When I was in Japan this year it struck me how accurate things can be there and I began to wonder what I could learn and introduce to my business from everyday happenings around me.

So far, it’s been tough.

Everything kind of slotted into place about the Accuracy when I was starting the journey back from the mountains in Koriyama to Tokyo.  I stood on the platform waiting for a 9.40 am train inside the designated yellow lines.  The train pulled up stopping silently within a centimetre of its marks at 9.38.  I stepped on, sat in my numbered seat, popped the beer can and watched the clock tick to exactly 9.40 when the train moved.  (By the way, for reasons I’ve never known it’s OK to drink beer on a 9.40 business train in Japan, fine place.)  Even the vending machine had carefully provided me with change and reminded me to take it before thanking me for my business.

When I’d made this journey in the other direction previously I found it was possible to know exactly which incomprehensible station I was at just by looking at my watch.  If it’s 4.17 this is Funehiki.  No exceptions.

Arriving at the station I’d been greeted by two old fellas acting as attendants for the fifty or so spaces in the car park.  They’d diligently guided our vehicle inch by inch into the space, directed traffic and pedestrians perfectly allowing us all to arrive unscathed and perfectly in time.

Back in Tokyo I headed to a kaiten sushi that always has a queue of 30 people waiting to sit (the food’s excellent and ¥100 a plate). Thanks to the incredible organisation inside, you’re always eating within minutes of joining the party.  They do that for 23 hours and 50 minutes a day, every day.  In the department store I’m welcomed like clockwork by every assistant.  When I purchase something it’s wrapped, bagged and walked around the counter to be handed to me face to face.

I was a little too late in Enoki that night chatting with the usual odd mix of clientele (if I recall, a bank manager, a French vineyard owner and an actress) and arrived out of time for the Narita Express.  A guard explained I could hit the last local stopping train and make a connection somewhere or other.  It all worked like clockwork and arriving at the airport hotel it wasn’t a suprise that the desk clerk had my paperwork in front of her almost without effort.

Everything works, generally.  When it doesn’t, all hell breaks loose.  We’d bought a couple of phones and connectivity in Tokyo before heading to the boondocks and they hadn’t worked at our house (we were told they would).  We called to say there was a problem and were thrown into an endless loop of customer service people phoning us (note – phoning us, not the other way round) eventually culminating in a delivery guy turning up to collect our gear.  There was so much effort put into fixing the issue it was clear that such things didn’t usually happen – in the UK there would be a slick set of defences and procedures set up for lodging your complaint through official channels… In Japan it almost cut straight to the heart of the organisation because there was no precedent.

So… I’m trying to bring a little of that home, starting with the small stuff like filing… The tricky thing will be striking a balance between doing perfectly, and doing fast.  If we can master both, we’re laughing..

Oh goody.  More tax from today.

Here’s a breakdown of where the money goes, just in case you were thinking any of your mates who are entrepreneurs turning over £250K a year were rolling in it…

VAT @ 17.5% – £43,750
Rent & Rates – £10-15K
Customer Acquisition – £62,500 (based on £250K being made up of single £20 sales with £5 per customer spent on ads)
Materials – £62,500 (each thing they sell at £20 costs £5)
Fully loaded wages (inc NI etc) for basic employee – £20K
Accountant’s fees – £2K
Telecoms, web host etc etc – £2K
Other stuff – £2K (and there’s *loads* of other stuf)

Leftover so far:  c. £40K

Corporation tax on profit is 20%, unless he whips all that out the business.  If he does it as wages then he pays about 12.5% PAYE on top and has to take out his own NI, PAYE at the other end too, meaning a wage packet of about £25K-£28K and a business with no retained profit.  These aren’t based on any particular business by the way, just illustrative – I’m always suprised how many people I talk to don’t get that turnover isn’t the same as money in your pocket…

So… if you’re thinking that dandy product idea will make you spare bucketloads of cash, think carefully again.  If you want to make £25K a year of the sweetest, most enjoyable kick-ass money you’ll ever make in your life – dive right in!

Wow.  Costco.

I’ve always wondered about how they keep all their staff so friendly (at least in our local).  Today I think I found a clue – empowerment.

We purchased a huge BBQ from them on Monday which was advertised as coming with a cover on their literature.  The cover was a big selling point, as those things run at about £40 for this particular model.

