philgo

June 15, 2011

Do the thing that sucks early in the morning!

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.

May 26, 2011

Start Your Day by Delegating Work

This is part two of the so-obvious-productivity advice serie sponsored by an anonymous procrastinator. Part1 is here.

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.

May 17, 2011

Cross something off your list every day

This is going to sounds like the most obvious advice ever, but it’s not. And you might think it comes from a master of procrastination, and it kinda does.

When you find yourself working on a difficult task for an extended period of time with none or little progress, your morale take a hit.

One of the reason why is you don’t have any feeling of accomplishment, fulfillment or utility.

But all it takes is one significant task completed per day and things change a bit. You simply feel better.

What makes this much more difficult than it sounds, is that you are sure you are doing the most important thing you can be doing at that moment. Anything that would divert you from completing the ‘big-long-and-might-one-day-be-completed’ task is seen as a destructive distraction. And it’s true, except for that one task that will make you feel better today.

For me today it’s probably writing this post as my main task will need another half-day of work.

Have you cross something off your list today ?

May 6, 2011

What ?? 5 months and you haven’t launched yet ? Lean startups are profitable after 10 minutes. Geee.

Here’s how I feel about starting up a techno company with a so-called innovative idea after 5 months. The tone is a bit different than after the first month.

You are stressed all the time.
You get pity look once a week. Would happen more often if you’d leave the office more.
You feel pressured to launch asap for no good reasons. ‘lean blah blah blah’ ‘profitable in 2 hours blah blah lean puppy diarrhea’
You forget to shower daily.
You start blaming your superstar developer for features that do no even exist on hosting plans you don’t need.
You haven’t watched the Habs loosing the series.
Your girlfriend still has no clue what you’re doing and where you were at 1AM on a Thursday nite.
You miss all the good days to go cycling. When you look outside, it’s raining. Spring in Montreal is great.
The TODO list never gets shorter. It creates its own verticals.
Hiring is ridiculously long and hard. And sometimes a Big Apple defeats you
You start thinking that your friends in the online porn business have it way too easy.
Just when you’re about to go live, some smart-ass tells you that without the proper marketing plan it are already too late.

So you better pick an idea that is fun to code so at least you can enjoy some solitary pleasures.

If you smiled once reading this, consider signing up for our private beta here.

If you smiled twice, consider sharing matchFWD on Twitter or Facebook.

Cheers,

April 23, 2011

Do you trust the 200+ apps with access to your Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn accounts ?

Have you recently the check the list of apps with access to your Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook account ?

Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn are now the most common authentication methods used to access apps and products online, without having to fill up yet another profile.

The thing is, if you are like me, you sign up to try quite a few services and products every week/month, many of them from developers you don’t know much about.

A quick scan of my Twitter settings (Settings->Connections) shows over 130 apps have access to my Twitter account, the vast majority with Read&Write access meaning they can push to my feed at any given time without me being notified about it. And that’s Twitter only. I suspect the number goes way over 200+ if I add Facebook and LinkedIn.

I am not utterly paranoid but what is a bit frightening is the low level of control and information I have about what these apps do.

When was the last time they connected to my account to read my info ?
When was the last time they connected to my account to write ?

I rarely go back in my feed to check it so how would I know if some malicious app had pushed a message in my feed ?

I think it’d be nice for the service providers (Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn) to do a bit of monitoring for their users so we can rapidly know if something weird of unexpected happened or if some app behave suspiciously. Like a mini-dashboard.

Or it might be a simple product idea for a startup.

The rise of these authentication services will probably continue has we like the convenience of using them to authentify ourselves to new services. I think it would make sense to expect some control over it.

What do you think ? Am I the only one looking for a bit more control there ?

April 14, 2011

The people you want to work with

I just read a post about important traits for entrepreneur that made me think of what I like in the people I prefer to work with. 1 of the 2 traits Elad listed was a “raw capacity to learn”.

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

March 5, 2011

my dancin’ Northern Soul

me like that music …. Northern Soul et un URL génial pour en écouter : Northern Soul

Northern soul is a music and dance movement that emerged from the British mod scene, initially in northern England in the late 1960s. Northern soul mainly consists of a particular style of black American soul music based on the heavy beat and fast tempo of the mid-1960s Tamla Motown sound. The northern soul movement, however, generally eschews Motown or Motown-influenced music that has met with significant mainstream success. The recordings most prized by enthusiasts of the genre are usually by lesser-known artists, and were initially released only in limited numbers, often by small regional United States labels such as Ric-Tic and Golden World (Detroit), Mirwood (Los Angeles) and Shout and Okeh (New York/Chicago).

Northern soul is also associated with particular dance styles and fashions that grew out of the underground rhythm & soul scene of the late 1960s, at venues such as the Twisted Wheel in Manchester. This scene (and the associated dances and fashions) quickly spread to other UK dancehalls and nightclubs like the Catacombs (Wolverhampton), the Highland Rooms at Blackpool Mecca, Golden Torch(Stoke-on-Trent), and Wigan Casino. As the favoured beat became more uptempo and frantic, by the early 1970s, northern soul dancing became more athletic, somewhat resembling the later dance styles of disco and break dancing. Featuring spins, flips, karate kicks and backdrops, club dancing styles were often inspired by the stage performances of touring American soul acts such as Little Anthony & The Imperials and Jackie Wilson.

During the Northern soul scene’s initial years in the late 1960s and early 1970s, popular Northern Soul records were usually not recent releases, and generally dated from the mid-1960s. This meant that the movement was sustained (and “new” recordings added to playlists) by prominent DJs discovering rare and previously overlooked records. Later on, certain clubs and DJs began to move away from the 1960s Motown sound and began to play newer releases with a more contemporary sound.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northern_soul

Great Northern Soul Clubs (musicouch.com)
Northern Soul Floor-fillers (musicouch.com)

February 13, 2011

What’s going on ?

Working (a bit/lot) on our social recruiting startup : matchFWD.

Here’s some news about it.

February 7, 2011

Vacation : A better policy is no policy

I’ve always had some problems with vacation policy as they rarely reward hard work. Found out about an interesting Vacation No-Policy going around at NetFlix, GroupOn, Flixster, and Rapleaf.

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.

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

February 2, 2011

Python Ternary Operator : The Final Post-It

I come from c/c++ and I like my ternary operator. Simply great for short and simple condition-assignment.

Since i’ve started using python (about 18 months), I have problems remembering the proper way to do this (ADD anyone ?), simply because Guido went for a “great to read” but “impossible to think” way of expressing it.

So here’s for me and others to remember (I’ve also put it on a huge post-it above my desk) :

c version is –> conditionalExpression ? valueIfTrue :valueifFalse;

python version is –> valueIfTrue if conditionalExpression else valueifFalse

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

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