Do Successful People Need Sleep? – Speakeasy – WSJ.

Getting in the zone seems increasingly difficult if you work in front of a computer. Between your email client, your mobile phone, your co-workers, Twitter/Facebook/Google+ and the gazillion browser tabs you have no open, no wonder you’re struggling to stay away from watching videos like this:

I am struggling too. But right now I need to be 1000% more productive than usual as we’re in the final stretch toward a our social recruiting product launch at matchFWD.

Yet I know a couple things that just work:

• Come in early, stay late or phase out your lunch: Less people in the office, less distraction.
• Leave your mobile in your coat. On vibration: Your girlfriend, your mom and your friends might hate it, but you just cut yourself of one major distraction. And your bill might even shrink. Not really.
• Use 2 computers: one for work, one for communications and social network. You focus on one part of your work at a time. Don’t have access to a second computer? Use Spaces on Mac.
• Ban time-wasting sites: I user Chrome Nanny to ban myself from Facebook, Youtube and a list of blogs during core hours.
• Put your headphones on: Even without music, people will think twice before interrupting you.
• Read only one TODO list at a time: I keep a list on my desk, on my phone, in my notebook, in my bug tracker, I share one with my designer. Yet when I am looking for the next thing to do, I look at one list first and finish it before moving to another one.
• Have everything handy: I start the day with a coffee cup, a bottle of water, a full place of fruits, enough paper and everything else I’ll need to complete the day.
• Stop reading blogs about productivity. Seriously.

What’s your trick?

Related articles

• 8 Strategies to Get Your Business in a Distraction Free Zone (freelanceswitch.com)

I recently hired a promising school dropout. He goes by the nomulous moniker on the web and as Fletcher Tomalty everywhere else. Some late night browsing on GitHub made me a very lucky manager as he’s so far the best hire of my 1st decade in technology. Too bad, he’s not drinking yet

Last week, his 4th with us, he told me I was wrong using the word “ratio” to qualify some metric for the social recruiting product we’re building at matchFWD. I first resisted as he couldn’t come up with a proper alternative and because I was pretty sure it was a ratio. Turns out he was right as a ratio is

an expression of the quantity of one substance or entity in relation to that of another; the relationship between two quantities expressed as the quotient of one divided by the other.

and it differs from a proportion

in that the numerator is not included in the denominator. Thus x/(x + y) is a proportion, x:y is a ratio.

Read more: http://www.answers.com/topic/ratio#ixzz1fAYUo8sv

I think using the right words is incredibly important when programming as well-written and well-labeled code is, in my opinion, the best type of documentation (yet often not sufficient).

But the real thing is: I got schooled by my new hire!

And I think it’s great!

You need to encourage your team to speak up on issues they’ve identified and encourage them to come up with a better solution.

That’s not sufficient though. You also need to fix the issue. And I am faulty, I haven’t yet fixed all the variable names. But you know what? That’s the first thing I do tomorrow morning. Why? It’s clearly not a top priority, the misusage of “ratio” is invisible to users and nothing is broken. It doesn’t matter.

If you want your people to keep coming up with suggestions of improvement, take action when they do or you might just repress one of your best source of continuous improvements.

I am not saying you need to fix every little bits and pieces that one guy thinks are not perfect or you’ll never launch your product or release the new version. They should know better anyway right? Use your judgement but make sure everyone as a voice and that their voice as meaning.

And that’s how you start building a team.

If you’re part of a team or looking for a new opportunity, make sure your boss can handle being schooled by his team.

Related articles

• Scaling GitHub’s Employees (zachholman.com)
• How GitHub Works: Creativity is Important (zachholman.com)
• Knyle style recruiting (warpspire.com)

If you’re a co-founder,  CEO or simply the boss of the company, everything that sucks about it or that fails is your fault.

Don’t even think of blaming the new guy, the young guy or the guy who left for a week in the Bahamas.

If one does not know what to do, is not qualified or hasn’t documented how to re-configure the message queue system, it’s because you weren’t there to make sure things were OK.

So next time you’re about to send an email to blame someone, forward it to yourself.

I always find myself figuring the best route to complete all tasks.

What do I want?

An app to …

• Alert me when I am close to a business related to an item on my TODO (integration with YellowPages API?).
• Integration with Google Maps so when I plan a route (by car, bike or transit), it chooses not the shortest path but the better usage of my commute and my trips to scratch off items from my TODO list.

NOTE: found that old (2007) post about something like that, but with antiquated technology and UX. Give me an iPhone/Android app.

First thing you do is delegating work right? So what’s next?

There’s always something you have to do in a day that truly sucks. One item on your TODO list you are avoiding over and over again.

You usually get to it somewhere in the afternoon. By that time, you convince yourself you’ll do it tomorrow, that now is not a good time because you’re getting tired and you’ve worked hard all day. And you’re right.

For some people it’s going to the gym, for me it usually involves accounting. We all have at least one recurring task we always push back to tomorrow.