After lots of unpacking though, no cover.  I called them expecting at best an offer to refund if I drove it all the way back, but was blown away when the girl who answered the phone said “Yep, I looked on the box and it doesn’t say cover, nor does it say cover in the literature but I see that printout near the display and that *does* say it comes with one; so I’ve instructed purchasing to find you one, buy it and have it delivered to you.”  24 hours later the manufacturer phones me up to check a time for a CitiLink courier to turn up.

Not that long ago I’d mentioned to a customer service rep I’d left a crate of beer on the trolley in the car park, and almost without me finishing my story she’d gone and fetched me a replacement and told me to have a nice day – no questions, no demand for proof or anything.

The staff seem to be given the power to make decisions without needing to pander to some manager somewhere.  That must make a huge difference to how they operate in what is essentially a big warehouse supermarket.

Hats off.  Applying to own business.

Here’s something I don’t do very often.. a review.

I’ve been sparked into action by a twitter automation tool, Hummingbird2. Before I begin, I’d just like to point out that I’m not an affiliate and any links are straight, not coded.. so I speak my opinion..

I needed a tool to help find interesting folk on the Big T, so I went shopping and based on what it said on the tin, came back with HB2. Silly me.

The problem is that it bills itself as being a highly accurate finder / adder / unsubscriber based on targeted keywords in the public stream.

It’s true – you find people by telling it what you’re interested in. It finds anyone who happens to have typed or retweeted your word and compares them against a few heuristics to see if they’re up to scratch (simple scoring mechanism based on your settings for min tweets, followers etc).

The problem is that the search engine seems to be dated circa 1995. There’s no support for operators, negatives or even a simple AND. For those who understand such things, you’re basically getting:

SELECT * FROM firehose WHERE msg like ‘%keyword%’

I don’t get it. Even the public API for Twitter supports most of their fancy switches and query language.

So the net result is doing anything clever, like filtering out messages from foreign languages, restricting to a very specific subject, time, place etc is impossible.

I ran it for a few hours and have spent a few days trying to clean up the mess it made of my account. In spite of setting the quality requirement to B+, I ended up following spammers, poker people and *endless* “retweet to win” types.

Another gripe is the unintelligent unfollow system. There’s no VIP list or way of protecting the innocent, there’s no flair to how the unfollowed are chosen. There’s also no way to manually unfollow users in case it picks up someone you’re not interested in. The big song and dance about clever unfollowing is simply “unfollows the oldest person who hasn’t followed you back”.

The makers seem to have spent a lot of time on a nice polished interface, a half baked Twitter client (presumably to give some kind of “free download” and forgotten the most basic things – if I want to employ a software tool to help me follow interesting / targeted people, then it better be able to target.

I did write to the company about my concerns, but I received a very odd email back being all philosophical about success (“Like any tool if you are looking for the tool to make your success you will find that your success is limited.” Er, yes. Now – why doesn’t it filter like it says it does?)

Summary – if you want something to sit there and follow zillions of people in the hope that they follow you back, it’s probably quite good. If you want to find targeted users matching specific criteria – I found it useless.

[tweetmeme]I read with interest, and slight glee, that Google is being hit hard by consumer groups complaining that it should have telephone support for the Nexus One instead of the traditional Google way of email only.

As a long time user of Google’s services, I’ve often been frustrated and amused by the fact that the hundreds of thousands I spend with them doesn’t give me access to even having a telephone number there (we used to have one, but it’s been recently replaced with a voicemail asking us to email). In any other company in the world, if you spend half a million or so a year, you’d expect there to be a salesperson ready to jump.

Not with the Big G though, bless ‘em.

Many are also complaining about the amount of time that it takes Google to respond to queries. Google said it would answer problems via e-mail though any response may take a day or two to arrive…. A common sentiment on the support forum was that for the $500 people have paid for the phone they should be able to call a dedicated help line. bbc.co.uk

They’ve brilliantly and efficiently changed our expectations, in part through being what is effectively a monopoly, of customer service. Granted, their email response is pretty good these days, but nonetheless seeing how a new clutch of Google customers is reacting to dealing in the Google Way is a reminder that there’s still a long way to go before every buyer can be beaten down into using the “new” ways of ecommerce.

I wonder how much we leave on the table by excluding them in what we do; or more importantly what the opportunity will be to pick up the ball of old-style customer service in the new-style economy?

[tweetmeme]So … January.. snowed out in the UK. Nonetheless we find ourselves at the start of the big countdown year with a hefty list of things we can work on to grow the business.

