How do you focus / work?
So a lot of solopreneurs and entrepreneurs have a lot of stuff to do on any given day. We juggle marketing, HR, dev, and even design all the while trying to build a product as fast as possible.
Needless to say, it can get quite hectic!
How do you guys stay focused during the day? How do you guys deal with the constantly switching of hats? What keeps you productive long-term?
I personally never work from home (try to visit different cafes around the city), open up a loooong (4+ hours) music playlist on Youtube, and put my phone in the bag to minimize distractions. Tried using things like pomodoro timers and stuff to help but had a hard time getting into it.
Would love to hear how other people deal with work!
I just read the book Do Nothing: How To Break Away From Overworking, Overdoing, and Underliving [1]. Despite the title, it wasn't about actually doing nothing. It was about being intentional with your work time and your leisure time and scheduling both.
I have a tendency to overwork so for me it's been very important to place a conscious value on pure leisure time (where I'm not trying to better myself with a new business book or programming language) but am just enjoying myself.
I always have a ton of work to do but this leisure time has helped me to be more creative and recharged with my work. It helps me keep up stamina for the long run.
I also wrote this post a little while ago on keeping up a "can-do" attitude [2]. Was largely for myself :)
The key points were
Celebrate small wins is one of my favorite ones. My co-founder and I like to do "reveal parties" when we ship a new feature, where we play a pump-up song and then do a demo. It's easy to forget to celebrate and to just start on the next thing. Celebrating small wins has been essential to keeping up our momentum.
[1] https://celesteheadlee.com/do-nothing-book/
[2] https://medium.com/better-programming/cultivate-your-can-do-attitude-10864742d76d
Good stuff @cara
Key take away from your comment for me was celebrating the small wins.
I was just thinking the other day about how it's been a while since my co-founder and I have set down to think about all that we've accomplished so far. We're usually focused on the future and what we should be doing next which can be overwhelming and sometimes stressful.
Celebrating the small wins frequently seems like a fantastic idea. Like your way of doing it :) Going to grab a beer with my co-founder next week to find my way of doing it :D
PS. About the beer - we're in Korea where COVID has fortunately died down a lot!
Everyone is different so what I suggest is, when at the end of the day you feel you've had a very productive day, think about what made it different. Some things would be coincidences (like having fewer emails or random distractions) but others would be that you organized yourself that day in a specific way that works for you. I've done this a few times and discovered the routine that works for me:
I try to keep as much as accurate to this as I can. It's not possible 100% most of the days but the closer I get to that routine, the more productive I am 😉
Great insight!
I love how you include time to spend with your loved ones. An important aspect I sometimes find myself overlooking!
Best thing I found is having strict blocks for communication and deep focus.
Deep focus - mobile off, no running social apps, unavailable to everybody, only me and list of tasks, going one after another, smooth classical or medieval music :)
Communication - outsourcing, replying, making sure the rest of the team have what they need to proceed, mails, slack, asana, calls
Very effective separation.
PS. I'm available after 12. The morning is mine ;)
@tyherox what is causing biggest distraction in your case?
Very interesting! I like the separation of "my" time and "team" time.
My biggest distraction is just having things pop up in the middle of whatever I'm doing. Be it an important email, reply from twitter or IH, a SOS from one of my team-mates, but most often - a random passing thought I want to test out!
Designating strict blocks for whatever I need to do sounds like a great idea. I'm going to give this a go along with @karlhughes's feedback.
Nice :) Happy to know what will come after :) I use All-In-One-Messenger app where I have most of the communication apps - slack, Linkedin, meet, WhatsUp, messenger. Just checked that you have also twitter. Once it's closed, there's no pop-ups :) Same with mail.
Most of all @tyherox, respect yourself. You'll always be more productive, effective, concentrated when it's just you producing, doing, being focus on the goal and way to reach it (meaning getting the task done)
Good luck in everything!
Thanks @Jacula, wish you luck on your work as well :)
I schedule in my calendar what I need to do every day:
So I can always do the same and I follow the pomodoro technique using http://www.tomato.es/ . That’s mostly it! I don’t like doing complicated stuff.
Pomodoro is definitely cool, just couldn't get myself to commit :(
Another timer I advise checking out is https://pomofocus.io/. Really clean, nice interface!
But yea, scheduling is one of those things that tend to break down quickly once your projects hit the ground and start running. Especially if you have a small team.
I aim to get two 2-hour blocks of good, deep work in every day. I outlined my schedule in an interview recently:
The key for me is blocking off my calendar. During those two focus hours I have nothing else on my schedule, so there's no excuse not to get a ton done.
Noticing an interesting pattern amongst high level productivity people.
They "work" 4~6 hours max a day. Really different from the "hackathon" mindset I see so much from entrepreneurs and especially solopreneurs. Perhaps this is something people should pay more attention to!
I've noticed this too.
Knowledge work is draining, and my brain needs time to refresh every day. Plus, you need balance.
I think it's possible to do more work every day for a while, but it's not sustainable. This is why it's so hard to start a business only working nights and weekends. Eventually, you'll burn out and something has to give.
Indeed. Thanks for the insight Karl :)