Episode 12 | Six Ways to Increase your Productivity

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Show Notes

• Start Small, Stay Small – Rob’s new book
• Albuquerque, New Mexico
• The Four Hour Work Week
• The Micropreneur Academy
• OnStartups.com – Dharmesh Shah’s blog
• 37signals
• answers.onstartups.com – Public startup Q&A forum

Transcript

[00:00] Rob Walling: This is Startups For the Rest of Us: Episode 12.

[00:03] [music]

[00:13] Rob: Welcome to Startups For the Rest of Us, the podcast that helps developers be awesome at launching software products, whether you have built your first product or are just thinking about it.  I’m Rob.

[00:23] Mike Taber: And I’m Mike.

[00:25] Rob: And we are here to share our experiences to help you avoid the same mistakes we’ve made.  What’s the word this week Mike?

[00:30] Mike: Not much.  Still in Albuquerque.  Good times. [laughs]

[00:34] Rob: And still sick.  You sound just the same.

[00:37] Mike: [laughs] It could be worse.  It could be worse.

[00:41] Rob: I guess you’re not sick, you have allergies, huh?

[00:43] Mike: Right.  Mild difference.  It certainly doesn’t feel like that sometimes.  No, that’s about it.  Just enjoying my iPad.  [laughs]

[00:50] Rob: Again with the iPad!  Would someone just offer to give me an iPad and then I won’t have to hear about it from Mike anymore?  You can reach me at 626-3…No, I’m just kidding.

[01:00] Mike: [laughs] What about you?

[01:02] Rob: Well, my wife and I have been married 10 years as of a couple weeks ago.  So we spent the weekend in San Francisco, caught a show, and had a nice dinner.  It was a lot of fun.  Nothing new to report on the work front, though.

[01:13] Mike: Making good progress on the book?

[01:15] Rob: Yes.  The book will be released soon.  And by the time this podcast is published, it should have been out for weeks.

[01:22] Mike: [laughs]

[01:22] Rob: So come check it out at Startupbook.net.

[01:26] Mike: Cool.

[01:27] [music]

[01:29] Mike: So what are we talking about this week?

[01:30] Rob: This week’s show is titled: Six Ways to Increase your Productivity.  There’s something very specific that we’re addressing here.  We’re not talking about how to find more time in your day.  What is it that we are going to address today?

[01:45] Mike: Well I think that we’re going to be looking at, specifically, because of the fact that as most micropreneurs get started and they are trying to build their business, they are still working on fulltime jobs, you are still spending anywhere from 50-60 hours a week, including your commute and everything else.  You’re still spending that time.  You only have maybe two hours a night to work on your own products.

[02:07] And so in total, maybe 10 or 15 hours a week.  And you want to get the most out of those 10 or 15 hours as you possibly can.  So you want to be as productive as possible during that time.  And that’s what we’re really talking about today.  We’re trying to look at specific ways that you can increase your productivity while you are working on your products.

[02:26] The first one that we came up with is that people need to stop multitasking.  And everyone seems to think that they are great at multitasking.  “I’m a wonderful multitasker.”  The fact is that most people aren’t.

[02:40] Computers are designed to do multitasking.  I mean all the modern operating systems are multitasking operations systems.  And they do it reasonably well, but there is a certain point at which it becomes inefficient to switch between tasks.  And the threshold for computers is much, much higher than it is for people.  And for some reason, most people have this illusion that they are very good at multitasking, when the reality is that they are not.

[03:06] So our suggestion for this is to basically, when you start one task, finish that task and then move on to the next.  Don’t try switching back and forth between a couple of different things unless you are actually waiting for something.  I mean if you kick off a query into some system and it takes three or four minutes to come back, sure.  You know what?  Go ahead and spend that three or four minutes doing something else and then come back to it.

[03:27] But for the most part, that’s just really not going to happen.  I mean that’s not the case for most of the things that you are doing.

[03:34] Rob: Yeah, I think a big cause of this is listening to podcast while you work.  Now, of course, ours is the only podcast that really matters, right?  Just kidding.

[03:44] Mike: This is more about trying to listen to podcasts while you work, because a podcast, generally you are listening to it because you want to pay attention to it.  And if you are paying attention to it, you are half listening to it and you are half doing whatever it is that you are trying to do.  But you are doing both of them pretty piss poor.