I’ve already noticed an interesting side effect of the Real Plan – huge amounts of work are being compressed into very short timescales. So short in fact that what I thought would be a year of work is being knocked down like fairground ducks. Of course that’s not true for external factors that we can only influence and not control (e.g. The Big G), but foundation work has become a no-brainer.

I read an article on entrepreneur.com this morning about “2010 is the year for planning”. Interestingly it speaks about a backlash against the backlash against business planning. Having lived in Boulder, CO for some of the boom (tech) years I remember anti-planning sentiments well. It was basically a function of the bum ideas, bum execution and greed of the age. So perhaps planning returns during periods of frugality and caution.

Crucially the act of working to the Plan forces us to stop merely existing as our business grows around us and return to being the driving force behind the growth. As an entrepreneur this is all quite liberating – the thrill is in the startup big-bang, the creation of something from nothing to the point where you create value and people give you money. The Plan recreates that environment in a way by setting impossible-possible goals, lining up threats as enemies to be eliminated and waving big fat dollar signs in your face.

All hail the Plan!

[tweetmeme]In entrepreneur world, we have to make prices up as we go along. Generally I’ve tried to avoid the tendency of service providers to pull prices out of thin air by making list prices and rules around to build, but sometimes, whether buying or selling, we gotta negotiate. And guess what – that old thing about starting low or high has firm psychological roots and reasons.

Sell High

My dear daughter, once again, seems to have this hard wired into her DNA already. I’d like to think it’s inherited from me, but something tells me it’s a learned behaviour that the super efficient four year old brain has figured out. “Daddy – if I eat all my dinner, then we’re going to play Lego Star Wars for 20 minutes OK?” She knows that’s more likely to get her 10-15 than if she starts at 10, which will get her nothing or 5 minutes.

The reason is that we “anchor” ourselves to a starting figure and adjust only until a plausible figure is reached. So if you’re the seller, start high in a negotiation. The buyer will naturally adjust away from your starting point, but only to a certain degree. It’s called the “Anchoring & Adjustment Heuristic”:

Anchoring and adjustment is a psychological heuristic that influences the way people intuitively assess probabilities. According to this heuristic, people start with an implicitly suggested reference point (the “anchor”) and make adjustments to it to reach their estimate. A person begins with a first approximation (anchor) and then makes adjustments to that number based on additional information. Wikipedia

An experiment by Strack & Mussweiler in 1997 involved estimating Ghandi’s age when he died. Before giving their answer, one group was asked if he was older or younger than 140 when he died. The other group were asked if he was older or younger than 9 years old. The first group estimated his actual age of death much higher than the second when asked – each were anchored to the original value they were presented with.

Watch out for this technique by clever salespeople… [ to those who know me... I used to jokingly quip when clients asked me for an estimate that "It'd be less than 100,000".. I'd like to publicly say that I had no idea I was setting them up for anchoring to a high price! ]

You can go some way to fixing your broken brain when someone hits you with a high opening price by focussing on their weaknesses, the bad stuff in their product. The high opening price has pushed your brain to look at the good stuff which is the limited information it will select when deciding how far to move from the original price in the negotiation; force it ignore that instead.  Adjustment is effortful so:

…anything that increases a person’s willingness or ability to seek more accurate estimates tends to reduce the magnitude of adjustment-based anchoring biases. (Epley & Gilovich)

…the conscious and deliberate nature of adjustment suggests that warning participants to avoid satisficing will increase adjustment. Indeed, we have found that warning participants about anchoring effects is sufficient to increase adjustment from self-generated anchors, but has no influence on participants’ responses within the standard anchoring paradigm (Epley & Gilovich, 2005)

There’s a great paper by Gallinsky, Ku & Mussweiler here (pdf) that explains all this in pretty simple language. Another essential one to read is Mussweiler, Englich & Strech’s paper the Anchoring Effect (pdf), particularly if you’re ever in court, and Epley & Gilovich’s awesome paper The Anchoring & Adjustment Heuristic (pdf) in the Journal of Psychological Science is some of the scarce information on why we don’t adjust enough.

Beware the Highball that’s out the park

And of course, one word of warning – the highballer’s goal is to create tension to move from the initial price. Too extreme and the buyer won’t take you seriously, they’ll just leave and dismiss you completely. Be prepared for them being prepared too – if your buyer knows, or simply says that you’ve taken a highball stance, you better be prepared to absorb and deflect that.

