Matt Warren

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Author: Matt

  • How to Maintain Momentum

    The main lesson from a handful of recent books that I have read has been focus on fewer, more important things if you really want to make progress.  Less but better.  And that the best way to maintain the momentum on the projects you do want to take on is to make small steps and celebrate the progress, rather than reaching the end goal.

    Studies have shown that the best way to create engagement in your work is to either experience achievement or recognition of achievement regularly.  This is something you have probably experienced personally.  The best projects are the ones that you can feel like you finished something at the end of every day.  Massive all or nothing projects that drag on each day where you work hard but it’s difficult to see the progress can wear you down very quickly.

    With this in mind, it is important to structure your projects such that there are always pieces where people can feel personal accomplishment or otherwise provide some external recognition of something that cannot easily be sub-divided in to small tasks.

    This works at various different scales too.  Entrepreneurs talk about Minimum Viable Products and “Done not perfect” to describe that initial ship-able product that can be celebrated as a turning point in the business.  At the day-to-day scale the accomplishments might be to implement a button on an app, or finalize financing terms for a business loan, or write a chapter for a book.  When you start off the day knowing the small task that provides a small step towards your end goal, then at the end of the day you can feel that sense of accomplishment when you complete it.

    These small daily accomplishments are THE major factor in maintaining momentum.

    Work each day without the sense of accomplishment is like crossing a bog – slow, tedious and dreadful.

    With the sense of accomplishment it’s like driving a car on smooth paved roads – even if you take your foot off the gas you’ll keep going forward.

    How do you make this concrete and apply it to YOUR goals?

    There are two steps/skills required to control and build your momentum.

    1. Focus
    2. Planning

    Focus is about very specifically knowing what your goal is and using that goal as part of all your decisions.  Develop your goal by taking time to really think about it, make it something measurable, attainable, and time boxed if possible: “lose 10 lbs by summer vacation”, “reach $1M in revenue this year”, “sign up 1000 new clients this month”.  With this goal in hand filter all decisions through it.  “Will X help me accomplish Y faster?” If the answer is No, then put it aside, decline the offer, and continue to use your time on things that will get you to your goal.

    Planning is about taking the time to really think about how you can accomplish your goal.  Figure out how to divide a big goal into smaller daily or weekly goals – something that is actionable. $1M per year in revenue is more difficult to understand than a $4000 per day sales goal.  Then put systems in place to measure and accomplish those smaller goals. Up front planning is important but it is also critical to re-evaluate and adjust the systems as progress is made and you learn or experience roadblocks.

    With a good plan and the ability to maintain focus on your goal you stand the best chance of having the daily accomplishments needed to create momentum.  Slowly but surely these accomplishments compound until massive progress is done, goals are met and success is had.

  • Morning Routine Redux

    Last year I had a morning routing going for a while but after a while I fell back into my old habits of spending the early hours of the day scanning Facebook in bed instead of what I was actually intending to do.

    Last week I got a tip to never leave your phone in your bedroom.  It’s just too tempting. I decided to try it out.

    For the last couple of days I have been putting my phone in the kitchen before bed.  It’s close enough that I can hear the alarm go off, which forces me out of bed.  And once I’m up I’m more likely to stay up.

    My morning routine looks like this now:

    6am: wake up
    immediately have some breakfast
    read or write for at least 30 minutes.

    The hope is that I can keep this up and do some catch up on my reading goal for the year.  By setting aside some quiet time in the morning to read I’m hoping to make a dent in the backlog of books.

  • Fill your mind with good things

    As the father of a 18 month old, it’s been fascinating to try and understand how her little mind works.  Currently she is getting quite good at classification: car, cheese, door, dog. Everything she sees is echoed back.

    At this early stage in development it’s easy to see that what you say and do have immediate impacts with what she learns and how she behaves.

    This doesn’t stop just because we get older and become adults.  Our minds are flexible and always changing – forming new memories, changing opinions, learning new things.  All these new growths in the mind are a result of the external and internal stimulus we give it.

    It has been said that reading is the most effective form of mind control.  When you read, the words on the pages leave an impression. The concepts give your mind something to spin on until the books ideas merge with your own.

    On the other hand. Feeding your mind with the wrong stuff can have unfortunate consequences. In an effort to teach Watson (IBMs Jeopardy winning AI) pop culture and slang, they fed it with the content from urbandictionary.com.  Unfortunately it had the effect of turning Watson into a potty mouth.  With an AI they were able to simply undo that.  Human minds don’t have an undo function.

    Do yourself a favour and be picky about the information and ideas that you feed your mind. Be mindful of the internal thought processes that develop your opinions. It will dramatically impact your future.

  • Personal Key Performance Indicator Dashboard

    There are many things that make corporations work well (in well run businesses) that can be applied to a personal level. KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) are something that I’ve been fascinated by for quite a few years now.

    Building dashboards full of statistics has been a part of every one of my personal projects.  The back-end for all my mobile apps/games was focused mostly on collecting and displaying all the various income sources and plotting revenue per day per app so that I could see the trends and identify spikes.

    My most recent app (Persistence) is, in essence, a KPI system for yourself.

    Exploring this idea further I worked on an application for my Raspberry Pi and am using an old monitor to have an always-on dashboard to display my activity against the goals I have.  When falling behind on my reading goal I’ll see a red box highlighting the overdue situation.  If I haven’t written enough code for the day I get an alert box.

    This is what it looks like so far:

    Screenshot from 2015-05-03 21:26:29

    I’ll continue to build it out and try different indicators that I’m interested in tracking and figure out what will provide the best motivation to keep focus on my longer term goals.

    I’m 1 week away from a 200 day streak on Github activity.  Maintaining this streak through the year is one of my New Years resolutions.  I’m also attempting to read one book every 10 days (which is proving difficult), and I have my financial goals for the year.  I’m hoping that having this always on dashboard will keep me focused on the right things, and not on spending too many nights watching TV.