[03:58] Rob: Nice!  I think you summarized that well!  I’m actually a…I do this all the time.  Probably once a day I listen to a podcast while I work.  You know what I realized a long time ago?  Whenever I do listen to it, my productivity will go down.  And so I do it for a very controlled amount of time, typically, like a 30 minute podcast.

[04:17] And I kick it on when I kind of need to have a break, and I kick it on when I do very specific things, like when I am moving a lot of files around, because that’s kind of no-brainer work.  I never do it when I’m typing an email or trying to read something long.  I only do it when I am doing kind of more visual work, maybe some…I can actually listen to it while I’m programming pretty well.  I know I’m acting like the exception here, but coding using a different part of, kind of, my concentration.

[04:43] But most office tasks I can’t do while I’m listening to podcasts.  And so it really does slow me down overall.  So I’ve kept it pretty controlled.  And I do find that once the podcast is over, I feel kind of rejuvenated, kind of like it gave my mind a temporary rest.

[04:58] But yeah, I know people who listen to like five or six hours a day of talk radio, or they watch CNN or stream CNN while they’re working, and I think that’s got to cause some concentration issues.

[05:12] Mike: And those concentration issues are really what kind of drops people’s productivity.  So if you can concentrate on the task at hand, that’s certainly going to help your productivity.

[05:22] Rob: The second approach we came up with is removing distractions.  Now, I’ve been a culprit of this for years, or I used to be, I should say.  Having your email toaster pop up whenever you get an email, or even having an IM client pinging you when someone wants to chat with you, they are major issues.  They totally break your trains of thought.

[05:46] And we all feel like we’re the exception.  We feel like we’re the person that that doesn’t impact.  But I actually stopped the whole email notification thing a couple years ago.  I read “The Four Hour Work Week”, and one of the key points I took away from that whole book was Ferriss saying only check your email twice a day.

[06:01] And I admit I don’t do it twice a day.  I probably check my email four times a day.  But it absolutely has increased my productivity.  When I sit down to do email, I do it in a batch now, when I have 10 or 15 emails to respond to.  It all makes it easier to figure out what I’m working on at a given time since I like to track every minute of my day and assign it to one of my products, or one of my clients when I used to do consulting work.  It really helps to kind of batch them and do related things all together rather than every five or six minutes you get this pop up.  You know, it throws you into a tailspin.  You open up your email client, you read it, you think about how to respond.

[06:41] And the worst thing is if you can respond really quickly, you do that and you might get back to what you’re doing and get back into a flow.  But the worst thing is when you see it and you are like, “Oh, no.  This is like a 10 or 15 minute response.  I don’t want to stop right now.”  And then you just leave it read in your inbox and go back to what you’re doing.  And then it’s kind of mentally weighing on your mind.  And you have these read emails stacking up in your inbox.  And you come back to them later and you have 10 or 15 of them, it’s just overwhelming.

[07:10] But if you would finish your task and batch those emails, essentially, it’s a form of multitasking, right?  It’s trying to do two things at once.

[07:21] Mike: Yeah, email is definitely a big distraction.  But I mean when you’ve got that two or three hour block you are working on your product for an evening, I mean there are a lot of other distractions.  I mean IM clients, your cell phone, wife, kids; everything is a possible distraction.

[07:39] And the best way to get rid of them is to turn off your email client, turn off your phone or your cell phone, put them on mute or vibrate or whatever, or just turn them off outright if you can.  If you are working at home, ask your family to just kind of leave you alone and let you get the things done that you need to get done, because that is your time that you’ve allocated to working on your own product.  And if you aren’t able to work on it effectively, essentially you are pushing out your launch date.

[08:03] Every interruption that comes in, you are pushing out your launch date.  And as soon as you come up on something that is going to start eating into your productive time, just keep that in the back of your mind.  By paying attention to this or whatever it happens to be, you are pushing out your launch date.

[08:19] The third way we came up with to increase your productivity is to create a discreet task for everything.  And what I mean by this is when you have your product launch that you are trying to get to and you know the things that you need to do to get to that product launch, you have this huge list of things that you have to get done.

[08:40] And what you need to do is you need to organize that list.  Either use a bug tracking system or Notepad.  Whatever system works for you, use that.  And for every individual thing that needs to get done, create it as a task within that system and use that system.

[08:55] What’s going to happen is you are going to end up with an extremely long list of things that need to get done.  Your goal here should be to ignore the actual length of that list.  The length of that list should not be a discouragement.  That list of things to do is essentially a list of things that you need to check off in order to get done.

