Upstart

There is one school of thought that any activity that is not taking you closer to your goals is a waste of time. To a certain extent I agree, but I also understand that their are many activities that may appear to be a waste of time on the surface that are in fact helping you achieve your goals indirectly.

One such activity for me is reading fiction. You may be asking how as a software developer and entrepreneur my outputs can be increased by reading stories that are completely unrelated to my work? The answer is simple, reading is my disconnect, reading is my off switch.

We’ve all been there, it’s late at night, and after hours of work you’ve gone into that goggle eyed state of monitor hypoxia, you’ve been going around in circles for an hour before convincing yourself it’s time for bed (a decision a properly functioning mind would have made hours earlier). It’s 2am and your know you’ll be awaken an 7.30. A wealth of experience in burning the candle at both ends tells you that any less than five hours sleep means tomorrow is going to be a struggle. Yet despite exhaustion, you lay in bed struggling to keep your eyes closed, whilst your mind is still frantically turning over the days work in preparation for tomorrows assault.

Enter the disconnect. A disconnect is anything that can quickly snap your mind out of work mode and allow it to wind down in a controlled fashion, reading fiction is the perfect disconnect.
Reading a book is one of the few things in this world that requires your full attention and can’t be multi-tasked with other activities. Reading fiction with it’s imagery, emotion and make believe immediately starts utilising the areas of your mind that have been idling during your over extended hackathon while the parts that were red lining are given a timeout. Disconnects are vitally important in maintaining sustainable productivity and avoiding burnout.

I don’t just read fiction before bed, anytime I feel myself reaching the point of mental exhaustion, I walk away from the computer, find a quiet space and begin reading until it’s passed. There are many other forms of disconnects from brisk walks to meditation, but reading is the one that I personally find most effective.

Since the realisation that reading stories is not a luxury that eats into my productive time, but is a disconnect that indirectly increases it, I have started reading A LOT, I now get through two or three books a week! My Kindle is now my number one productivity toy and it goes with me everywhere, always preloaded with two yet to be read books. I must now be one of Amazon’s top customers!

If you want to get the most out each and every day it’s vitally important that you discover your own disconnect and begin using it as an important tool in your personal productivity arsenal.

I just downloaded and skimmed through the “The Noob Guide to Online Marketing” from unbounce.com. This is an excellent guide to marketing your startup and makes for a fantastic compliment to all your other marketing books, guides, mentors, gurus, wise ones etc!

While the infographic Unbounce have made is great and really helps to to see a path to marketing glory it, of course, lacks interactivity. Here at Upstart we are really into this kind of stuff and thought let’s make this interactive!

Usually, for most of us, the quickest way to make something like this interactive and collaborative is to create a new Google Doc spreadsheet which is exactly what we have done. Here is a screen capture:

Noob Marketing Guide Checklist

Another thing that we like to do at Upstart is learn from this process as much as we can and build this into our software, so that we can offer it to you, our users! Essentially we are here to help Startups and an interactive marketing checklist like this is a God send! As the weeks go past, your startup team can get notifications about which marketing efforts need to be carried out that week. This can include ongoing efforts like “write that damn blog post” to “ok it’s time to setup A / B testing” to “style that Twitter page!”.

The other benefit by making this interactive is that we can update this guide anytime as the playing field changes, which as we all know, changes quite frequently. I expect that we would allow any user to contribute ideas to this marketing checklist and maybe have a voting system to see which ones we will actually include. As new items are added to the check list we can probably let each user decide if they want to include that in their marketing efforts or not.

I have no doubt that we will find this exceedingly useful for us at Upstart and, no doubt, we hope that you will too when we launch this as a feature!

I’ve now come to the conclusion that generally speaking Kanban isn’t a good fit for software SME’s. The reason I say this is that most SME’s can’t afford to have a dedicated product owner. I don’t include startup’s in this statement as here the lead developer, product owner and CEO are one and the same.

