Howells.

I think we’re all agreed that not talking about your ideas and slapping an NDA all over them is never good advice.

Chris Dixon eloquently talks about this in “Why you shouldn’t keep your startup idea secret”.

I would go further and encourage you to talk to absolutely anybody about an idea you have listing in your head, without shape or form.

Talk to people who don’t know your industry, or who don’t know about problem you’re trying to solve. If you catch yourself waffling, or searching for the right words to convey the idea, it needs work.

Email people you normally tweet with out of the blue. They’ll welcome the surprise, and pay attention.

Write about your ideas publicly on your blog. If you’re feeling particularly ballsy, light the touch-paper and stick that blog post on Hacker News. (Make sure you stand well back.)

An idea only grows with a thousand bumps and bruises: rebuttals, criticisms, “it won’t scale” and plenty of “that already exists”. Afterwards, the idea might still be unclear, will take on a sharper silhouette.

Then it just takes execution, but that’s a whole other story…

I don’t really post links on this blog these days, but once-in-a-while an article comes along that I feels deserve more attention than a quick link on Twitter.

Connor Tomas O’Brien write an enlightening post about avoiding medium-sized stuff:

The small stuff is okay, too. Tweets and Instagram photos and Vine clips – stuff that’s easy to create and easy to digest. The small stuff can stay. The small-scale stuff is fun.

…

The medium-sized stuff: projects that don’t really mean that much to me, but that take more than a trivial amount of effort to get finished. Recently, I’ve been taking on a lot of projects with timeframes measured in days or weeks. That’s not long enough to do anything very interesting. These projects are not horrible to work on, but, were I to pan out and see my life on the scale of years or decades, I realise it’s these particular projects that I’ll end up forgetting, these particular projects that will lead me to wonder, “Hey, what did I actually do over this year and that?”

…

Big projects are scary. It’s much more tempting to take on a bunch of medium-sized projects than one huge project, because in doing so you mitigate the chance of failure. But it’s the stuff that could fail that’s the stuff we remember, not the stuff that’s safe.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this recently and I’m thankful to Connor for giving this thought a shape and meaning.

☛

Last week I attended OFFF, which was a fun few days of interesting talks and meeting people in Barcelona.

The keynote was delivered by my pal Matias Corea of Behance, whose message was about Making Ideas Happen. I particularly liked a slide he showed which listed all the most common excuses that people have for not making their ideas/dreams happen. How many do you recognise, and what can you do about them?

• It’s not the right moment. There’ll never be the right moment. It’s as simple as that.
• It’s not polished enough. It doesn’t matter. It’s far better to get something out the door, tell people about it, and use feedback to make it better.
• I’m worried about the competition. The competition doesn’t matter. There is always an opportunity to create something better than the competition, regardless of how superior they may seem in terms of resources.
• I have to pay the bills. Matias framed this along the lines of: “would you rather pay your sad bills with your sad time and sad money, or pay your happy bills with happy time and happy money?”
• I don’t want to fail. Turn failure from a negative to a positive: it’s beneficial to fail. In fact failing a lot of the time was a consistent theme from the talks at OFFF; a lot of great personal work comes out of failure.
• I don’t have time. When you’re in a bar drinking a beer, can you still feasibly complain about having a lack of time? Sounds facetious, but it’s true. I knew one guy who effectively gave up going out partying for a month and had one of the most productive and fun months of his career, creating a whole array of personal projects. Wake up an hour earlier; go to bed an hour later. You’ll always be able to find time to make something you want.
• Someone is already doing it. Matias used Google as an example here. When they started, there were 17 different search engines doing effectively the same thing (remember Alta Vista?). To reiterate an earlier point, there is always an opportunity to take and idea and make it better.

I’m guilty of so many of these, so I’m posting it here to return to as a checklist to give myself a kick up the ass when I start whinging about not starting something.

I switched the date order on my inbox the other day, which made me realise I have kept every since piece of “proper” email (i.e. not newsletters, and so on) since July 2006.

That means I have, right now, 34,746 emails in my Apple Mail inbox (about 17 being worthy of keeping a day), which is an amalgamation of 2 main accounts - personal, and work.