[09:12] And the entire purpose of this list is to allow you to track everything that needs to get done and make sure that things don’t slip through the cracks.  And while you’re working in those two to three hour blocks, you pick off some of those things and you work on those things, and you move on to the next one.

[09:28] Rob: Yeah, I think the real benefit here is, you might have noticed something about the way we develop software.  First you sit down and you design some type of high level spec, even if you are doing agile development or something.  You get a general idea of what you are going to build and then you might do a little bit of design or a little bit of architecture.

[09:48] And then, after that’s done and completed and makes sense, then you step into the coding.  And those are like two or three different tiers in the process.  And have you ever noticed that if you are sitting there coding, and suddenly you need to switch into design mode, you need to go back and kind of rethink those decisions, it’s really hard to shift your mind from those extreme details and shift it up to 30,000 feet.  It’s almost like you are on the ground digging a ditch, basically writing code, and you try to jump up to 30,000 feet and look at the whole picture.  It’s really hard to do that mental shift quickly and it kind of churns up a lot of time.

[10:25] You have to get the whole context of the application back, loaded back in to your internal memory.  I think that’s the same thing here.  If you look at a task and it’s going to require a number of things to do, it’s so much more efficient to put all those tasks out at one time.  You’re in the mindset, you’re in the flow, and you do it once.

[10:44] Then as you’re working through them, once you’re done with a task, there’s no reason to procrastinate, to get distracted, to do anything.  You don’t have to sit there and load the context of the whole project back in your mind.  You just look down the list.  And the next things there, and it’s like “Oh.  I need to now write this one email,” or “get this logo designed” or whatever.

[11:03] ]Since it’s such a discrete task and it’s so easy, you can just implement it immediately, you’re much less likely to be less productive, basically; to wander off and read your RSS reader or do whatever it is that you do when you get distracted.

[11:16] Mike: Yeah, I mean the primary thing here is to get yourself organized so, as Rob said, you’re not switching gears between looking at the dirty details and then you realize that you forgot something.  You have to shift gears, go back up to that 30,000 foot view and essentially figure things out again, get the lay of the land.  Because you’re wasting time every time you do that.

[11:38] But if you focus on getting all those tasks written down, figuring out what needs to be done and you’ve got that list, you can essentially block those things off so you’re aggregating some of those ditch digging tasks all at one time, and you can just bang through them.  When you’re done, you switch out to five or six 30,000 foot view tasks.

[11:58] Rob: Approach number four for increasing productivity is to focus on those discrete tasks.  Once you’ve created all of the tasks, focus on them.  When you finish one, start working on the next one.

[12:11] Mike: One of the things that I’ve found to be helpful is to use a timer to essentially challenge yourself to get things done in a certain time period.  If you’ve got one of those kitchen egg timers, those sorts of things sometimes work, but occasionally the ticking bothers you a little bit.  There are software tools that can do the same kind of thing.

[12:30] Essentially, you decide on a task that you’re going to do and that you’re going to be able to get done within . . .  Say that you’re two hours into your three hour time period and you’ve got a 45 minute task or 60 minute task that you want to get done.  You set the timer and you say, “I’ve got 60 minutes to finish this”, and you go to work on it.  Every once in awhile you glance up at that timer, see how well you’re doing.  And essentially, you’re challenging yourself to try and finish that task in that allotted time period.

[12:56] What you can do is you sort of make a game out of it.  You say, “Well I think that this task is going to take me 45 minutes.  Can I do it in 35?  Can I do it in 40?” Those sorts of things will challenge you to work harder because you’re going to not procrastinate while you’re working.  That’s one of those things that a lot of people will do.  They’re going back and forth between screens; they’re going a little bit slow.  If you focus on your productivity, this is going to make you more productive.

[13:25] One of the downsides to this is that if you’re in the middle of a mentally challenging task, and programming is a great example of that.  If you’re in the middle of one of those tasks and let’s say you gave yourself 30 minutes to do something, and the timer goes off and kind of jumps up in front of you.  It can be a little bit jarring.  It can be disruptive.  You have to decide for yourself whether or not that is so disruptive that it’s actually impacting your productivity or not.

[13:52] If it is, you leave it in the background.  You leave that timer in the background.  You check when you’re done.  Maybe you went over, maybe you didn’t.  As long as you can make sure that you’re on track to try and meet the goals that you’re setting.  The important piece here is that you’re being as productive as possible.

