published on Sep 03, 2009 by Paolo Dona
As you know, I’m into monthly resolutions.
I want to find out new goals as this way to improve my lifestyle has proven really successful and rewarding.
Here you’ll find a bunch of ideas from which I’ll choose my September’s resolution:
- Track personal finances and expenses
- Do not drink Soda
- Always cook my own lunch and bring it to work (as opposed to buy it)
- Relax properly every day (eg: 10 minutes of pure rest or breathing excercises)
- 10 minutes of walking/running a day (maybe using my fivefingers)
- Check email twice a day at regular times
- Work on my own projects every Saturday morning
- Declutter the house 10 minutes a day
- Have a basic weekly dinner program (so that I don’t randomly eat junk food)
They’re just Ideas and I’ve got only four months left this year so I’m pretty sure I won’t be able to do them all, but they can be inspirational for you as well. Once you’ve compiled your own list you need to go through it and ask yourself the following questions:
- What’s the habit which can have the most impact on my life?
- Which habit would I be the most proud of?
- Which habit would solve a behaviour which I consider an issue now?
My answers to these questions are:
- Most impact: Work on my projects every Saturday morning as I dream to run my own online products in the future.
- Most proud of: 10 minutes of walking/running as could help me to get started with regular excercise.
- Solve an issue: Check email only twice a day as I feel I’m too distracted and need to focus more on getting my stuff done instead of being always ‘email driven’.
I decided to go with the “Email twice a day” resolution, as I’ve been fascinated by:
- Marc Andreessen’s guide to personal productivity
- Tim Ferris: How to Check E-mail Twice a Day or Once Every 10 Days.
What’s your September’s resolution?
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published on Aug 28, 2009 by Paolo Dona
In the past couple of months my eyesight has worsened quickly.
It has worsened to the point that I now need to wear glasses on a daily basis. I know this doesn’t sound too serius as there are millions of people wearing glasses or contact lenses but I consider it quite bad after 30 year of perfect eyesight. The worst thing about it is that I now get tired easily and I suffer from occasional headaches.
I just want to share a couple of tips which are helping me to reduce eye strain:
Looking at the computer screen is like looking at a light bulb. The less white light hit your eyes, the better. I used to use editors with a black background but there are a couple of applications that do not support color customization (Word, Excel and the like).
Nocturne is a little application that invert the colors on your screen, so that white becomes black and viceversa. I can assure this is a lot easier on your eyes and you’ll feel the difference if you just try it for an hour.
I’m used to look at close objects and my optometrist suggested to regurarly look at things far away, and of course I forget to.
This software (Anti Repetitive Strain Injury) remind you to take short breaks every now and then, to make sure you don’t stare at the computer screen for too long without giving your eyes the chance to rest.
AntiRSI is smart enough to understand if you’ve already taken a break, monitoring your mouse and keyboard activity.
These tools are only for Mac, please feel free to reply with Linux/Windows equivalents.
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published on Aug 07, 2009 by Paolo Dona
Before relocating to the UK I used to run my own business. I co-founded SeeSaw, an Italian consultancy firm. About one year ago I sold my shares to a partner, and the company hasn’t done much since.
Whilst the business was reasonably profitable, the fact that at some point we abandoned our dreams and basically gave up trying, makes me consider the adventure as a partial failure.
I’ll try to analyze what didn’t work and why.
What was the business about
We (the three founders) were Java/Ruby consultants struck with an entreprenurial seizure. As most good enough programmers do, we just thought “we can do it better” and started implementing projects for other companies. Not that kind of pay-me-by-the-hour consultants, but the risky we-will-deliver-what-you-need kind of guys. We wanted also to build our owns products, but the idea never really took off.
Lack of mission
The company mission wasn’t very clear, we wanted to build a product (a financial-analysis tool that we discussed about for months), but not having any money in the pocket we started consulting. And once the money started coming in, we kept ourselves busy with a customer’s project, and another, and another. Along the way we also started doing training courses, open source plugins, speeches at conferences. All great stuff, but we didn’t focus on developing a core business idea.
When you are good at doing whatever you want to, you risk switching between too many topics without maximizing your potential.
I’ll give you a bunch of examples of stuff we’ve done:
- First Ruby workshops in Italy
- Web apps using Java/Spring/Oracle on BEA Weblogic
- Rails apps on MS SQL Server
- Rails catalogues as bootable CDs with online synch
- Static websites and CMS
- Desktop apps based on the Eclipse and Netbeans platform
Good experience? Sure. Best way to spend our energies? I really doubt it.
