This didn’t work out so well for me. In a nutshell, when I don’t have client work, I need to spend my time rounding up more client work, or else the dry spell will be unsustainable. Even more importantly, I need to be doing marketing activities all the time, trying to keep my pipeline full. I’ve learned to do that fairly well. In fact, I haven’t had a dry spell longer than a couple days in many months.
But, having gotten good at keeping the work flowing, how do I ever find time to fulfill my original intent?
My solution was to identify the time of the working day that is my “cream” time.  The time I am the most productive, the most on-task, and the most creative.  For me, that is the first couple hours of the morning.

I no longer give that time to clients.  I dedicate it to my long term projects.  That includes blogging, building speculative apps, and building sites like GoSatchmo.

My rules for this time are:

• No checking email until afterwards
• No phone calls
• No client work, period
• No scheduling meetings during this time

I’ve done this before, last year I did it for about three months.  That was the single most productive period in the last few years!  However, it was too much.  I was dedicating up to 4 hours a day to these projects.  As a result, I simply didn’t make enough bread-and-butter money.  My new scheme is to just take the first hour.  I can spare that, and it is sustainable.

Not only that, but I now wake up excited to get to work.  After all, I get to do the most fun and interesting tasks straight off!

You see, I’ve discovered Portland’s Charter Schools. For a fair background about our Charter schools, refer to this Portland Mercury article, and for an overview of the charter movement, see The National Alliance for Public Charter Schools.

Awareness Dawns

A couple weeks ago, we got the fateful phone call. It was the middle school guidance counselor, "I___ will not be successful if he goes to Wilson High School. He’ll inevitably drop or fail out. You should consider alternative schooling." His poor performance was no surprise to us, but we were very interested to hear her ideas, since we were completely exhausted by trying to force the kid to succeed.

One of the alternatives she proposed was sending him to a charter school, specifically Trillium. I don’t know how I’d missed it up until then. I suppose I thought that I thought most or all so-called alternative schools were gang schools or lightly veiled schools-for-the-slow.

The Visit

We visited last week and we were simply blown away. Yes yes YES, we want our son to go to Trillium. Yes, we want him to experience a school where we counted no more than ten students in any one class. Yes, we want him to go to a place where we witnessed a physical altercation being resolved by peer mediation. Yes, we want him to have a chance to take African Drumming class alongside Japanese. Yes, we want to give him a chance to replace apathy and failure with engaged interest.

In fact, we were so impressed that we applied for admission for our daughter who’ll be entering first grade next year. We want all that for her as well, even though she’s very much her brother’s opposite when it comes to school. Frankly, my wife and I both wished we could have gone to a school like that.

Taxes and staying put

Dustin and I have been considering moving to Mexico for a long while now. But if this works out, and it is what we believe it could be, we’ll stay put while our children receive a truly outstanding education. I don’t even mind the high taxes we’ll have to pay to do that.

Technorati Tags: charter school, charter-school, education, taxes

Descriptions and reasons why after the jump.

Currently reading

• “Getting Everything You Can Out of All You’ve Got: 21 Ways You Can Out-Think, Out-Perform, and Out-Earn the Competition” (Jay Abraham) – I basically bought this book because I wanted to see why Jay Abraham can command such incredibly high prices for his seminars and coaching programs. Now I see why. He’s incredibly incisive and has spent his life learning about sales and marketing. Very very good.
• “The Design of Sites: Patterns for Creating Winning Web Sites (2nd Edition)” (Douglas K. van Duyne, James A. Landay, Jason I. Hong) – A book to refer to or draw inspiration from when designing websites for clients. I haven’t gotten too far into it yet, but it sure is pretty.
• “Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability (2nd Edition)” (Steve Krug) – Recommended by many designers I admire, I had to read it. Excellent, short, and achingly good. I am already applying concepts I learned from this gem.
• “Seven Secrets of Great Entrepreneurial Masters: The GEM Power Formula For Lifelong Success” (Allen E. Fishman) – An Entrepreneurial mindset book. So far nothing new for me, but I am doing the exercises anyway, to give it a fair shot.
• “Opportunity Investing: How To Profit When Stocks Advance, Stocks Decline, Inflation Runs Rampant, Prices Fall, Oil Prices Hit the Roof, … and Every Time in Between” (Gerald Appel) – The best book about investing in turbulent times (when are they not turbulent?) that I’ve ever read.
• “No B.S. Sales Success: The Ultimate No Holds Barred, Kick Butt, Take No Prisoners, Tough and Spirited Guide” (Dan Kennedy) – Dan is a curmudgeon, and I like curmudgeons. He’s also a brilliant salesman and has a lot to teach me. An easy read which bears rereading.
• “Time Management from the Inside Out: The Foolproof System for Taking Control of Your Schedule and Your Life” (Julie Morgenstern) – I like Julie’s organizing book, so I picked this one up used. I haven’t started it yet.
• “Organizing from the Inside Out, second edition: The Foolproof System For Organizing Your Home, Your Office and Your Life” (Julie Morgenstern) – An excellent system for organizing. Suggests making places for things near where you need them. The rest is details.
• “Million Dollar Consulting: The Professional’s Guide to Growing a Practice” (Alan Weiss) – Inspiring book about consulting rather than simply being and independent technician. I have so much to learn from this book.