[tweetmeme]The first step in the RealPlan was to dig out as many opportunities as we could for our business – a  four hour session and we turned up hundreds.  Problem is, we aren’t hundreds of people…

Were we to simply jump in and attack the things in no particular order we might hit a winner, but the chances are we’d lose momentum, return to the status quo and not be able to strive properly to our goal.

So we need to find a way to evaluate each one against some set criteria that can give us a scored result as a very obvious pointer to what to do first and what needs further thought.

(Remember – we’re just thinking about the opportunities inside our existing business here, not a whole new business plan, so much of the usual gumph doesn’t apply!)

The Method

First I get the whole lot into a landscape document with a big margin on the right hand side to scribble in and print myself off a stack to scribble on.  It seems there’s something different about how your brain operates when faced with a pen and a doodle space as opposed to a screen and keyboard; for me it makes the thinking process much clearer.  There’s also a reason having such a massive list of opportunities in a pile of paper is good for the business brain that I’ll come to in a moment..

Next, you need to decide on the Rules for evaluation.  These can be anything you want depending on your business and goals.  For example:

• How much money can this opportunity make us?
• How many development hours are needed?
• How many admin hours are needed?
• Will it create recurring or one off income?
• What’s the percentage chance of success?
• Will it have a non-financial benefit like creating a barrier to entry, adding a killer sales feature etc?

Now, pick a subset of your Rules and create a scoring system for each.  One framework I’ve used is this:

• A: Annualised financial opportunity in monetary value
• B: Percentage chance of success
• C: Development cost in days
• D: Admin cost in days
• E: Other cost in monetary value

In the big margin write down the scores for each opportunity as best as you can estimate.  Don’t get analysis paralysis and spend weeks buried in spreadsheet models to score any one row – you probably won’t be any more accurate than your gut feeling about something.

As an aside – it’s important to avoid emotion when evaluating these things, that’s where the size of the list can help. When you’ve only got a couple of opportunities in front of you, it’s a natural human tendency to favour one over the other in an instant. The trouble is, once you’ve made that commitment to something, it’s hard to shake off.  The act of going over pages and pages of mixed opportunities de-personalises it all and enables you to think more clearly.

Next is to dream up an equasion to put your figures through to give you a “score”.  Using the Rules above:

Opportunity 1: Get to #1 in the SERPS for our primary keyword: A – 100,000, B – 40%, C – 10, D – 100, E – 20,000 = (AxB)-(C x 100)-(D x 100)-E = 9000

Opportunity 2: Find one more customer per month being worth 1000 per month additional revenue: A – 144,000, B – 50%, C – 10, D – 100, E – 30,000 = 31,000

You can see that Opportunity #1 scores far less than opportunity #2, although if you asked me to decide between the two without any analysis I would probably have jumped on #1.  The big score for #2 A is because we’re looking at annualised financial opportunity – so at the end of one year, if 100% successful, we’ll have 12K/mo additional revenue.

You can keep slicing and dicing too, looking at each opportunity with different subsets of your rules and scoring things differently.

By the time you’ve finished, you’ll have a much, much clearer way to rank the importance of each opportunity for your business and one less thing to need to worry about when you’re trying to fit them into the development timeline.

In practice.. this has turned out to be a brilliant way to focus everyone on what’s important in the coming weeks.  It’s made us all more relaxed because we know we’re working on the useful stuff, not wasting time on the small stuff, and we’re not setting ourselves up for disappointment when projects we’ve randomly worked on turn out to be tiny opportunities.

Next post we’ll figure out how to do the same thing with the Weaknesses list and then get onto the nitty gritty stuff of actually writing an action plan…

[tweetmeme]I’ve been involved in lots of business plans before.  Some were for raising finance from VCs, others for angel capital and yet more for the boss.  The one thing that they all had in common, and I believe this is true of 99% of business plans, is that they were written to do a single job and then filed, only to be given lip service now and again.

If you take a look through the bookshelves of the business section you’ll find plenty of books on writing business plans, either whole volumes or dedicated chapters in some “start your own business and live the lazy life of a bajillionaire because anyone can” kind of book.  Hell, your bank will probably give you a kit to fill in the gaps on a business plan to convince you that you need to buy an overdraft facility from them.

All these resources happily tell you about executive summaries, financial projections, SWOT, PEST and maybe even a Boston Matrix to throw in. You’ll write reams about your competitors, the market opportunity and the fabulous CVs of the core management team.