Lack of roles
Partner A: You’re too slow!
Partner B: You don’t think about maintainability!
Partner C: But the GUI is the most important thing!
Partner A: But that’s not RESTful!
Partner B: But that Kernel module needs to be recompiled!
There’s no way three programmers with the same seniority can agree on everything. This can easily lead to endless discussions on how to implement this and that. Everyone feels entitled to say something about a partner’s work.
Someone needs to be in charge of the decisions, and that’s it. Someone at some point need to say “This is how we do it here”, It’s business, not a pub chat after all.
The roles inside the company needs to be defined and cristal clear from the beginning. The input and expected output for each role needs to be defined in advance as well.
Micro management
When you work in your own business, you tend to become a maniac. Pixel-perfect alignment here, perfect ruby pattern there and so on. You finally can create the perfect world you couldn’t find in the companies you worked for. The problem arises when you’re overwhelmed and need to rely on employees and contractors. They will never care as much as you do and you’ll be bothered by the ‘not perfect way’ they’re doing their assignments. You panic, and start designing websites even if you’re not a web designer, doing the books even if you’re not an accountant, writing copies for web sites even if you’re not a content editor to just make sure everything’s done your way. You’ll end up doing, checking, and generally speaking, working so much that you’ll hardly find energy to ‘run’ your business. You’ll end up being always busy and run by the events. That’s exactly how I felt when I gave up.
Fear
Only recently I could realize how many business decisions we’ve made have been driven by fear. There’s that customer that you don’t really trust, but you think “well, at the end of the day we need to work”… and embrace a project you don’t believe in. That customer, after 1 year and a half, hasn’t yet paid you and you’re still banging your head on the wall.
Trust your feelings, and don’t do business just because you need to survive. It’s better to be employed by someone else and have the time to rethink your strategy.
We kept changing our short term goals to match whatever was profitable at the moment, to not be confronted with the implications and sacrifices of a long term plan.
The business model needs to be robust and if you find yourself changing it too often, or making too many exceptions to your plan, you better take a pause and rethink it from scratch.
At the same time fear kept us inside our confort zone. We only did what we could do or completely understand ourselves. For example we never had a proper marketing plan because we’re not marketing guys. What we should have done instead is identify the roles we needed to make the business succeed and hire appropriate people.
Conclusion
Many people think about entrepreneurship just as having a better or cooler job. I’m finally starting to see the difference between ‘working in a business’ and ‘running a business’. Look at your own boss: is it working in the business (making the products/services himself)? Chances are he’s not. Is he running his business? Probably yes, and he’s definitely making more money than you are.
There are so many activities that my business didn’t properly take into account, from planning to marketing to resource management and task delegation. This first entreprenurial adventure has been a great experience and a good chance to see different aspects of a business and I’m confident this will help me a lot on my next attempt.
If you run your own business and it hasn’t succeded the way you wanted it to, please share your experience in the comments.
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published on Jul 07, 2009 by Paolo Dona
Those of you who are close to me know that I got into a kind of monthly resolutions challenge this year. I’ve been doing this for 6 months now so I wanna take you through my progress.
What’s a monthly resolution?
Instead of having a big new year’s resolution, which I inevitably failed to achieve year after year, I decided to break down my goals into small and more manageable monthly bits. The base line is: Stick with one and only one goal for a month, after which chances are it will become a habit, enabling you to move on to the next thing.
This is a quite clever way of approaching resolutions, as it puts almost no pressure on you and can lead to good life-changing habits.
Here are my resolutions so far:
- January: Set my 3 Most Important Tasks (MITs) each morning.
- February: Become a early riser.
- March: Eat better.
- April: Give up coffee.
- May: Cycle to work every day.
- June: Play my guitar half-an-hour a day.
So, how has it been going?
I’m quite happy with the results, even if I’ve not been 100% diligent. Some resolutions have worked better than others. But I can say this is the first time in my life I’ve been able to change my habits so effectively.
January: Set the 3 MITs for the day.
This involves identifying 3 must-do tasks for the day and writing them down on a piece of paper to carry in your wallet all day long. They don’t need to be big things. Just think of them as small steps towards your long-term goals (eg: call that guy to help you out on you project, call the bank to set up a merchant account, and so on).
