While reading The Art Of The Start I was quite surprised how many parallels there are to Rework. Kawasaki’s guide gives a concise overview about many things that are helpful to know when starting either a business on your own or a new product internally within an existing company. It also contains a couple of good references to further readings.

Topics are:

• What’s your business about: Positioning, Pitching, Business Plans.
• Money: Bootstrapping, Recruiting, Raising capital.
• Create a profile: partnering, branding, rainmaking.

Some people call it the “startup bible”. That’s exaggerated. It’s a useful guide, a starting point. You might also want to read The Principles Of Successful Freelancing, since you’ll find more information about the nitty-gritty details of creating a business there.

P.S.: I’m not saying Rework is necessarily a startup guide. Fried and Hansson focus more on work quality and life / work balance. At least that’s how I read the book.

If you want to learn about increasing your productivity most people will recommend you David Allen’s book “Getting things done”.

When reading through the book you might get the impression that Allen evangelizes his productivity principles like a religion. I wouldn’t go so far and call it a religion, but certainly implementing those principles will have a notable effect on your life. It is a methodology to get organized and productive.

Getting things done consists out of three parts:

1. Master your workflow / Natural Project Planning
2. The core principles in detail
3. Key principles for a successful application of the process

If the first part Allen introduces the “Mind like water” concept. The modern world bombards everyone with thousands of inputs. Allen calls it simply “stuff”. This stuff needs to be canalized into a trusted system as fast as possible in order to keep a clear mind and to be able to concentrate on what really matters.

The complete system looks like this:

Let’s look at it a little more detailed. At the beginning stands the collection process.

Goal of this first step is to collect all the various inputs in a single inbox. This makes the next step of “Processing” a lot easier and effective. Collecting all your loose “stuff” is the very first step towards a mind like water.

Next comes the step of processing and organizing.

You need to regularly empty your inbox. If you don’t, it will soon serve as garbage dump rather than inbox. The first question you have to ask for each item is “What is it?“. This might sound dumb, but in the collection process you only collect everything without making a decision about it. Therefore when processing your inbox you first need to find out what you’re dealing with. Without knowing this you cannot figure out a good answer to the next question: “Is it actionable?”

If it’s not actionable, there are three possibilities:

• It’s not needed so trash it.
• No action is needed right now, but someday you might want to do something about it.
• No action is needed, but you want to keep it as reference material.

If it is actionable, you should do things which take less than two minutes right away. If you do that, it means one less item to think about, one less item on your lists to review.

For all other items:

• If you’re not the right person for the task, delegate it. Wait for results, if necessary follow up with the person to whom you delegated the task.
• Since you can’t get the task done within two minutes: Defer it. In case it needs to be done on a specific date / time, put it on your calendar. If it’s not bound to a time, put it on a list that keeps track of the “next action” you need to undertake.

Some things consist out of more than one action, you usually call them projects.

Projects need to be managed vertically and horizontally. They serve as constant source of “next action” tasks.

Managing horizontally means, controlling all the different kinds of topics / projects you’re involved in.

Managing vertically means to think about the distinct tasks of a specific project.

At the end of the processing / organizing step you have at least 8 categories:

• Trash.
• Someday / maybe list.
• Reference.
• A list with projects and for each project a list actionable items (project plans).
• A waiting-for list, holding all things you delegated and are waiting for results.
• A calendar, containing all tasks which need to be done at a specific time.
• A list of “next-actions”, containing atomic actions you need to work on.

Now, after putting all the energy in collecting, processing and organizing you have to regularly review these lists, update them and then most important: getting the specific action items done.
The review step is at least as important as the “do” step. It guarantees that your lists stay up to date and you won’t forget about something. If your lists are not up to date, you can’t trust them. They might contain stuff you have already done or which is outdated. If you don’t trust the system, you won’t use it and you won’t get the benefit of the “Getting things done”-methodology, you won’t feel the relieve of a mind like water ;-)

There’s a whole lot more useful stuff in this book. One of which is “Natural Project Planning”. I will write about this in a future post.

