[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]I just discovered OmniWriter.  It’s the ultimate minimalist, but not too minimalist, Zen-like writing app for the Mac.  Utterly simple to the point of almost being an empty box, it’s perfect.. shows a snowy winter scene in the background and plays tinkly noises.  If it doesn’t make you want to go to the bathroom all afternoon then it might help you stop procastinating and write!

Edit: I was sure this app was called OmniWriter.. I’d seen posts even saying “No relation to the other OmniWriter”.. but now it seems it’s OmmWriter.

[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]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 :)

[tweetmeme]I used to think that focus was the most important skill I could develop to build the business.  And looking back, until I stopped messing around with every new opportunity that came my way, lack of focus was a dumb thing to be held back by.

Now I realise there are three parts to focus to, er, focus on which I’ll call Mad-Bastard Focus, Daily Grind-o-Focus and Out-Of-Focus.

Starting with my definition:

Focus is the ability to shine a questioning, critical light on all distractions and decide whether they move me toward, or away from the particular goal upon which I am supposed to be fixated.

Mad Bastard Focus

This is the Thing, the Thing that drives you to work.

It might be a financial goal, an audacious market position something far less interesting.  Whatever it is, it needs to be clear and stuck in your head, otherwise you can’t ask yourself – does this stuff I’m about to do, opportunity I’m about to chase or call I’m about to put off move me towards or away from the Thing.

Once you get Mad Bastard Focus, life gets easier.  Everytime someone suggests you should think about taking over that struggling coffee shop at the end of the road it’s a simple matter to run it through your Mad Bastard Focus Filter and reject instead of pontificating / round-bushing to avoid embarrasment.

Daily Grind-o-Focus

Of course, the Thing is immaterial unless you can actually sit down and do some work.  I find the Pomodoro Technique (work for 25 minutes, break for 5, ignore everything except the job in hand) and GTD (fancy way of organising lists by project / context.. excuse to buy Moleskines / Mac Software) work for me.  More another day.

Get Out-Of-Focus

Once you’ve got your Mad Bastard Focus on the Thing, and you’ve managed to actually do some work when you sit down instead of rolling from news site to blog to in-tray to coffee machine and wheels are in motion, you need to switch a different bit of your brain on.  Notably, the right temporal lobe.  That’s where the Eurekas! happen…

For me, it’s driving whilst listening to ebooks through one earbud which does it (seriously, exactly that). Some people swear by showers, meditation and even brainstorming. But for me, getting into the zone stuck behind a lorry on the M6 seems to bring all my best inspiration and Eureka! moments.

And those are the moments that have really taken a simple business idea and turned it into something brilliant.

The PLoS Biology site has an interesting study on brain activity during “Insight” Moments which gives a spot of scientifc basis to my motorway driving strategy developments (it gets pretty heavy pretty fast if you’re not used to reading academic text, but nonetheless it’s fascinating). It seems that Eureka / Insight / Aha! moments spark of a unique mental process in the brain. Pictures taken of the grey matter at the precise moment of solving a problem by insight showed activity in the right temporal lobe of the brain (same bit that processes jokes). If someone else gives you the solution, you get a different area of the brain firing up with a “Doh!” experience instead.

And, it seems:

“Solvers usually cannot report the processing that enables them to reinterpret the problem and overcome the impasse”.

Perhaps in here somewhere lies the secret of entrepreneurs.. maybe you’re genetically coded to be one by an ability to sporn Insight moments again and again…

But how do we make Eurekas in our out-of-focus world.. we can’t be spending hours on the motorway every time we’ve got a problem to solve..

Google led me to an ancient article online at Inc by Alison Stein Wellner entitled “Perfect Brainstorm” lead me to Paul Paulus at the University of Texas’ Group Creativity Lab. Paulus has conducted thousands of brainstorming sessions and figured out what’s going on. All very interesting, but requires other people for the group dynamic.. so no-go there.

There are lots of posts about being relaxed to have a Eureka moment, but I wanted to know why being in a particular zone seems to spur more ideas.  For that we need psychologist John Kounios at Drexel University in Philadelphia.

Dr K and his team busily studied volunteers grappling with word puzzles, measuring their brain patterns.  They found three things going on – people who sweated and analysed their way through a problem, people who were just stuck and couldn’t go anywhere and lucky folks who just “got” the answer but didn’t know where from.

But here’s the weird bit.. one third of a second before the inspired people got their inspiration, the brain flashed gamma waves from the right hemisphere.. it had the answer before the conscious volunteer… Robert Lee Holz writes about the whole thing in “A Wandering Mind Heads Straight Toward Insight“.  He also notes that people with a positive mood are more likely to experience Eurekas.

So it seems to provoke a Eureka, the best we can do is to adjust our mental position in relation to the environment, suitably relax / distract the consicous mind, tickle the brain with cross references and random thoughts and think positively..

I’m off for a drive.