For me, anything new starts with a brainstorm.  Almost everything I’ve ever written started as a brainstormed list and was later constructed into a complete thought.  As much as I’ve mentioned enjoying this in the past, in a way, I envy those people that can turn a blank page directly into to something well crafted and polished.  It certainly saves a few steps.

In college, my freshman year writing teacher once told me I was one of the most step-by-step writers she’d ever read.  I could apparently write (surprise to me), I wasn’t lacking things to say (less of a surprise), but I was just really, really sequential she told me.  (This woman had the dark, artsy grad student thing down pat.  I’m sure she didn’t know what to make of my engineering ass.)  My creativity simply comes at a different part in the process — the brainstorm’s where the fun is.  It’s putting together the puzzle from that brainstorm that’s logical sequential.

Anyways, here it is.  We’ll see how I put it all together.

Community

• Sustainability in your Community
• Eyeballs to Fingertips Ratio

Build systems, not products.

Feedback – get it every where you can

• Emails
• Webinar
• Power Users
• Coworkers

Revenue

• You need more
• Who has the pockets
• Traditional vs. Non Traditional

Operations

• Always getting better
• Document!
• Know when to fudge it.

Wikinvest – Working for a startup, analyzing conglomerates.

Changing Landscape

• Falling (failing) newspapers.
• Large institutions are out.  Little is in.
• Paying platforms – Mahalo, Facebook, iPhone
• Manager your own money

ADRE and QQQQ

Ownership

• Company Options
• Personal Investing

What’s Failure?  What’s success?

Your Network

• Casually
• Personally
• Network-ily

If you haven’t figured it out by now, I’m obsessed with finding ways to work faster and smarter.  I’ve talked about designing and brainstorming faster with my whiteboard and Balsamiq’s mock up tool.  I spent over 600 words describing how I organize my email inbox, and I can’t wait for Ativiti to launch so I can share even more ideas about process.

Given all that, it’s no wonder I enjoy working for a startup.  From my experience, it’s the ultimate test in your ability to get a lot done in very little time.  There are always a million things you have to do.  There’s absolutely no way you can accomplish everything.  How do you figure out what gets done and what doesn’t?  When no one is telling you what to do, what’s the most important thing you should be doing?

From my experience with this and previous jobs, there’s the things you have to get done, no matter what, and then there’s everything else.

Things that have to get done, no matter what.

In most normal jobs, “the things that have to get done, no matter what” take up most of your time.  In a startup, though, these things are the least of your worries.  At a startup, the things that have to get done, no matter what, are the things that you’ve figured out already.  You know your payroll process.  You know your QA process.  Make them as fast as possible.  Make them take up 10% of your time.  You have to spend the rest of your days figuring out your new marketing strategy, the next product launch, the bug fix, and …

Everything else.

If 90% of your time is spent on everything else, what does that time look like?  How do you figure out the next most important thing for you to work on?  Your work has to constantly move a process forward, a contract forward, a task forward, the company forward.

Are you creating something new?

Working at a startup means you have the potential to create something new just about every day.  You can’t actually create something every day, but that’s the potential.  It takes a lot of prep work to create something new, especially to do so correctly.  Creating requires a process — brainstorm, refine, plan, build, refine — and with each step you’ll have to ask yourself the same question, what’s the most important thing I should be doing?

Are you doing something that will bring attention to your organization?

No news is bad news for a startup.  Find a way to get people talking about you.  There’s many ways to bring attention to your organization — create something new, improve your page rank, generate buzz on the blogosphere.  If you’re doing this, you’re always doing something important.

Are you creating something that’s lasting and replicable?

You’re creating something new.  We’ve established that.  You’re also creating something that may have to last.  You need to assess whether what you’re creating is a one-time activity or not.  Pulling a report is never a one-time activity.  Writing a feedback email isn’t either.  Obviously, this has to be balanced with a startup’s short-term need for speed and agility, but a little planning up front helps ensure longer term success.