Technorati Tags: reading

Taking this warning to heart, I’ve been systematically building processes and tactics into my business to deal with the problem up-front. Planting seeds of success, doing one thing every day to help bring in future business, is a great discipline. Another tactic I’ve been developing for some time now is fairly unusual for programmers and web-folks.

Talking to people, making friends

I’ve been an active member of Toastmasters Intl for quite a while now, which has been a great way for me to learn to speak to people about business topics with confidence. Now, I am going to be joining the Portland Business Alliance, to take a big step up in my offline business development activities.

I’m really looking forward to this, even if – however unlikely – doing so never directly nets me a new sale. Over and over in my life, I’ve noticed that people tend to earn about the same amount of money as their friends. I think it is a complex feedback system, partly based on whom you choose to be your friend, and partly on “things in common”. I wouldn’t have a lot in common with a welfare family, but I would with a small businessman.

So, in the best Keith Ferrazzi approved way, I will focus on expanding my business networking through friendships and involvement with interesting organizations rather than superficial business-card-exchanging.

Technorati Tags: networking, web-design, portland

Each day, in my morning planning/emailing time, I do at least one thing which is purely intended to create future business for myself or my company. I got this idea from Dan Kennedy’s book “No B.S. Wealth Attraction for Entrepreneurs”, where he says:

It may be a small thing: tearing out a magazine article that should interest one of my clients, scrawling a note on it and mailing it. It may be answering one item of correspondence, getting one fax sent, identifying a new, potentially useful contact, jotting a note or sending a book.
[...] Most professionals stop selling while they’re delivering, so they have dry spells, roller coaster ups and downs. I have had more demand than supply of me and waiting lists of clients for many years because of my daily discipline of doing at least one proactive thing to attract business every single day.

For me, I find that this site and my programming blog are incredible sources of contacts and opportunities. So, doing a simple blog post like this one definitely counts as my seed for the day.

When I mention my new business venture to peers, many say “I did that, but I went and got a job after a few months. I just didn’t like the roller coaster ride.” I believe that this discipline is a key part of avoiding those problems. It is so tempting to just dive right into the mountain of programming I need to accomplish for my current clients, but it is a mistake. I plant the seed, and only then dive into the coding, letting the day pass by in pleasurable obsession.

Technorati Tags: entrepreneur, sales, time management

The two main areas of my life that I’d been neglecting up until then were my finances and my ability to get projects done. I always made good money, and I always managed to get a lot done, but somehow I rarely had anything to show in either area. My money was being wasted and my efforts as well.

I don’t use the GtD techniques exactly as presented, at least not all of them. If you listen to his audio seminar “Getting Things Done Fast”, you realize that he doesn’t intend that anyone really should. The ideas are meant to be adapted to the needs of the individual. As I’ve changed jobs and responsibilities, I’ve also had to adapt my working routine to reflect my changing needs. This is a good thing, since each time I do that, the system gets more integrated into my life.

Following are the four main elements my GTD practice that work astoundingly well for me.

Key 1: Zero-based

The big hassle in getting started with GTD is getting through all your piles of papers and tasks, giving them an initial organization. I think that’s where many give up. Don’t. For me, it was intensely liberating to finally get everything filed. I went out and bought two solid, good-feeling file cabinets along with a labeler and a pile of file folders. I threw out my old system and started fresh. Wow. That was one of the truly great decisions of my life.

Just the other day, my wife was wondering where she’d put her contact list. She hadn’t seen it in months, and she needed to write an old friend. “I don’t know”, I said, “if i filed it, It would be under ‘Dustin Contacts’”. I didn’t remember, and I didn’t need to remember. That’s crucial. Where would I file something like that? Because I wouldn’t throw it out, it must be in the files, and it could only be in one or two places. A trusted system saved (probably fruitless) searching and annoyance. I simply wouldn’t put something like that anywhere else.

Zero-based is more than just filing papers, of course. I spend the first hour of each morning processing everything in my in-boxes. The is both my physical inbox and my email boxes. I used to dread doing this, and honestly it took until a few months ago to get committed to clearing my email. My coworkers (when I had them) thought I was nuts, but I was always ahead of the game, knowing what people had asked and when. I didn’t have to constantly run searches on my own email inbox.

One great tip for me has been simply writing notes and throwing them into my inbox. Physical or email, doesn’t matter, either way I can trust that I’ll see the note within a day and take the proper action on it.

