versions of our apps for iOS. We found that there are so many apps, they have been devalued to the point of monetary irrelevance. That's sad because a good app is a piece of art. The user flows, the interface, the streamlined backend, all the pieces of a finely-tuned app take so much time and energy to perfect that I wanted to write a post to call attention to the level of software perfection that most people have acclimated to without even knowing it. Here are three reasons why it's insanely hard to make a kick-ass Mobile app:

System Constraints

You could say that Objective C is the problem, or put another way, the lack of >insert language< or >insert framework<. But the reason why developers are shackled to Objective C is to make sure processes finish in human time, and this is fundamentally a performance bottleneck in mobile hardware. Swift is a great step forward, but it's immature and for complex backend work, Objective C is still necessary. 

Skritter's iPhone app is great, but at core it is just an app to learn Chinese characters. Skritter doesn't pilot your car or allow you to edit movies or do any other mind blowingly complex task. But when it first launched, it wouldn't run on all but the n-1 generation of devices. When we tried to launch CodeCombat's tablet app, on the iPad 2 Air could run it at decent speeds. Why? Because older devices have limited memory, CPU cycles, and bandwidth, newer versions of iOS brick older devices, and news features are only available to developers on newer versions of iOS.

For a generation of coders accustomed to limitless managed memory, high-level programming abstractions, and thousands of deeply functional opensource libraries, mobile is a step back to the Byzantine world of Commodore 64s.

If you have built an app that doesn't choke on graphics and feels responsive, you have accomplished an incredible challenge and I tip my hat to you.

No Features

User-software interaction paradigms are changing and simplifying. Photoshop's submenus, window management, and setting screens afford it a level of feature depth I don't believe can be achieved in a mobile environment no matter how sophisticated and intuitive UI conventions become.

Put another way, there is a terminal threshold of feature depth to an app and this limits the scope and usefulness of any one app. That's not an intractable problem and the solution that has been embraced to date is app fragmentation. There are separate Skritter Chinese and Japanese apps for this exact reason. But consider the logical extreme of this design trend: if you were to make a fully-featured Photoshop app work on a mobile device, you would end up with several hundred micro-apps to do one thing very simply. Just download Instagram to see what I mean.

So, if you are attempting to make a kick-ass mobile app, you must make a lot of decisions that ultimately come down to "how little will my customers allow me to integrate into this thing?" Err on the side of simplicity and you might end up with a fart app. Go the other direction and you have a pile of unusable menus and sliders.

Extreme Polish

The app market is cruel; even moreso for the need to do a Hollywood launch. Because nobody has solved the discoverability problem in the app store, you need to launch big and magically figure out exactly what users want ahead of time. That last point is especially troublesome for people used to iteratively designing for the web. The road to app store success is littered with the corpses of apps that launched big but hadn't fine-tuned their interfaces, didn't have time to include that key feature users wanted, or just failed to make the app novel in some primal way.

Even the basic business sense of not overbuilding is turned on its head for mobile development. If you somehow manage to land that sweet TechCrunch article or New York Times acknowledgment, the app has to be perfect not just from an implementation point of view, but from a feature and context perspective as well. A perfectly implemented, compelling, novel app isn't enough; you have to know that your customers will agree about your choices.

There's always another app for whatever you are doing, and that makes customers more picky. The pressure to get it right the first time can be crushing.

So Get Insane and Start Building

I write all this not to discourage, but to uplift all those developers struggling with their mobile projects. It's tough to make something good, let alone make something good that also happens to make enough money to warrant the effort. For those out there building apps of consequence, I want this to read as a note of enouragement: stick to it and overcome the difficulties I've written about above. The mobile future is depending on you.

It's Religion All the Way Down

It was a hot day and as Rebecca and I drove north on i70. I was looking straight ahead as I pulled up behind a beat up SUV with a bumper sticker extolling the virtues of Yoga. A hand poked out of the front window and flicked a cigarette.

In the passenger seat Rebecca craned to confirm the cigarette siting, "Is that person smoking?" she asked. "Doesn't seem to fit with their bumper sticker."

"True," I said as the light turned green and I accelerated to pass the SUV, my underpowered Suzuki Aereo struggling to hit 40mpg, "it's religion all the way down."

"What?" Rebecca asked.