But you won’t learn how to write a document that sits on your desk for the next year and becomes the roadmap, the measure against which everything you do can be judged.

That’s what I’m going to try and do in the coming posts.  It’s not something I’ve actually done before, so I thought I’d share the journey over the next few weeks of how we try to crack this particular nut.

By the end of the story, I hope we’ll have a step by step guide to creating a RealPlan™ (ho ho) and not just another 100 pages of wind.

We’ll know if we’ve got a successful RealPlan if we have a document that, in the light of our Goal:

1: Summarises our best thinking about the market, our opportunity, what we do and our place in the world;

2: Tells us in no uncertain terms where we need to be in 12 months time;

3: Gives us a step by step plan to get there, and actual doing plan with things to push and pull and colour in;

4: Gives us room to branch out or change route if our month on month experience dictates it;

5: Allows us to ask any question of whether we should do the next thing we were going to do, or not;

6: It sits within arm’s reach on all our desks to provide inspiration and instruction during the working day / week / month / year;

7: At the end of the year, it’s crossed off, scribbled on, dog eared and shelved;

The Starting Point

We set a revenue goal, pure and simple.  There’s nothing airy about it, we can measure it and easily know if we’re successful.  There’s a difference between a goal that has only two possible outcomes (you did it, you didn’t do it) and an aspiration like “be the best maker of widgets in the UK”.  I want to wake up on Dec 1st next year and know whether we won or lost the game.

Opportunities

So – our goal is to exceed a specific turnover in 12 months time, so it seems reasonable to begin with the opportunities that we can exploit to make more money from what we’ve got.

In traditional business speak, opportunities are “external factors that contribute to the achievement of the goal”.  That seems way off, so we redefined it as “any way we can extract extra revenue streams from our existing business model”.

In very broad terms we reaslised that there are four categories that any revenue enhancing activity fits into. Splitting into these four distinct and pretty much exclusive groups has helped us generate a huge list of opportunities by adding some structure to our brainstorming:

1: Make more widgets and sell them to our existing customers

2: Make more from each widget sale

3: Find more customers to buy our widgets

4: Sell new products and services independent of our widgets

In around a four hour session we managed to come up with about 50 new ways to make more from what we have available to us in the company, all fitting into one of the four groups above.

The next step will be to compile our brainstorm into a useable list and devise a way of rating each idea with the goal of prioritising on the timeline for the year. The next step will be to list all our horrible weaknesses that might cause us grief in trying to go after any of our new opportunities..

Suddenly, what seemed like a monster task is becoming a very busy, but seemingly achievable one.

Step Two to follow…

[tweetmeme]If ever there was a topic to write about when writing a blog, it’s procrastination, that which my four year old is expert in, and which I’ve been the world’s expert in the past.

I wonder how much I’ve not done, because of procrastination.  Not only the stuff that’s on my Daily-Grind-O-Focus list, but the big stuff in life.  The round-the-world ticket that I’ll just wait till next year to buy, the opportunity I’ll look at next month when I have more time.  That kind of stuff.

“Indecisiveness and procrastination are the chosen ways of life for most people.  They follow the course of least resistance, which is to do nothing.  This provides a security blanket of never being wrong, never making mistakes, never being disappointed and never failing.  But they will also never succeed.  Selling to the Top by David Peoples”

Mr Peoples has a point.  Procrastination is not a positive a trait and it takes many forms.

However, for a bit of balance, at least in my introduction, I found a psychologist being one of those fashionable “experts” making “declarations” in the “popular” press.  He decreed that procrastination is good for our health.  We take on too many tasks, so letting a bunch slip to another day is a good thing.  What a nutter. The insidious creeping of slipping todos collecting in a pile at the wall you’re eventually going to crash into.

There are competing theories behind procrastination giving us loads of scope for making excuses:

Perfectionist poseurs

I really can’t subscribe to this dumb idea that folk procrastinate work on something because they want perfection.  Whenever I’ve wanted perfection, I can’t wait to start on something.  Anything that inspires perfection is going to be the most exciting thing in your day.  So – I call bull.  And I can, because it’s my blog.  Sorry Prof Ferrari.