If you have read Getting Real you’ll notice some overlap with Fried’s (@jasonfried) and Hansson’s (@dhh) new book “Rework”. Despite that, it’s a great business book. Especially, but not only, for those who want to create a small business.

Some randomly picked stuff I specially liked:

• Learning from mistakes is overrated – Learn from successes instead. They make a really good point here. After making a mistake you still might not know how to do it actually the right way. If you did something successfully however, this becomes crystal clear.
• Workaholism – Working longer hours often results in getting less work done instead of more.
• Try to solve your own problems. The advantage of that is, that you exactly know what is the problem because it’s your own. Moreover you probably have a pretty good idea about how to solve it.
• Don’t think or talk about doing something, do it.
• No time is no excuse. If you don’t find time to do what you want you don’t really want.
• Businesses who think about an exit strategy, start thinking at the wrong end. Think about how you can grow your business. That’s the road to success.
• Constraints help you to be creative. Embrace constraints instead of seeing them as real limiting factors.
• Start at the epicenter – Meaning: What’s the core of your product? Start there, don’t think about stuff you don’t necessarily need. Don’t think about problems you don’t have yet.
• Less is more
• Launch early, get good feedback.
• Interruptions are one big productivity killer
• So are meetings, just that they multiply it by the number of persons who take part in the meeting
• Most meetings are not necessary. Try to limit them as much as you can. Think about it that way: A meeting with 5 person for 1 hour is really 5 hours of work which could get done instead.
• Split big tasks into small ones. That’s easier to manage.
• With that goes: Make many small decisions instead of big bold ones.
• Don’t copy. If you want to do something that’s “like” your competitors product or service you already lost.
• Say no by default – Don’t say to everything yes, think about new features carefully, see if they really are needed, if they really fit to the product.
• Out teach your competition – Teaching customers is an easy way to compete even with the big players. And it’s mostly for free.

I thought this is an excellent article:

Doing It Wrong

So good that I want to waste some of my time citing from it:

[...] What I’m writing here is the single most important take-away from my Sun years, and it fits in a sentence: The community of developers whose work you see on the Web, who probably don’t know what ADO or UML or JPA even stand for, deploy better systems at less cost in less time at lower risk than we see in the Enterprise. This is true even when you factor in the greater flexibility and velocity of startups. [...]

[...] More important is the culture: iterative development, continuous refactoring, ubiquitous unit testing, starting small, gathering user experience before it seems reasonable. All of which, to be fair, I suppose had its roots in last decade’s Extreme and Agile movements. I don’t hear a lot of talk these days from anyone claiming to “do Extreme” or “be Agile”. But then, in Web-land for damn sure I never hear any talk about large fixed-in-advance specifications, or doing the UML first, or development cycles longer than a single-digit number of weeks.[...]

Everybody knows that many millions and billions have been wasted in enterprise IT systems, so:

Plan A: Don’t build systems

If you really have to, Plan B: Do it better.

Please read the article: Doing It Wrong

If you used the public transport in Prague recently, especially the metro, you might have noticed commercials of Bonus.cz.

The idea itself is great and for sure pays out for the company running the site. The concept is this: People buy points. For these points they can bid on a product. By biding on a product the price increases. The product is available for at least 24 hours during which the user can bid. If someone else bids in the last 30 seconds however, the countdown resets again to 30 seconds. If no one else bid during that last 30 seconds period, the user who bid last on the product won.

The calculation for the user:
Final product price = Cost for points he needed for biding + final state of the bid

The calculation for the company:
Profit = Cost of all (!) points bid on that product – Price for buying the product

So far so good. The “dangerous” thing here is that most people won’t get that this is pure gambling (like in the casino) and the bank always wins: You buy your tokens and make a bet e.g. when playing roulette. There’s a small chance you win but usually you’ll loose!

So your calculation is not really “Cost for points + final state of the bid”. By trying again and again to “win” you will invest so much money that in the end it’s likely that you’ve paid more for points than you would have paid for the desired new mobile phone, digital camera or what so ever…

There’s a similar site in Germany: www.dealstreet.de and I’m sure you’ll find sites with the same concept in other countries, too.