[14:08] Rob: Another approach I’ve seen used, I don’t actually use it myself but my wife does, I’ve seen this used to great effect if you’re fairly organized, is to actually plan out a bulk of the next week.   Like on Monday, to actually open up your calendar, look at the full week and do a form of time boxing where you actually time box out 30 minute blocks and you say, “I’m going to work on this specific task.” Or maybe 15 minute blocks.

[14:33] Now that puts a lot of administrative stuff up front.  I think that to be most effective, you’re probably going to want to stay between 30 and 60 minutes.  What it allows you to do is when you sit down that night to get started and you look at your calendar on Wednesday, it’ll say get the HTML built or build this single feature.  And you don’t have to think about it.

[14:53] One of the biggest reasons that we procrastinate is that we don’t know what to do next.  Have you ever noticed once you’re in the middle of a task or once you know exactly what you need to do, it’s not actually that hard to get the task done?  But you can kill a lot of time trying to churn and figure out what the next task is.  That’s what that approach is trying to avoid.

[15:13] Mike: The fifth way to increase your productivity is to make fast decisions.  Humans are notoriously bad at making decisions when there’s any sort of a risk analysis involved.  There have been various studies out there that show that based on certain parameters of humans trying to assess and quantify or identify anything where there’s variable nature to it, we’re just bad at it.  Vegas makes a killing off of people being bad at math and analysis of statistics involved in various things.

[15:46] The problem here is the vast majority of things that you do or the decisions that you’re making,  let’s be honest; you’re not going to make the worst possible decision in any given case.  What you need to do is you just need to make a decision and move forward with it.  If you need to change your mind or change what you’ve done down the road, that’s fine.

[16:05]  In the long run what’s going to happen is the time that you’ve saved in making those decisions quickly is going to more than outstrip the time that you would have spent sitting around and thinking: “Am I making the optimal decision here?”  You never have to make the best decision.  You merely have to make a reasonably good decision.  Make your decisions quickly and simply move on.

[16:28] I think of the example I used in the past was, if you’re trying to buy a hard drive and you’re trying to decide between these two different models.  One gives you 9 millisecond access time, the other one’s like 8.8, and there’s a $20 difference between them, and you spent half an hour trying to figure out: “Which one should I buy?”  It’s like, well, you’ve already wasted enough time to just have bought the more expensive one, so does it really matter at this point?

[16:52] Rob: Our sixth and final approach to increasing productivity is to outsource.  Mike, I know you and I have harped on this before, we’ve talked about outsourcing.  Some people are believers, some people aren’t.  But of all the approaches we’ve listed here today, this has been the single most important one for me personally over the past three to four years, was learning to outsource.

[17:14] At first, simple tasks to a virtual assistant, and then going a bit larger and having designers do more work that I should try to do myself, including HTML and CSS, and even working with some outsource developers from time to time to write some code that, in the old days, I would have written all myself.  It’s incredible the amount of time you can save.

[17:36] The other ones are incremental ways to increase productivity.  But this one can be a much larger amount of time saved.  These days I use virtual assistants and other outsourcing partners for . . . It’s actually pretty slim these days.  It’s probably down to about between 40 and 60 hours a month.

[17:56] About a year ago I owned a few different products that I’ve since sold.  I was well into the 150 to 200 hour a month mark with VA’s.  It gives you an example.  Those are hours that I would have been working.  I would have either not been able to maintain the products at the level they were maintained or I would have… in theory, I can do the work a little faster than they were.  So I wouldn’t have had to spend a full amount of time.  But realistically, even if you say I’m twice as fast, it still would have been another 70-80 hours that I was working each month.  That’s a pretty big productivity boost.

[18:30] Mike: I don’t think people fully realize the value that having a virtual assistant or having just somebody who you’ve hired to do something for you really has in terms of your productivity. Because the fact is, if you’ve only got these 10 or 15 hours a week to work on your product, if you outsource a task that takes four hours, that right there is 25% of your time for the week.  It’s very effective to be outsourcing tasks that really don’t require your skill level to do, because you can’t outsource certain things, like development.  You could outsource development if you want to, but we don’t generally recommend that people outsource their core skills.

[19:11] In the last podcast, Charlie had written in and said that he’s not a developer, so of course he’s going to outsource that task because he’s not a developer.  A lot of our audience is developers.  Why should you be outsourcing your core specialty?  But there are a lot of things that you can outsource that you don’t need to do.  You don’t need to be doing copyrighting.  You don’t need to be doing editing of web pages or other people’s copyrighting.  That’s not stuff that you need to be doing.