Catatonic crumbling (avoidance)

Another reason put forward for our tendency to put-off is that we’re all a bit overwhelmed.  There’s so much to do, we can’t decide where to start or feel there’s any benefit, so we do nothing (hmm, climate?).   Hence the attractiveness of concepts like InboxZero and coin phrases like email bankruptcy that allow us to completely shrug off our procrastinated stuff.

As an entrepreneur, I don’t think I’ve ever really had the luxury of avoidance too much.  It happens of course.  There’s 50 jobs I’ve got to do by Friday, I can only do 30 so I have to pick.. I’d be lying if I said I always chose the right ones based purely on their economic contribution to the organisation.

What is a problem for the entrepreneur though is..

Short termism (impulsiveness)

Piers Steel, Prof Psychology at Calgary University has also done the fashionable thing and made an equasion for procrastination, U=EV/ID:

Steel formed his equation after 10 years of research on procrastination. He began by studying 250 college students and has since included data from other researchers. In Steel’s equation, U stands for utility, or the desire to complete a given task. It is equal to the product of E, the expectation of success, and V, the value of completion, divided by the product of I, the immediacy of the task, and D, the personal sensitivity to delay.

Cor.  So that explains it then.  If I think I’m going to do OK and that’s going to mean good stuff and unless I do it now it’s going to go off..then it’s going to be a good choice to do now.  Procrastination is short term thinking.  It’s like the kid who wants to eat the ice cream before the plate of pickled broccolli (actually… ) It’s everyone who’s in higher education of any kind.  It’s most people with a job who don’t have IM, Facebook, Ebay blocked by their administrators.  In fact, it’s pretty much anyone who’s been in the workplace since the 80′s when computers landed on desktops and gave us the perfect procrastination machine with setting upon setting to tweak and fix.

Want to know how much someone’s procrastinating secrectly – easy.. just count the ratio of mouse to keyboard clicks.

In fact, Prof. Steel theorises that because many jobs are self structured these days (i.e. we can all make it up as we go along) it gives us the perfect opportunity to procrastinate.  Now, entrepreneur’s at the top of the tree with no-one to answer to (e.g. VC’s, Boards etc) are pretty much free to jump around wherever they want.

In the beginning that “freedom” was part of my drive for starting out on my own.. I could have 20 companies that made a little bit each and make a stack of cash, I thought.  I since know that doesn’t work for me and focus has taken over.

But how can we avoid negative impulsive behaviour, the stuff that eats away at our day and does nothing but damage?  Here’s my way – I make no promises for you!

1: Forget all that “do the nasty things first” crapola

All that happens when you follow this oft quoted advice is that you procastinate with other stuff that you didn’t need to do or might not even have thought of before you do the nasty stuff, the end result being you don’t have time to do the good stuff because you’ve told yourself you can’t start till after finishing the nasty stuff…  That’s more or less it.  So I sneak some nasty stuff in through the day, just bang it in there between fiddling with a plugin and polishing the espresso machine.  It’s true that the nasties usually aren’t as nasty as one might have imagined, but your brain will never believe you until you’ve done enough of them / it to properly de-nasty.

2: Do SOMETHING to take action

Switch on your pomodoro timer for 25 minutes and tackle any part of the procastatask.  Do anything.  If you’ve not started it at all,  follow point three and smash it to bits to give yourself a nice long list of things to do in small chunks. That’s a halfway house between putting off an taking action I always think. Trick your brain into thinking it’s working on something else…

3: Break it up!

As above.. take your big task, or even your small one, and break it up.  I’ve got an 800 word article to write so I think up 8 interesting points and now I’ve only got to write 100 words each time I fire up the machine.

4: Go home early

Basically – reward yourself for completing that procrastatask.  Personally I prefer going home early, if I think “reward” it normally involves something unhealthy or expensive – either way, unnecessary.  Sometimes I reward myself with some procrastination …

5: Set impossible deadlines

To think too long about doing a thing often becomes its undoing.
Eva Young

This works well for me when I’ve got a reasonable energy level – it’s not a good thing to foist upon yourself at 3pm.  It’s also exhausting and tricky to maintain for too long, so save it for emergencies. Basically – you earmark an impossible task / set of tasks for a short deadline.  It has a weird effect on the brain throwing it into some kind of hyperfocus where you produce an incredible amount.  This is the way I have to run my startups.  I give myself two weeks from concept Eureka! to ready-to-sell-something.  Any longer than that and feature creep sets in, fatigue, boredom, distraction and so on.  I use the same technique now in daily work, though it’s most effective when there’s a deadline (real or artificial) approaching that’s out of your control (e.g. end of the week, presentation etc).  Maybe it comes from leaving homework to the morning before it was due (or maybe I’ve always been like that).  It just works!

