Creating Structure

November 10, 2009 – 4:52 pm

Remember that scene in Office Space about having a million dollars? Here is a neat little animated refresher:


In the movie, Peter goes on to say that if he had a million dollars he would do absolutely nothing. That is the whole point. If you have enough money that you don’t have to work for a living (and a million dollars wouldn’t do that for most of us), how would you spend your time?

I think a better question is “what would you do with 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year?”

That is sorta kinda what I have. I made a major life change in March 2008 when I stopped working as a full-time employee in order to focus on entrepreneurial ventures. March 2009 was a little tough because I realized it was the one year anniversary and I felt like I could have been more intentional about how I spent that time.

As I am quickly approaching the two-year mark I am again reflecting on how I spend my time. Now that I have the freedom to decide how I want to spend my time, my life has become very ambiguous and unstructured. I think it is time for some self-imposed structure.

I was just reading How To Create a Balanced Life and it has some key steps that I really agree with:

  1. Eat right: I had been doing really good about this, and my diet now is much better than when I was traveling all the time. There is room for improvement (like not skipping breakfast!!!)
  2. Exercise: Again, I was doing really good, but this has fallen off in the past few weeks. Exercise time is really great for clearing the clutter out of my head and gives me more energy.
  3. Know when to say “no”: My default has been to say yes to things until I am over-commited. I am hoping by creating a schedule for myself it will be easier to see when it is full.
  4. Sleep: I tend to “work” until late at night. I am going to schedule down time at night and stick to it. This will help me get to bed earlier and thus get up earlier.

There are a few more suggestions, but those are the ones that I really agree with.

Tonight I am going to create the first iteration of my daily schedule. In addition to getting up earlier, including daily exercise, and scheduling time for meals, I also want to establish regular office hours where I will have dedicated work time as well as some weekly tasks like grocery shopping that I always seem to put off until the last minute. I also have a weekly schedule for when I have time with my kids. This allows me to schedule more intentional parenting time.

I have enjoyed the supreme flexibility of not having a schedule. I just feel like I can do a better job of getting done what I want to get done if I am more intentional about how I spend my time.

Admittedly, it is a good problem to have.

Afterthought: I think I will include time for a few blog posts a week, too ;)

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Turning a Side Hobby Into a Success

October 29, 2009 – 8:47 pm

It has been a little over a year since I created a new venture with Nicholas Holland. We created Side Hobby LLC after Nashville’s first Startup Weekend to pursue our project gpsAssassin.

When we first started out we were (foolishly, but commonly) optimistic that it would just be a little 3 month side hobby (thus the name) that would either make a bunch of money or fizzle and die quickly. We thought the game would release before Christmas and we would be all done with it (or rolling in money) shortly thereafter.

It has been an amazing experience so far, and I think we are going to keep growing the business for a long time to come. TechCrunch has said gpsAssassin could be the next highly addictive hit game. We have been featured on games.com, had an article make it to Reuters, and even got an editorial shout out in the Nashville Scene’s Best of Nashville for Best iPhone Game Developed by Some Local Dudes. Needless to say, it has been an entrepreneurial success so far. (We aren’t making a bunch of money yet, but we are cash flow positive).

We have made some serious blunders along the way (I wish Nick’s BarCamp presentation was online, it was awesome). However, as a business we have addressed the problems, but as an entrepreneur I have learned a ton from them.

At times it has been stressful trying to juggle this “side hobby” with being a single dad while keeping up with the other projects I am working on. The freedom that comes from being able to pursue entrepreneurial ventures makes it totally worth it. I was able to spend every Thursday and Friday with my kids over the Summer, and for that I am really grateful.

So what’s next? We are keeping that close to the chest right now, but we are going to continue to grow gpsAssassin. Our numbers look good (and I think we are watching the right numbers). We are continuing to add new players. Most importantly, we have demonstrated that people will pay for what we are doing (thank you!).

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What I Want in a News Reader

October 29, 2009 – 7:02 pm

I have not been using an RSS reader for months. Lately I have been trying to look at my NetNewsWire again, but there are a couple of things that frustrate me.

The first is that it is not easy for me to share items. I used to be able to clip them, but now that NNW syncs with Google Reader I want an easy way to “share” a post on Google Reader from NNW (maybe this exists, but I haven’t found it).

Also, I don’t want to subscribe to a bunch of RSS feeds. Instead I wan to just get a list of relevant posts to me. I have been filling this need with a combination of Hacker News for tech stuff and Newser for news. That isn’t really what I want though.

The first thing I want is a list of posts that people in my network have read, commented on, linked to, shared, etc.

I want it to be sorted by an attention score so that a post that two people in my network read and one commented on places higher than one that just has two reads (which is higher than one with one read, etc).

I am actually hopeful about the future of Facebook because of their new News Feed. If I was a fan of all of my news sources on Facebook (and my network had the same strategy), then the posts that were getting the most attention would be in my News Feed. The problem is that Facebook is not really where I want this information. Secondary problems have to do with the technical aspect of actually getting that data.

The system I want is the same one I described in my 3D Social Networking talk at BarCamp Nashville 2006 (slides). Here is how I think it could work in today’s landscape:

  1. Aggregate my social networks. Pull the social graph from where my networking is acknowledging attention to articles. Give a point to the friend score for each one.
  2. Try to identify the accounts for that user that also share content but might not have a social network (Disqus, Intense Debate, Delicious, etc)
  3. Pull down the content that is shared on those sources, which might include aggregation of their own posts to twitter (via links), on Facebook (via imported notes), etc. Give each occurrence of an article one point for each friend point (connected on three networks and shared on two gives it a 6).
  4. Add up the article scores across all of my network and give me a news list sorted by that score.

This would result in a system where the posts of my friend would have an advantage, but posts that multiple of my friends shared would float to the top.

Then, when I am ready to read some news I would be able to go to that one place and see loads of stuff that is relevant to me.

I think it is a hard system to build because there is a whole lot of aggregation and parsing, not to mention a pretty massive database. I also don’t think it is something that could easily generate revenue. I am hoping someone builds it, but I am not holding my breath.

Which brings me back to Facebook.

A few months back they acquired Friend Feed. One of the features that impressed me most about Friend Feed early on was the idea of “imaginary friends”. I think they removed or de-prioritized the feature, but it allowed me to pull content in from additional sources and let it play in Friend Feed’s ranking system. I don’t think it is too far fetched to see something like this make it’s way into Facebook now. If Facebook added Google Reader integration it would go a long way too.

update:
Apparently there are a couple of related posts today, I would have known this earlier if I was using a feed reader. Why I don’t use Google Reader anymore and Why I continue to use Google Reader.

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