Key 2: The tool choice doesn’t matter

I am an optimizer and a geek. I love tools, gadgets and “cool stuff”. I spent the first six months of my GTD life trying all sorts of tools. Palm, Treo, “hiptop”, “Kinkless GTD”, each of them works great. It wasn’t until I picked one and stuck with it that I started really getting the rewards.

The problem is that when you are constantly changing, you lose the trusted nature of the system. At any time, you should trust your system absolutely. It should have no leaks or “alternates”. If it does, your system won’t give you the peace of mind you are after.

My current system is Daylite for tracking, inboxes for gathering, and DevonThink for long term project knowledge base and planning. I am mostly at one computer all day, so this works for me at the moment. When I worked in an office, I used the 3×5 index card “hiptop” method. The important thing for me was to commit totally to one and only one method at a time.

Key 3: Projects don’t have to be big

For a long time, I made the mistake of thinking that my GTD projects had to be big. “Get out of debt” and “landscape the yard” were the scopes I tended to use. These are still valid, but I’ve found a lot of value in lowering the bar significantly. David Allen’s definition of a project is something like “any goal that takes more than one step to achieve.” So now I have projects like “Spring Goodwill donation.” That one requires at least two steps, probably more. When there is no resistance to adding a new project, since after all I can always change my mind or move it to “someday/maybe”, I find that I capture the real tasks-of-life much more effectively.

Key 4: Regular review

I am not the best at this part, to be truthful. I tend to do it at the most biweekly. I think ideally it should be weekly at the longest.

Despite that, I find that regular review makes me consider the value of my projects much more analytically. I ask myself the important questions such as “Is this project really the best use of my time?”, “Could anyone else in the family do it?”, “Could I just pay someone to do this?”, or perhaps most importantly “Does this project move the family toward our long-term goals?”.

Technorati Tags: GTD, Getting things done, David Allen

However, I’ve really outgrown him. I think he is wrong in his insistence that debt can never be used as a tool. But more importantly, I think he is psychologically and spiritually wrong to be so obsessively focused on debt. To really build wealth, you must be building toward something, not away from debt.

This quote summarizes my thoughts brilliantly well (italics mine):

It’s simple. Your field of focus determines what you find in life. Focus on opportunities and that’s what you find. Focus on obstacles and that’s what you find. I’m not saying that you don’t take care of problems. Of course, handle problems as they arise, in the present. But keep your eye on your goal, keep moving toward your target. Put your time and energy into creating what you want. When obstacles arise, handle them, then quickly refocus on your vision. You do not make your life about solving problems. You don’t spend all your time fighting fires. Those who do, move backward! You spend your time and energy in thought and deed, moving steadily forward, toward your goal.
–“Secrets of the Millionaire Mind” (T. Harv Eker)

Technorati Tags: eker, millionaire mind, millionairemind, debt, ramsey, dave ramsey, daveramsey

Family Goals

Driving (endlessly driving) back from Nebraska when coming home from vacation this summer, we talked for hours about our family goals. One of our biggest goals was to live out of the country for at least six months sometime in the next few years. We’ve talked about that one for years.

We’re planning to live in one of Dustin’s father’s houses in Mexico, most likely in San Miguel de Allende. It is a gorgeous town, with plenty of amenities for expatriots. Most importantly, we already love the place. We love Mexico in general, and both agree that of all the places we’ve visited in the world, Mexico is one of the few places we can imagine making home.

Reading the excellent article about bootstrapping your business in Argentina, I realized that despite agreeing on the goal, we have not been taking any steps to accomplish it. If we seriously want to do that, then we need to let it guide some of our choices. For example, our house.

In the few years since we’ve owned our latest house (my fourth), it has increased in value by nearly $250K. Theoretically. It would certainly be worth that if we put some effort into presentation and curb appeal. It could easily be worth another $100K if we made strategic upgrades to it. It is in a wonderful, desirable neighborhood in Portland, and should be fairly resistant to any “plateau” or “bubble” effects. At least, as long as we sell in the next couple years.

If we are going to move like that, we should probably also not buy any large items. At least we should not but anything which would be hard to resell or which would lose a lot of value. In fact, we should work diligently to pare down some of our too-much-stuff from the storage room in the shop.

Language is a harder question. Neither of us speak spanish, yet it would be simple to just enroll in an intensive course such as the famous Warren Hardy School. My father-in-law thinks taking courses here would probably not really give us much of a jump up on the learning process.

Of course, one of the big things is a source of income. If eBookTribe is a success, then we’ll be well on our way to filling that need. If not, then I’m simply going to need to learn to freelance. It is about time.

Decisions

We’re going to move ahead with this goal. It felt great to talk it out with Dustin and decide that we’re really going to do it. The kids will benefit so greatly from it, and we’ll all have a blast.

One life goal, coming up!

Technorati Tags: goals, mexico, expatriot