6: Pomodoro, GTD and all that stuff

I’ve owned every damn organiser, electronic or otherwise, pretty much since the Newton.  Almost all of them didn’t work for me.  The only two things I’ve got consistent mileage out of are David Allen’s GTD system (once it evolved into an overly simplified system that could be organised on my Mac in OmniFocus) and the Pomodoro Technique.  GTD just stops me forgetting stuff (so much) in its glorified capture / listmaking way.  Pomodoro is a fancy name given to an age old technique – set a timer for 25 minutes, work on one thing only with a rabid focus on that alone, stop for 5 minutes, repeat.  If you have that damn thing ticking away it’s a constant reminder that the coffee machine and Facebook page are off limits, at least for another 11 minutes 27 seconds..

7: Headphones

Music without words works great for me when convincing brain that I really do want to do this task.  It’s another little mental trick that convinces the annoying bit of bonce that likes to put stuff off that we’re not really doing that, we’re listening to music privately and we may as well doodle though this too.  If there are lyrics it doesn’t work for me mostly, but a dollop of Ryuichi Sakamoto, Mahler or drum & bass seems to do the job very nicely.

8: Environment

Clean up.  The obvious reason is to get all the distracting stuff off your desk – it’s way to easy to thumb through the intray looking for procrastatasks like filing, but there’s something about a clean office that inspires action.  Kelly @ centsiblelife.com says good stuff in the linked post.

Working at home is a proper pain in the ass if  you’ve got a partner there tucking into some addictive lunchtime drama.  Stay away from the TV and the kitchen at all costs.  I swear I’ve lost at least one business to Jerry Bloody Springer and the Refrigerator.

And don’t forget your computer desktop environment.. I’ve started closing all extra browser tabs, twitter clients and even (shock) email clients.  If it’s not on Alt-Tab then I can’t accidentally catch an eyefull of something interesting or faux-urgent on my way through the windows.

9: Finish It

As important as starting and progressing is finishing.  This has actually been one of the hardest things for me to get to grips with, so luckily I have some awesome staff who can finish most of the things I start.  However – there’s a joy in finishing something properly that energises and seems to sweep away many of the mental blocks that keep us from continuing on other tasks.  There’s a kind of guilt that hangs over me if I know something lies unfinished and it makes doing other stuff painful.  So, I make a point of finishing something every week that would’ve been easy to procrastinate.  It’s liberating!

10: Make a mental note of procrastinating behaviour in others, and ask yourself if you’re that guy too

I had a buddy, still do in fact, who describes himself as an entrepreneur.  Thing is, I’ve never seen him actually run a business. Every step of the way there’d be another “We have to…” or “We need…” statement that threw up another barrier to actually selling something.  We have to get new furniture… We need a contract… We have to get new phones… We need a brochure… it just went on an on until eventually he’d get a job, “quit” and then start the cycle again.

As I thought about him the penny dropped with me – I was doing the same thing in a different way.  Endless re-coding, crafting of copy.. Waiting…

11: Stop waiting for things outside of your control to come to fruition

Lastly, for now.. stop waiting.  It’s so easy to identify some external factor that you can’t control and make that your procrastareason.  You need more press coverage. The advertising agency has to get the campaign rolling.  It’s Monday so everyone’s busy catching up so you can’t phone.

I actually wasted an entire business before I figured this one out.  We invented some cool web tech, ahead of its time, for self editable micro sites based on a plug in architecture (way before MySpace et al became the dominant force).  Instead of getting down to selling it properly, I thought I’d recruit a few associations, get them to sell it instead – big market reach and all that.  I found one with about 17K SME members and started counting my money.  Thing was, that put me too many steps from the money and gave me an excuse to procrastinate about all the major steps I should’ve been taking to build a proper business… I can’t do X until they’ve done Y.

Unfortunately, they were nutters and by the time I’d learned my lesson the fire had gone and another opportunity had presented itself.

So – that’s it.  Select any of the above, apply to daily life, feel better.  It’s not an instant thing, it’s a bit like dieting. If you crash, you’ll burn.  Start with one change and build it into your routine, just a tiny one.  It doesn’t take long to add the others and before you know it your railing against procrastinating like some kind of lunatic.

That’s the place I like to be :)