[19:37]  I mean you can outsource that, have somebody else do it, and move on.  That saves you so much time in the long run.  If you can save four hours a week, well, basically you’ve just cut another week off of the time that it takes you to get to launch, because that four hours a week, over the course of a month, is 16 hours, which, as I said, if you’re only putting in 10-15 hours a week, there’s your extra week closer to launch.

[20:00] [music]

[20:03] Rob: This week’s listener question is from Justin Chmura,  and his question is as follows:

[20:08] “Dear Mike and Rob, I’ve just started listening to the podcast and figured I would pose a question.  I currently work at a small software company doing about 30 hours a week because I’m currently wrapping up college.  I also have a lot of ideas for doing development on my own and possibly taking those ideas to the next level.  What I run into is showing the same dedication to my projects at home compared to my projects at work.  Do you have any advice on how to push through development on your own time when already doing it for seven or eight hours straight that day and keeping up with the background behind marketing a product?  Thanks guys and keep up the good work.”

[20:44] Rob: What do you think about that Mike?

[20:45] Mike:  Well I think that he starts off really well.  He says, “Dear Mike and Rob,” so that makes the score Mike three, Rob zero.  Is that correct? [laughs]

[20:53] Rob: Hey, wait a minute!  Yeah, I’m going to reorder this!

[20:55] Mike: I think there’s a few different underlying elements here.  The first one is that there are a lot of different reasons why people aren’t as motivated to do their own projects as they are at work.  Sometimes you come home and you’re just exhausted.  You don’t feel like doing more work.  Other times you’re comfortable at your job, you’re happy with it.

[21:14] Why are you really working on this other product?  Does it really make sense to spend that extra time?  If it’s not something that you’re doing for a good reason…I mean you really have to have a good reason to be building your own product.  If it’s just because eventually you want to have more money, that’s fine.  But I think that in Justin’s case, he’s just coming out of college and what’s his rationale for building these extra products?  Is it because he wants extra money?  I don’t want to say it’s a bad reason, but…

[21:42] Some of the other reasons that people aren’t necessarily motivated are that they’ve got other things that they want to do with their life.  I remember back when I was just finishing up college.  The last thing I wanted to do is on a Friday or Saturday night be sitting home banging away at code.  I wanted to be out hanging out with my friends and doing all sorts of things that were not programming.  All those things kind of add up and you really have to sit down and think about, “Well why am I doing this?”

[22:08] In terms of things that you can do to actually push through and develop things on your own, there are a couple of different things that you can do.  The first and foremost that works for most people is public accountability.  Public accountability is just telling people what you’re doing, why you’re doing it, and giving yourself deadlines to meet.  If you’re not able to do that, if you can’t hold yourself accountable to meeting those deadlines, then you’re never going to finish them.  Essentially, what that does is that puts you in that first category of people who are… they start products but they’re not necessarily good at finishing them.  On one hand that’s good to know that that’s the type of person you are, but on the other, you need to be able to figure out how to deal with that.

[22:49] Other things you can do for public accountability, you can have a blog post where you tell everybody.  Say, “This is what I’m doing and this is my deadline.”  You essentially write in reports for that.  Inside of the Micropreneur Academy that Rob and I run, we tell people . . . .  There’s an accountability forum in there that tells people, “Hey, why don’t you tell people what you’re doing and give us weekly updates?”  That helps so many people get on track and makes sure that they’re doing the things they’ve committed to publicly doing.

[23:18] Some other things that you can do, you can hang around with others who are doing the same sorts of things as you are.  I find this a little bit more challenging than some of the other things to try, just because the fact is that when you’re first coming out of college, you usually have more friends who are probably interested in that sort of thing.  After a couple of years it gets a little bit more difficult to find people who have the same mindset as you and say, “Yeah, I’d like to build my own products.  I’d like to become an entrepreneur.”  The ratio of entrepreneurs to everybody else in the world is actually pretty small.  There are a lot fewer entrepreneurs than there are people who are willing to work for these multimillion dollar companies who have a national presence, for example.

[23:57] What about you Rob?  What do you think of some of the other things that he might want to try?