"Oh, it's just something I've been thinking about recently. Everyone always says that there's no accounting for taste, but until recently it was hard for me to admit there were chain smoking Yoga enthusiasts. It just seemed too contradictory. The best model I've found for respecting those kinds of differences are to treat them like religions."

"Yoga isn't really a religion," Rebecca said. "And what's with all the way down? Is that a rip on the turtles?"

"Yeah, I just tack on the turtles bit because it's funny."

With the SUV slightly behind us, I quickly changed the topic, "Quick, can you see what the driver looked like? I'm curious what a chain smoking Yoga enthusiast looks like."

Rebecca swiveled around in her seat to look, "I can't see, there's too much reflection in the windshield."

"Darn, I guess it will have to remain a mystery."

Marketing is Just Sales Without Accountability

Over the course of the last 7 years, I've spent a considerable amount of time managing sales and marketing for my own 2 software companies as well as a web consultancy. I've attended conferences, made sales calls, printed flyers, and schmoozed at investor gatherings. And I've come to believe that marketing is just sales without accountability. Bear with me for a moment.

Marketing is Sales

Both marketing and sales are intended to produce the same end result: make more sales. Marketing is the top of the sales conversion funnel; the first interaction with a potential customer in which good salespeople provide value and make a lasting impression. But let's not loose sight of the end goal: that first contact with a potential customer is fundamentally about sales.

Companies don't sponsor trade conferences and staff booths because they want to spend tens of thousands of dollars on snazzy signs and airfare, they want to make more sales. Companies don't maintain blogs because they want employees to become excellent writers, they want to be noticed for their contributions to their niche and make more sales. Companies don't buy television, print, and radio advertisements because they want to support actors and graphic artists, they (you guessed it) want to make more sales.

Marketing Isn't Measured

The problem with marketing is that it's so far towards the top of the sales funnel that it's difficult to measure. Sales calls either result in a sale or not, so it's natural and easy to measure their effectiveness. It's a lot harder to measure the value of meeting someone new at a trade show. Will the person become a paying customer? Will they refer someone to your business? Will they write about what great work you are doing? Or will they trash you to a potential customer? It's just not something that's obvious or easy to measure.

As a result, businesses and business owners (myself included) simply throw up their hands at some point and start generalizing. "We have to get our name out there somehow, and people watch television, so why don't we try a TV ad?" Or perhaps "We know some of our customers attend the BigConf Trade Show, so let's exhibit this year."

The unspoken rule of marketing is that most of it is wasted effort, but for a myriad of reasons, it's too costly to figure out which part is wasteful. My suspicion is that for companies in established markets, what most folks would recognize as marketing probably is worth the time and energy. Most companies can't prove that, or course, but the fact that they are still around means that they are either spending little enough on marketing  that their failures don't sink the ship, or the marketing efforts are actually paying off.

Stop Marketing and Start Selling

If you work for a tiny company or are building a new product, you can't afford to waste resources on unprofitable marketing or sales. You have to start measuring marketing efforts in the same way that you might measure sales. At this point you might be saying "Yeah, well, that's all fine and dandy, but how the heck do you propose I do that?"

Simple: pick some metrics and start recording data.

Here are some examples of things that I've personally tried:

1. Enter people you meet at trade shows in a CRM and track sales as they come in later.
2. Attach a coupon code to print materials and track how many times the coupon is used.
3. Ask incoming sales leads how they heard about you, be bold and ask for a name if the person is willing to give you that information.

You might now be saying "but I'll never be able to measure activity X!" One striking thing I've noticed about sales is that salesmen and sales departments are loath to invest time or money in anything that can't be tracked. That's a good starting point for marketing too. That doesn't mean you can't do activity X. It just means you have to get creative about tracking it. In cases where you can't find any way conceivable way to track it, that's generally a good indicator that it's not a profitable marketing channel.

Conclusion

You might well choose the wrong metrics to measure the first time around. For instance, the first two years that I attended trade shows for my company, I measured booth traffic. I literally just wrote down how many people talked to me at the booth. It turns out that people visiting the booth didn't predict sales at all. But that data saved us more than more than $10,000 when it came time to exhibit in year three. We had hard numbers that suggested that either 1) it didn't make money for us to attend trade shows or 2) unqualified visits to our booth are not related to making sales to qualified leads. Dodged a bullet there!

Marketing doesn't have to be blind, and when it does, don't do it. Treat marketing like sales, measure everything you can, and in a year or two you should be able to make at least one decision that saves your company $10,000.