Are you improving an existing process?

You’re taking a process from the person who first created it.  The problem is, you’re not someone who just takes a process as-is.  You want to question and improve it.  With enough people thinking like this you can quickly go from a guy writing a payroll check to an electronic, efficient direct deposit payroll system.  Be sure the time spent fixing your process justifies the effort, though.  If it takes several hours to reduce a back office process from three clicks to two, it might not be worth undertaking right now.  It might still be worth fixing, but not until a million other things are taken care of.

Are you developing something you can pass to another team?

You not only have to create things that can be passed to your own internal teams, you may need to make your work presentable to another team in your company or another company altogether.   You can’t simply give the administrative assistant a payroll task without re-explaining your process, highlighting any exceptions.  Your specification has to be written unambiguously in order for development to pick up where you leave off. What’s acceptable for internal team distribution often requires a new draft entirely for other teams.  Factor this extra effort into your planning.

Are you learning something new, something that you can re-use?

You know what you’re doing right now.  But do you know what you’re doing a year from now?  You should have an idea.  What will you need to know then that you don’t know now?  A few pilot programs now will make it easier for you to answer that question later.

Are you fixing something that’s broken?

Fixing something that’s broken helps make sure you’re not wasting time on things that don’t fit these criteria.  Remember what I said above, though, the effort mustn’t exceed the reward.

Finally, in this economy, there’s the most obvious question you should be asking yourself whenever you prioritize your work –

Is this going to make us any money?

Forget everything else.  If all else fails, focus on generating revenue.  In this economy, there’s nothing more important that you could be doing right now.

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I’m obsessed with process.  It’s impossible for me to work without thinking about how to turn 10 steps into 3, without figuring out how to do things faster, simpler.

Recently, I found something that made my process-obsessed self feel well documented, reproducible, and, well, whole.  Recently, I discovered Tasks for Gmail.  Tasks is an amazing but simple little feature you can find by digging into the Labs portion of your Gmail account.  It allows you to easily add a task, schedule it, and check it off with a fulfilling strike-through.  It rests in the bottom right portion of your Gmail window, and when you’re not using it, you can simply keep it minimized.  Tasks are also what finally brought my work stream full circle, and, Tasks have almost single-handedly rid me of my paper “habit”.

Before Tasks, I wrote all of my major To-Dos for the day in my notebook.  Each day, I would start from the top and work down the notebook completing tasks.  In the course of this, I would scratch things out, write notes in the margins, and generally make a mess out of each and every page.  Each night, I would list out what I hadn’t accomplished and include any additional tasks for the next day, prioritizing as I went.  The problem is, it was just a little too messy.  I was never a huge fan of the hand offs between my paper process and my email / work stream management.  I was wasting paper and ink with pages of scratched out, messy lists.

Along comes Tasks, and all of a sudden, I have a fully integrated process for managing both my micro tasks — email — and my macro tasks — things bigger than emails.  Check it out:

1. As emails come in, I have filters that organize and tag my emails based on either a work stream or specific project.
2. When I come in each morning, I review every piece of email until each ones has been read — I continue this throughout the day too by monitoring a FireFox tab with Gmail to see when it throws up a (1).
3. Emails that I can respond to immediately, I do.  If not, the item is starred and finds its way onto my task list.
4. Once the inbox is clear, I review my task list, add anything that’s missing, and prioritize.
5. Next, I work on tasks in my task list from top to bottom — stopping only to keep my inbox clear.
6. As I come to an item that is associated with a starred email, I address that email and remove the star.

Voila!  When my emails are done, my tasks are done.  When my tasks are done, my emails are done too.

There are all kinds of task management tools I could have chosen — just ask my friends at Ativiti about all of them.  What’s great about Tasks, though, is that I never had to think about it. It simply arrived and became a part of my day-to-day, all without requiring a single additional username and password, without another website to keep open, and, really, without much more functionality than a basic checklist.

It’s now a part of something bigger than itself.  It’s now a part of a process.

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