How to get more done? Human are designed to care about various of things. Even the greatest hacker wouldn’t ignore how the world are spinning. Hackers ought to care about shit loads of stuffs, the change of the tech flow, everything, or else they will fail.
Humans are ‘greedy,’ and the nature of the greedy algorithm is that so often, we won’t care what lies beneath the tree. We take paths that seem reasonable ‘now,’ and we never care if it might be the best route at the end. Often, this reflects how startup these day are doing, and it might be the correct path. As the reality decision tree is technically endless, if it took a genius 3 years to come up with a direct route toward the highest reward, a hacker might probably have went deep into the tree, possibly yielding some (not necessary good) results, but an impressive amount of experience.
So for the experience, it is advised that startup people should definitely apply greedy algorithm, as planning all days long won’t make anything after all. So how do you hack your work?
A common trend I observed when making decision is that people tends to give themselves a constraint of time working on things. For a feature, strive for 2 days. For a project, strive for 1 week. For a business, strive for 1 month. Keep in mind, these are virtual deadlines that must be expanded when converting to real deadline (for example, when giving your investor some report). In reality, a feature might take three weeks, a project 2 months, and a business 2 years. There is a trend here. You take your virtual deadline, add 1 then increase the time unit (day < week < month < year). For our, just make it day.
Using time to increase moral of the team is also crucial, given that you are good enough and can take the hacking load. A good startup with great leader often churn out very inspireful virtual deadline. A lot of hackers strive for 9 hours a feature simply because they know the tool fairly well. This translate to a feature per day, which realistically is possible for very good hackers who know how to jump over problems and so on!
Human need rest. As a hacker, even if you think you don’t need rest, you do, so take it periodically. You don’t want a malfunction brain. You want to increase productivity. You don’t want an unhealthy body. You want to enjoy life after this. And you surely don’t want a dry dick/virgina. You need a great sex life once your company went IPO or got acquired && you got back at least 1M in return. So, what should you do?
| First, change yourself, your hobbies, your interest, such that it all align with your startup | goal. A software/game startup? Make you hobby working on tutorial/ learning more about dev tips and trick, or exeprience the role of the sale guy. A hardware startup? Make your hobby fixing stuffs, DIY, etc… Make yourself enjoy these activity, punish your soul into liking these hobby. You need it to make your first hundred thousand bucks. |
The desire to doing unproductive but entertaining stuffs greatly surpass the amount of thought going toward goal, as the former is easy and the latter hard.
People want excuse to avoid hard things. This is a dangerous mindset in anyway, as it slow down learning, and distract the person from his own role.
In a lot of software startup, one thing that bug me is how people still keep their hobby running wild while still claiming to be working on a startup. The software people universal hobby is video game. And just to clarify, if you spend an hour playing game in exchange for 18 hours of productive work, that’s ok. Don’t do it the other way around.
Divide your day into hour blocks, and train your rhythm to notice that a certain amount of minute has gone by. In the lab, we trained with 9 minutes section using a stop watch. Using tools such as Pomodoro timer to remind yourself of standing up and stretch is another strategy.
Keeping a diary of thought is a good idea. Even if you don’t have time, try to have a note book in your pocket. At the end of the day, jot them down, with dates and location. This help organizing your thought so you can feel more comfortable meditating.
In the lab, we try to spend at least 9 ‘productive’ hours. This translate to an 18 ‘working’ hours. The rest 6 hours is spend completely on deep sleep/rest. Keep your brain tight.
Of course we do spend numerous weekends straight 45 hours no-sleep-hackathon, but doing so continuously is not a very good idea as lack of sleep has been clinicaly-proven to kill within 11 days. So technically with just sitting on my ass and hacking, I’d expect my CPU to crash on the 9th day.
The 9 hours of productive work has to be extremely focus. It should be divided into chunks of hour as said. But the expectancy of work that need to be done for the day has to reach at least 108% in order for your startup to thrive. The goal is very simple, each hours try to complete at least 11% of the workload that need to be done for that day, and you are good.
The other 9 hours however, one should spend moderately on either of these thing:
Mind Cleaning : meditation or short nap
Body Cleaning : shower
These are the tasks that are the most useful in optimizing your growth. If you can train your mind to crave these activities, you will be a great entrepreneur. On the other hand, wantrepreuner loves spending time doing one of these thing:
All of these activities just please the mind or the body but does not contribute much to its growth. And some of them often lead to over-consumption, which can be a bad thing. However, if you chose to do one of these pleasing activity, analyze yourself, and if you say yes to one of these question, you are eligible to spend 9 minutes on one of those activity:
| You are horny | either having a boner or are really wet |
If you think “because I have been eating good, or meditating, or body training lately that I deserve these pleasing activity,” you are a wantrepreuner. Make your mind crave for thinking such as “Because I did a lot of work |
I just generated 100k more value to my company | I finished the MVP a week before the deadline, I deserve some training/cleaning.” |
Don’t “deserve pleasing.” Deserve the training and cleaning of your mind and body!
Two ways: Sleep on a schedule that adjust with your situation, or Sleep Periodically.
Strict calendar, setup your time so you have at least 9 hours of sleep. However, calibrate yourself. When are you the most productive? Is it 9am - 9pm or is it 9pm-9am? Lots of hacker tend to hack at night because they feel more secure as well as a more positive thinking that of coolness. However, there does exist hackers that hack in the morning as well.
Use your short breaks to take naps or meditate. This helps a lot in cleansing your toxic mind. Control how and when you wake up is the key. So alarm or teammate are all good.