And you will repeat the same pattern tomorrow and the day after… and again.

Do it right away. Don’t think about it. Do it now. Not second, not third, do it first. The rest of the day will feel like a sinecure.

If the task is sending an email, you ought yourself to read this post by Julien Smith.

No secret here, delegating work is surely the best way to increase a team or single person productivity. While you work, others work for you to and by the end of the day, more work has been done than a single person could have achieved by himself/herself.

But delegating work often means picking up the phone to call someone, sending email or meeting up with a freelancer or service provider. And we tend to see these activities as less important than our main work, whether it’s writing code, building a new kitchen or cold calling 50 new clients. So the communication necessary to delegate work is pushed back further and further into the day, and often to the next day. And that’s where we lose.

Delegate work first thing in the morning and it will get done sooner.

I know crazy idea. And that means sending a few emails to start the day or picking up the phone and you have no time to do that because you have to fix another damn bug or put up a new wall. But do it anyway. Now.

I did send 2 emails to delegate work before writing this. Do it.

They learn from every event. It’s magic.

They turn everything that happens to them into an opportunity to learn something. Doesn’t matter if it’s good or bad, they simply make the most of it. They not only see the glass half-full, they seem to take joy in learning something new, even when things get rough.

It creates some sort of resilience and the drive to go through just about anything as they know they can turn anything on its head. Meeting these people and learning from them is a life quest.

Do you know what kind of people you want to work with ?

PS : I might have found a great person to join us at the core of our social recruiting startup. #fingerscrossed

One of the things a fast growing company can do is constantly look to eliminate unnecessary policies and bureaucracy.   One place to look is your vacation policy:  having your employees track their vacation is demeaning and creates a lot of unnecessary bureaucracy.

Companies like NetFlix, GroupOn, Flixster, and Rapleaf have adopted a new no-policy policy.  It is simple: take as much vacation as you want as long as it is approved by your manager.  Yes, that means that employees will likely take a few more days than the standard two weeks allotted to them.  But those extra days are great benefits to your employees (and rewards for working so hard).  And in this no-policy policy, vacation does not need to be tracked by HR or on payroll — so you save a lot of time and limit internal bureaucracy.  You trust your employees and their manager to do what’s best for the company.

From Auren Hoffman blog, CEO of Rapleaf.

Related articles

• Flexible vacation policies are here to stay (money.cnn.com)

Keep it moving

When you launch a project that aims at disturbing a market, there’s probably an infinite number of things to do to get there and only limited time and resources. Don’t waste time debating. If you are unable to settle a point under 20 minutes, pick a side and move on. You might be right or wrong, but by the time it will make a real difference, chances are good that you’ll have figured out the right answer. And nothing was paralyzed by unproved arguments.

It’s not a sprint. Yet

You’ve read it and heard it before on a few 1000s blogs, but it’s so easy to get crazy right at the start. You like the idea so much, you feel the pressure of tens of startup looking in the same direction and you want to launch asap to get some feedback, so you start working crazy hours. Don’t. Not yet.

If you get to the launch with your tongue hanging out of your mouth, the day a real spike of traffic hit your servers and things start cracking (cause they will), I assume you better be well rested so you can stay up all night a few times fixing unexpected production bug your full-fledged QA team (lol) hadn’t found. It’s not yet about to happen to us but at least we won’t be mentally and physically exhausted the day we get there.

Our lead developer and his little family are probably helping me keeping it real on that end. Thanks Julien.

Stop reading startup blogs

The day you started your project, you probably already had read your share of “Ten Startup Lessons Learned” and other blog posts like the one you are reading now. Cut it out. You don’t need more lessons, you don’t need more advice, you’ll figure it out. If you are anywhere like me, the time you’ll save there might make a tremendous difference over a full week. And if you fail, it probably won’t be because of an unread blog post.
Same goes for business books. (I didn’t read the post …

Don’t over-monitor your competitors

You have an angle, it’s different. Looking at what your competitors do inevitably lead you to consider adding some of their features into your product. Of course, you’re too focused and smart to do it, but they’re smart too and they do have good ideas, so the temptation is there.

It’s obviously important to map your competition when you start, maybe start a little keyword and brand monitoring plan, but don’t look at it more than once a week. You do need to stay focus and that can’t be good when you feel you also need their new shiny feature.

Keep it fun

It’s too easy to start stressing about how important is it for you to succeed, how fast you need to go, all the things that need to be done, and all the tests that are not yet implemented, and your marketing strategy that’s still undefined, so how can it be fun ? Well it needs to be. It’s a simple question of survival. if you don’t have fun doing it, don’t. People around you will feel it, they’ll start to drag their feet to work and you’ll be on the death march before you even launch.

The lesson I am now trying to learn is to get to bed earlier. But I am not quite there yet.

I also have no idea if I can keep up with writing on this blog, but for now it feels like a nice place to dump my brain.