I haven’t added any to folders, nor have tagged them in any way. Occasionally I use Smart Folders to simply group emails from certain individuals depending on what my current projects are (though I only have three smart folders active right now - it’s never more than this).

When I have to get back to an email or respond to it, I flag them. This effectively becomes my to-do list, and I can see all the flagged items at once using the Flagged shortcut in mail. (The flagging functionality introduced in iOS 4.something was the single greatest advance in the iPhone in my opinion.)

As soon they have been responded or actioned, I un-flag. I usually start from the oldest and work my up. If a flagged message is really old, and nothing untoward has happened or the message is now irrelevant, I un-flag it, and will never return to it again.

At any given time I have less than 50 flagged items. If there is more than that I just have to make a concerted effort to go through them, but it’s never a case of trying to achieve “Flag Zero” - there will always be flagged items there, and accepting that means I’m never overwhelmed or stressed by it.

If I need to find something, full text search across every single email has never let me down, and it’s always super fast (in Mail, or in Gmail).

Ultimately this works if you accept you’ll never achieve inbox zero, and aren’t interested in the administrative overhead that comes into filing messages, this works well.

Finally, because of this - I don’t understand why so many people and companies are trying to fix the “email problem”, since email is only really a problem for the <1% of people who receive hideous amounts of email.

Email works fine if you just accept what it is: mainly messages between a person to person. If you use email to handle support requests, blog submissions, and so on, there are much better workflows you can use to help. Email won’t help you here.

I’m not a Reddit reader, but I loved this gem in answer to a question “What are the small lifestyle changes you’ve made that have had big impacts for you?”:

I make sure to start every day as a producer, not a consumer.

When you get up, you may start with a good routine like showering and eating, but as soon as you find yourself with some free time you probably get that urge to check Reddit, open that game you were playing, see what you’re missing on Facebook, etc.

Put all of this off until “later”. Start your first free moments of the day with thoughts of what you really want to do; those long-term things you’re working on, or even the basic stuff you need to do today, like cooking, getting ready for exercise, etc.

This keeps you from falling into the needy consumer mindset. That mindset where you find yourself endlessly surfing Reddit, Facebook, etc. trying to fill a void in yourself, trying to find out what you’re missing, but never feeling satisfied.

When you’ve started your day with doing awesome (not necessarily difficult) things for yourself, these distractions start to feel like a waste of time. You check Facebook just to make sure you’re not missing anything important directed at you, but scrolling down and reading random stuff in your feed feels like stepping out into the Disneyland parking lot to listen to what’s playing on the car radio - a complete waste of time compared to what you’re really doing today.

It sounds subtle, but these are the only days where I find myself getting anything done. I either start my day like this and feel normal and productive, or I look up and realize it’s early evening, I haven’t accomplished anything and I can’t bring myself to focus no matter how hard I want to.

A recent flurry of tweets spoke to something that really frustrates the dickens out of me: people who are self-employed or who run their own firms, publicly complaining about one or more of the following things:

• Having too many emails in their inbox, saddened at how they can’t possibly reach “inbox zero” today.
• Just how late it is on a Sunday and how much they still have to do, asking rhetorical questions as to why nobody else is working late on a weekend.
• How clients are taking up way too much of their time.

I don’t want to contradict what I said in my previous post about only following/connecting with people you feel don’t whinge, but it’s disappointing that often the same people who complain about work also share superb content and start great conversations.

It comes down to this: if you have decided to work for yourself, it was your choice. And you should be thankful you’re in a very privileged position to create your own destiny and write your own story. You don’t need to shout about the hardships – or indeed the privilege – of working for yourself: this should all be communicated implicitly in the work you deliver. It’s a given that late nights and working during the weekend comes with the territory.

I remember earlier this year when Rik Lomas and Lawrence Brown laughed at how many things I had in my dock (really?!).

They were using an app called Alfred that apparently negated having an endless row of icons stuck in one’s dock, by simply typing the first few letters of the app – or in fact anything you needed – in a modal box accessed by pressing Alt + Space.

A few weeks of slight awkwardness an inconvenience later, I couldn’t use my Mac without it.

A good tip to start using the app is to delete every non-core application from your dock beforehand, and then you’re forced to use it.