  • Re-invigorating Old Products

    Sometimes you need to go back and look at the things you’ve done in the past to see if anything is due for an update or refresh.  Leaving old products to go stale is a sure way to let your customers know that you don’t care and don’t provide good customer service.

    With that in mind we’re going back through our catalogue of products – stuff that we have spent thousands of hours developing – and seeing if we can apply what we know now to those products to breath new life into them.

    Beyond the easy stuff like bug fixing, graphics tweaks and updating and modernizing the projects it’s a chance to apply entirely new concepts.

    One that I’m particularly keen to experiment further with is Behavioural Dynamic Response.  The idea is to trigger context correct information to users to help push them through the key response indicators.  It may be a notification to get the user to finish the particular level they were on, or to come back to beat their friends score.  When you have sequences defined that you know you want your users to go through you can do whatever is within your power to get them to keep taking that next step.

    Behavioural Dynamic Response is a super powerful technique that is not yet being widely used and shows a lot of potential for improving the user engagement with your products.

    Even without the major overhaul and completely new features.  Just the occasional touchup to your products shows that they are still active and more worth checking out.

  • New Bike and Fractured Rib

    This weekend I picked up a balance bike for Ada to start playing with.

    green_sport_1__83411.1405352731.1280.1280These Strider bikes seem like a good way to get a child used to biking and gaining balance skills.  It sort of takes the place of ever needing to go with a tricycle or a bike with training wheels.  Once they get good at balancing on these they can graduate directly to a regular bike.

    In the process of giving Ada her first lesson and riding around the kitchen table I managed to stub my toe and fall into a doorknob.  I’m fairly sure I fractured a rib 🙁

     

  • Finishing

    There are plenty of hurdles that you have to make in order to be successful.  Perhaps the most critical is taking something all the way to completion.  When you are not working with a team this is a deceptively difficult thing to do.

    It takes determination, momentum and accountability to start a project and see it through to the end and beyond.  Many times you will hit on things that seem insurmountable or mind numbingly tedious.

    When I launched the iPhone apps that I’ve worked on the struggles all add up. All the aspects to each project needs to be completed and to an acceptable standard.

    • Software development
    • Graphics
    • Sound FX and Music
    • business registration
    • iTunes accounts
    • bank accounts
    • certificates, signing, provisioning processes
    • marketing graphics, app descriptions
    • webpages, support forms
    • backend
    • testing and Quality Assurance
    • App Submission
    • ongoing marketing
    • iteration and improvements

    If just one of these presents a hurdle you cannot overcome by either doing the work yourself or delegating to someone who can then your project is likely doomed to fail. Like the links in a chain only one link needs to break for the chain to fail.

    That is why finishing is so hard.

    Projects start with the best of intentions, fantastic ideas and a solid plan and can still be derailed by a hiccup.

    The Agile approach of daily stand up meetings is supposed to prevent stoppages from lasting too long.  Eventually someone says: “I can’t continue until X is complete.” This is an indicator that someone in charge needs to take action quickly to keep the work progressing.

    When you’re working on your own it becomes incredibly difficult to self diagnose these situations and push through.

    That’s why I have tremendous respect for anyone who finishes a project on their own.

  • Interstellar

    I love to support movies that I think support positive visions of the future with a constructive, based in reality perspective.  We just purchased Interstellar. which is probably one of the most intriguing movies I’ve watched in a while.

    Based in a post-war future where the climate of Earth is devolving into a dust bowl and food and survival is in crisis. The movie tells the story of the people who transcend humanity into a future where we have control of space and time.  It’s quite amazing that during the development of the movie they actually published a scientific paper based on the accurate simulation a black hole.

    The solid fact based science behind really made a difference for me.

    So much of current TV seems to devolve as good ideas turn into mass audience crap.  Big Bang Theory started out as a smart show where the content of the show featured actual science — current seasons have turned the show into just another sitcom.  “House of Lies” – another favourite show, started as a cool view into the world of management consulting industry, and turned into preposterous sexual drama.  “Mad Men” was interesting when they focused on advertising, but the current season is all boring office politics.  It seems that the good shows have good writers at the start and then trade out for mediocre ones once the shows get established.

    When there is a good quality content tv or movie, I do what I can to support it.  If you haven’t seen Interstellar yet, it’s fantastic and worth watching.

  • Pycon 2015

    For those of us who can’t take the trip to Montreal this year for Pycon all the talks are on the Pycon 2015 youtube channel.

    To become the best of the best you have to learn from the best and all the most active and knowledgeable Python developers are at Pycon giving amazing talks that will teach you something you didn’t know before.

    This talk from David Beazley about concurrency and socket programming is quite informative. Watching him livecode the entire presentation is extremely impressive – it takes a tremendous amount of knowledge and experience to deliver a talk like this:

    There are so many goodies in the youtube channel. I encourage every python programmer to watch and learn as much as they can.

  • Organizing Priorities

    One of the books I read recently suggested a best practice for a businesses to have a top 5 list and a top 1 of 5 item that is the most important of that list.  Limiting it to 5 makes things seem attainable and having one singled out as the top priority adds just enough focus that you should know what you should be acting on at any time.

    What you put on the list should be determined by your longer term goals, and each top 5 item should be a step in the right direction to get there.

    I’ve started to do this over the last 2 weeks and the results so far have been quite good.

    My office has gotten completely re-organized and everything filed, or purged. The gutters cleaned. garden raked and turned over.  I have written a ton of things over the last few weeks, and started the process of consolidating my mess of banking accounts.

    The technique seems to work better than making a long TODO list that becomes a bit too intimidating and ultimately fails.