[24:01] Rob: Well, to add onto your point about hanging around with others, I think that that’s a big reason why so many people go online, and that’s something I recommend. You live near Boston, which is a startup hub, and so you can actually find a lot of meet-up groups.  I use to live there and there were a bunch of great developer and techie and entrepreneur meet-up groups and startup meet-up groups.

[24:21] Out here I’m in the Central Valley of California; there really isn’t anything; there are zero meet-up groups for developer/entrepreneur types.  So that is one of the reasons that I recommend going online and finding that community of blogs like yours and mine, or on Dharmesh Shah ,37 Signals.  These are all kind of good startup oriented blogs.  Then, of course, you can go to places like answers.onstartups.com.

[24:45] In addition to that, I’ve got a couple in mind, some things to try to maintain your motivation.  Because I think that’s what Justin’s trying to do, is “How do I stay motivated to push through after a long day’s work?’  One thing we’re going to come back to over and over, and we said we would, is having written goals.

[25:03] You brought it up a little earlier, but knowing your goals and being able to reference back to them.  And if you’re goal is “I’m doing this to make money. I’m doing this for personal happiness.” Whatever it is, define these things and put them down on paper. Twenty minutes to write down why you want to build products, what you want to get done, and when you want to get it done by makes it more real for you.  It makes it more tangible.

[25:25] It’s easy to let days of not writing code go by if you don’t have something to come back to. I’m not going to harp on it too long; we did talk about it a couple of times in podcasts past.  I really think this is the cornerstone of keeping you focused and aware of why you’re doing these things.

[25:42] Mike: Something I’ll add to that is, even if you don’t believe us when we say that, spend the 20 minutes.  What’s the worse that you’re going to lose?  You’re going to lose 20 minutes.  The best thing that can happen is that it works out in your favor.

[25:55] Rob: I think the other thing I would suggest, something I’ve had success with and I’ve actually spoken with some other developers about how they stay motivated.  People use things like music and caffeine or even a glass of wine to get them into a certain state of mind.  I think music and caffeine are going to be better because they make you more alert and they can help you focus.

[26:17] Typically, I will drink a glass of wine while writing a rough draft of something non-coded oriented.  Find what it is that sets your mind into that flow.  It may depend on your mood; sometimes it’s instrumental. like Enya —something you would never have told your buddies that you listen to. But it gets you into this soundscape mode that just kind of shuts your mind down and makes it super ultra focused.  And it works really good at night with that kind of music because it’s the soundscape feel.

[26:43] Other times, I have a number of Metallica albums that I have on tap for just cranking it up and hearing really loud music that gets me amped and gets me through some tough stretches.  Obviously there are all different types for you, but find out maybe what your two or three favorite genres in music are that can pull you into it.

[27:02] In general, I think for me personally, it’s actually finding the same group of songs.  It may be like one song.  Sometimes I’ll put a single song on and loop it for a couple of hours, which sounds irritating to some people, but what it does…it sounds weird, but it’s like a trance where I’m total . . .   I’m in such a deep flow state that the time just goes by really quickly and I’m ultra productive.  That’s the wine.  Exactly.

[27:25] Mike: [laughs]

[27:25] I’ve heard of other people doing this exact same thing, of finding their song or a couple of songs and just going through them.  And, of course, caffeine can help this as well.  I mean it can be abused, but if you’re smart with it and you realize how your body reacts to it…I actually drink one thing of caffeine at lunch and I block of certain things to do right after lunch that I know I’m going to need high energy for.  I don’t do those things before lunch because I know I’m going to be at probably my lowest energy point of the day right before lunch.

[27:53] Mike: Very cool.  So Justin, I hope we answered your question, and thanks for sending that in.  We just wanted to recap just a little bit for the “Six Ways to Increase Your Productivity”.

[28:03] Number one is to stop multitasking.  Computers are great at it.  You’re probably not.  Number two is removing distractions from the environment.  Close your email.  Turn off your phone.  Turn off your instant messenger.  Make sure that you’re focusing on what it is that you need to do.

[28:16] Number three is create discrete tasks for everything; making sure that you’ve got a long list of everything that needs to get done so that you can pick and choose things that are related to one another, and you’re not zooming in and out of the project itself.

[28:29] Rob: Number four is to focus on discrete tasks.  Get them done one at a time and move onto the next one.  Number five is to make fast decisions.  We’re bad at making decisions when there’s a risk analysis involved.  Don’t wait on a time, make the decision and move on.  And number six is to outsource.

[28:46] [music]

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