It’s a lot easier to achieve goals when you plan them in advance, otherwise you risk having a confused day and being constantly pulled away from your priorities by all sorts of events.
I stuck with this habit for 2 solid months and then lost it a bit, definitely one of the most challenging habits of all to form. I’ll probably try to write down the MITs for a day the night before and see if it gets any easier.
You can read more about this topic here:
» Purpose your day: most important tasks
February: Become an early riser
The best results have come from getting up early. I had wanted to do this for a long time because there are so many things I want to do and always too little time. Also, I didn’t want to sacrifice the lovely evenings I usually spend with my girlfriend or playing guitar.
To begin, I decided to wake up at exactly the same time every morning. Then I bought a bodyclock and started waking up 15 minutes earlier every week, finally settling for 6:30am.
I’m now constantly getting up at 6:30 during the week and can easily work for an hour and a half on projects of mine before going to work.
It’s amazing how powerful a productivity booster this is. I’ve established a morning routine (wake up/shower/breakfast/work) that makes me feel proud of my day even before it has even really begun!
If you’re interested in becoming a early riser, read:
» How to become an early riser
» 10 Benefits of rising early and how to do it
March: Eat slightly better
Plain and simple: Eat at least 1 piece of fruit for breakfast and 1 serving of vegetables for dinner. Every day. If you manage to buy fruit and salad while at the grocery store, that’s pretty easy to achieve. I love apples and bananas for breakfast, and la bai cai (hot and sour cabbage) plus rice for dinner.
If you want to eat healthily and love Asian food, I suggest you read Why the Chinese don’t count calories
April: Give up coffee
I don’t like coffee, and I realized that the 3-to-4 cups of coffee I used to drink a day were only useful for keeping me awake. I didn’t enjoy them.
And I thought, why do I feel sleepy in the first place? Am I eating well enough? Am I getting enough sleep?
Programmer culture seems to worship coffee to an extent that I do not really understand. In a world in which technology and progress should make our life easier and less stressful, we always worry about performing at a faster pace. Giving up coffee is just a reflection of my inner pace change. Take it easy and enjoy the journey.
If interested in giving up coffee:
» How to give up coffee.
May: Cycle to work every day
I’m in my underpants in front of the mirror, staring at my pale body. I’m not fat, but let’s be honest, I’m definitely not fit. All these 10 years of programming are really starting to show, and the fact that my heart pumps hard whenever I walk for more than 10 minutes should be a clear warning.
So to start off nice and easy I just bought a bike and got rid of my monthly underground pass. That’s feasible, as my workplace is only 3 miles away from my house, making it a perfect morning ride to work. A nice added benefit is that I’ll cover the investment in 3 months and start saving money after that.
June: Play guitar half an hour a day
As some of you may know, I used to be a guitar player. I was in a successful little rock band, and at some point of my life I was almost tempted to keep doing that for a living. I Well, now with being involved in software develpment, is should pretty clear that I gave up.
It’s a shame I’m not playing on a regular basis, though, because it’s a very engaging and exciting hobby.
After 10 years of complete inactivity, my previous band members decided to organize “the farewell gig we never had”, so I’m kind of forced to play every day and sharpen my skills again!
Ten songs a day keep the programmer away!
Here’s the website of my former band: http://www.rambass.com (guess which one is me), I’ll be playing in Italy on July 31.
If you want to learn to play guitar, take a look at these awesome lessons: http://www.justinguitar.com
Bottom line
I’m not a very strong-willed person, but these monthly resolutions are really shaping new habits I’m very proud of. If you feel there’s something you’d like to change about yourself, try this method, and I guarantee your goals will be a lot easier to achieve.
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published on Jul 02, 2009 by Paolo Dona
Given I’ve chosen to have no TV set at home, I’ve been doing a lot of reading lately. I finished a couple of great inspirational books that I really suggest you to read:
- 4 hour work week (the best book I’ve read in years!)
- The magic of thinking big (and why being a positive person is actually a good thing)
And here a bunch more I just ordered on Amazon:
- The E-myth revisited
- The 22 Immutable laws of marketing
- The 80/20 Principle: The Secret of Achieving More with Less
- Letters from a Stoic: Epistulae Morales AD Lucilium
These should fill my free time in the next weeks.
I love inspirational books, and enterpreneurship-oriented ones.
Have you guys got any ideas for my next order? Anything interesting you’ve recently read?
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