Category: Productivity

There are proponents of both cases for building a business.  Should you identify the vision and strategy for one amazing product and chip away at it until it becomes a success, or should you try 10 small experiments, see what sticks then focus on the winners?

David Heinemeier Hansson of BaseCamp started his venture with a dozen different web apps, developed more or less in parallel for several years.  After a while it became apparent that one of them was vastly more popular than all the others and those lagging Apps were eating up precious attention that could otherwise be better spent focused on making their Basecamp app even more awesome. Eventually they sold off the other assets and doubled down on their winner.

Ford on the other hand started out famously with one car that was available in just one color.  The model-T was a singular project and the focused effort one building just one thing really well is what helped Ford compete and survive in those early years of the automotive industry. Had Henry Ford decided to develop 10 models of car at the same time it’s unlikely there would be a Ford Motor Company today.

Had DHH decided to start his company based on just one of those 12 app ideas, there’s less than a 10% chance he would have picked Basecamp and ended up with the winner he has today.

It seems that in both those cases one approach or the other was a requirement for their success.

However there is another strategy that attempts to strike a balance between these which is the pivot.  With this approach you focus on one vision until it can be validated by the market and at a certain point if things look like a dud then you re-align the company on a new vision.  This has the advantage that you maintain the efficiency that comes with a focused mission, but if the market doesn’t resonate with the product you can keep the company together, re-used some of the assets you’ve built and test another market with a renewed focus and determination.  Hopefully it doesn’t take too many pivots to find something that fits.

How do you know what is the best strategy for your business?  I think it comes down to how the development cycle matches with the marketing cycle.  A lag creates gaps where the development team may not have market driven direction to go, and the marketing team may not have anything new and hot to sell.  Filling the voids (if you have them in your business) may be an opportunity to develop a new idea, or an indication there is an opportunity to re-structure and tighten up the slack.

A goal without a process to back it up is just an idea.  It is the process which actually will help you reach that goal and it’s more important to focus on developing on an actionable process than to have the best idea or goal.

A business idea is worthless unless you do something with it.  The process you come up with could be to start a business around the idea, or to licence it to someone else.

If you had a goal of running a marathon but skipped the process of signing up for a race and training for it then it’s likely that your goal would sit on your bucket list until you abandon it.

Though it’s also the case that parts of the process also entail their own sub-goals. The process of training for a marathon involves sub-goals of going out several times a week for a run. It’s worth considering what the process would be to make sure the training happens which might require carving out some time from other priorities.  If these processes don’t happen it puts the goal at risk.

Consider your own goals, do you have processes to back them up?  Are those processes actionable given your time and money contstraints?

Personal passion is an undervalued driver of productivity. Experience has taught me that when you work on something that you are passionate about it becomes easier to focus, you care more about the quality and are less distracted.

If you can find your passion, it means you will never have a job – Richard Branson

When someone is extremely passionate it becomes possible to do 60-80-100 hours a week and not feel drained of energy. It is a powerful motivator and one which many businesses could stoke.  Although getting more overtime hours out of your employees isn’t a goal we should strive for.  Passion can overcome the draw of Facebook or milling about at the water cooler.  This can produce substantial gains.

The six-hour-work day increases productivity

Sweden is proof that there is still much productivity to be gained from the hours we do put into work.  Working fewer hours per day can help many people maintain the energy they need to stay focused and committed. The math of productivity is not simply about working harder and longer.  Finding other ways to drive energy such as cultivating passion in yourself and your employees can have a similar effect.  Getting stuck in a perpetual mid-afternoon slump is something that everyone should avoid.

At the beginning of the year I, like many other people, set some goals for the year.  I also took the step of putting a reminder in my calendar to revisit my goals list every month to assess my progress.

After a couple of cycles of that I recognized the pattern, I had inadvertently applied a piece of the agile development method to my goals.

In typical agile we set a small set of attainable near term goals and work over the course of 1-2 weeks to accomplish them.  Then at the end of that sprint we pause to assess and examine 3 questions:

1. what went well?
2. what didn’t go well?
3. what can be improved for the next sprint?

Small stretches of effort separated by pauses to assess and repoint are a fantastic way to reach a goal whether it is sailing across the ocean, building a software project or losing 10lbs.

