We’ve all heard stories about, or maybe even know the stereotypical entrepreneur. These are the men and women whose obsession to launch a company drive them 24 hours a day at a frenetic pace. They seem like they can do it all: making new contacts, hustling the product, winning sales, hacking out code, managing the project, and charismatic enough to keep their team on target. And they seem to be able to do it all on nothing more than three hours of sleep and massive quantities of coffee.
I’m not like that.
I started working on Mesa about three months ago, and while I’m still actively working on it, I was really only obsessive about it for the first month or so. Some days I struggle with motivation and “inspiration”; I don’t always know what direction to go; I’ve been bored with building out parts of the application; I procrastinate even when I know the time I have is limited; It’s difficult to see where the finish line is.
How does one find passion or motivation? It’s one thing when you are working for a company or freelancing; it’s quite another when you don’t even know if what you’re building will ever see the light of day. To help with this, I’ve been employing a few tactics, two of which are from a chapter on motivation from “59 seconds”.
As the old adage says, “If you fail to plan, you plan to fail.” Based on this, I’ve created a five-point plan for achieving my goal – which, by the way, isn’t creating a product, but rather gaining independence. Each step is further broken into these components:
I’ve completed the first step – launching the RedCoyote website. If there was any reward, it was learning how to create a static site with Jekyll.
The second step is to launch Mesa as a closed beta. This will be complete March 1.
This tactic sounds kinda cheesy and it doesn’t help that it originated with Oprah in a roundabout sort of way. Before I sit down to start to work in the mornings, I’ve started taking a few minutes to visualize what I’m working for; not in a way that assumes I’ve already achieved my goals, but in a way that emphasizes the positives of achieving them. It’s a fine line, but it makes a difference.
There are thousands of articles written about how to avoid procrastination, but it oftentimes just boils down to momentum; once you get started, the momentum can carry you through.
To get that initial movement, I’ve found that just sitting down and setting my pomodoro timer is enough to get going. Once I’m into the pomodoro, focus comes more naturally. If I don’t set the timer, it may be another 15 to thirty minutes before I actually settle in.
This is the big one for me: each night I write down the goals I want to accomplish for the next day. I have an alarm which goes off late in the evening to remind me to set goals for the next day. At that point, I look over what I’ve completed that day, and determine what needs to get accomplished the following day.
I can’t stress how much of a difference this practice makes in my level of motivation, and the more thought I put into it, the more focused I’ll be the next day.
During the time I use to set goals, I also list the successes I had for the day. This is a less traditional sort of journalling, and really just a bulleted list of successes.
When I first began this practice, I was more inclined to write down the tasks I accomplished, but as I’ve continued, I’ve begun listing more abstract successes. So rather than listing, “Finished the Appointments feature on Mesa”, I might write, “Appointments are finished! Time to tackle estimates”.
While I’m listing successes, I also try to think back over the day and list the things for which I’m grateful. This has less to do with motivation, and more with general happiness.
So, is all of this working? I would say, “yes”. Creating an overarching plan definitely helps with the vision I’m trying to realize, and the nightly goal settings have a huge influence in the following day. The visualization component seems to be more influenced by my nightly goal setting, than anything. Lastly, journalling is still a work in progress, but I think it will make a difference if I just keep doing it.
Two more major components remain before I can release the beta. I can’t wait.