The time to revisit and refocus allows you to keep all your goals front of mind and gives you a chance to re-evaluate if they were reasonable goals at all to begin with.

One of my goals was to be able to do 50 pull-ups.  After several weeks of exercise and research on training plans I’ve come to the conclusion that 50 is just an insanely unrealistic number.  So in light of this new perspective I’m re-targetting 20 reps.

Facebook recently announced and opened an API for building applications that can have conversations through Facebook Messenger.  This is a huge thing.  Messenger has 900,000 active users and it presents a huge business opportunity for new ways at interacting with people.

Many people are calling 2016 the year that conversational interfaces will take off, and a huge amount of capital investment is going into figuring out how to make txting with computer programs easier and more intuitive.

One of my old projects (which I still use) could really benefit from a message interface.  Persistence is a webapp I built to monitor my activities and nag me to maintain good habits.  One of the problems I have run into with it is that my email nag messages get filtered by gmail as not important enough for a push notification, and I miss them.

Chat provides a more direct messaging platform which doesn’t (yet?) have a way to filter things out, and thus would be more reliable at getting my attention.  It also offers a way to interact with the system without installing an app or visiting a webpage.  Perhaps I could just message back ‘go to sleep’ to silence things for a short period.

So I started to build it out, and it’s been pretty fun.

Computers have a long history of replacing the work of humans.  Before mainframes large businesses would have armies of people with punch calculators to do the work that is now in a single spreadsheet (each person performing just a cell of that sheet).

Over the past 60 years the primary productivity benefit from computers has been the ability to do our math work and implement logical rules on data.

It seems like we are finally getting to a point where computers can start to do some of the softer skills normally only done by humans.

Projects like OpenCV and Scikit-learn give mere mortal programmers the ability to write software tools that are astonishing.  There are a growing catalog of libraries for deep learning, big data and natural language processing that are at a tipping point of being easy to use and deploy.

The next generation of productivity wins will come from leveraging these new tools.  Smart email auto-replies, smarter code completion, smarter communication, and plumbing together of much more complex automations. Talking to computers as if communicating to a human and expecting it to understand.

This may be the final turning point in productivity where humans lose the ability to keep up or find a new industry to be employed.  One of the fastest growing segments of employment is being a personal trainer.  Computers so far have failed to provide a compelling replacement to person-to-person motivation at the gym.  However there is no guarantee that those jobs are not at risk given smart watches and connected equipment paired with sufficiently written software.

If that is the case then a good strategy would be to try and be on the side that takes advantage of the productivity gains and not on the side that will become unemployed because of them.  If a doctor using the latest in AI tools can see and treat 5x the number of patients as one who doesn’t use them then if you’re a doctor you should try to avoid being one of those doctors who can only examine 1/5th the number of patients.

These kind of productivity gains will take time to fully materialize but perhaps less than you expect. As they come into play more wealth will consolidate into the hands of those at the head of the curve.  It will increasingly be difficult to keep those jobs that are automatable.

It seems inevitable that this will happen and it’s up to you to make career moves that will land you on the side that stays employed.  If you’re in a position to leverage these new AI tools it will be in your personal best interest to do so.

I recently had an experience where I was given the same programming problem as a handful of other software developers.  My advantage was that I was using Python while the other people were forced to write their solution in Java or C.

The difference in the amount of time it took to solve the same problem with a different language was striking.  Most other people completed in about the 45 minute mark whereas I had finished in just 15 minutes.  An average of 3x less time.  That’s a massively significant difference in developer performance that comes primarily from using languages that aim to be readable and focused on developer productivity.

I’d always known that Python was a productive language but that was the first time that I had experienced first hand just how beneficial it can be to switch from one platform to another.

Imagine taking a 3 month project and complete it in just 1.  That’s a massive savings; enough to change a business idea from impractical to highly lucrative.

One thing I’ve learned over the last couple of years is that with the right approach and the right tools you can make difficult application development accessible to even small budgets.  Sometimes it requires creative thinking and accepting unconventional solutions.

I’ve worked on $1M projects that could have been MVP’d for 20 cents on the dollar by choosing different technology and different developers. It’s quite shocking to see just how variable it can be to develop the same software with different tools.

If there’s a lesson in this it’s: Take care when choosing the people and technology.  The right choice can save you a tremendous amount of time and money.