Most Kanban teams I know haven’t come form Waterfall or chaos, they’ve arrived form Scrum or XP, both of which use time based iterations or ‘sprints’. Sprints mean that most product owners will be very busy on Monday morning during sprint planning and Friday afternoon for demo, of course they still need to be around to answer questions as and when they arise, but this is usually far from a full time job and usually isn’t hugely disruptive. This leaves the multi-faceted product owner to focus on other tasks that are vital to a software SME, such as marketing, customer support or whatever today’s pressing issue is in a never ending sea of pressing issues.

The bottom line is that in most SME’s the product owners responsibilities are much broader than simply gathering requirements, feeding user stories to the team and then later signing them off.

The core of Kanban is simple, visualise the work flow, limit WIP and reduce cycle time. Ultimately if you follow these rules it always leads to the same place; very small stories or minimum marketable features that are often completed in hours rather than days and column limits that allow very little wiggle room. These things are great, don’t get me wrong, this is exactly the desired result, stories flying across the board and into production, no bottlenecks where stories are left to fester, teams who are very clear about the task in hand, great. Kanban is the last word in team agility, no question!

The only drawback is that now the product owner has to be constantly on top of the board to maintain flow. The product owner is involved in crafting new stories and signing off existing ones several times per day, although this is not a huge drain in terms time, it’s definitely disruptive and negatively impacts their ability to focus on other none team related tasks which are part of their daily workload.

If someone was to ask me the biggest difference between Kanban and iterative agile methodologies I would say that they both involve exactly the same actions, with exactly the same desired outcomes, except Kanban is dynamic and any action can occur at anytime where as iterative agile techniques group those actions by type and complete each group at a fixed prearranged time.

The question for you as an SME is whether or not you can afford to have a product owner responding full time to Kanban’s demands or you are willing to sacrifice some agility in order to free up your product owner to work on other responsibilities uninterrupted, because they can’t do both.

Today I’m going unveil my own personal agile technique which I use to increase my overall productivity, the technique is still a work in progress so this article will cover it in its current form.

The technique can be used in isolation or can be used in conjunction with macro team level agile methodologies such as XP, Scrum or Kanban and micro level personal productivity techniques like The Pomodoro Technique.

The aim of the technique is to suppress what I believe to the be the four enemies of personal productivity:

• Multitasking
• Working without a clear objective
• Burnout through not knowing when to stop
• Inventing things to do to avoid the important

To fully embrace the Daily Mission Technique you need to fundamentally change the way you think about work. You need to stop focusing on time and start focusing on outputs. Instead of approaching a work day by deciding try and do as many tasks as possible in a fixed period of time you need to start trying to do a fixed number of tasks in as little time as possible. The change sounds slight, but the effects can be dramatic.

When using the Daily Mission Technique time becomes the carrot on the stick, it’s the reward you are given upon completion of your objectives. Using the traditional method of working against a fixed period of time removes the incentive, when we complete a task more quickly and efficiently our only reward is another task, whilst with the Daily Mission Technique we are credited with free time which we can spend as we see fit, guilt free.

I developed the technique during the six months which has been an extremely hectic period of my life, I’m involved in three separate startups, one social enterprise and am supervising the construction of my new house. This period has personified a pattern that has plagued me for years, massive bursts of productivity followed by equally massive lulls of inactivity.
The pattern always played out in the same way, some event would capture my imagination and I would work every hour available until I burned out, then I would hit a lull that I struggle to climb out of until some new event captures my imagination and the cycle repeats itself.

I also noticed another pattern, it seemed that increased workload actually decreased my outputs and increased the height and depth of these peaks and troughs. I’m sure this is due to increased procrastination, added temptation to multitask and continually working to the point of fatigue.

The Daily Mission Technique has helped me to break the cycle and transform the peaks and troughs into a much flatter line with continued consistency.

The technique is broken into five simple parts outlined below.

1) Mission Planning

Planning for the Daily Mission is as simple as defining the primary and secondary objective. Planning should not be completed on the same day as the mission and not before the previous mission has concluded. This leaves a window between the completion of the current mission and the end of the day prior to the next mission to set your next primary and secondary objectives.

The reason for this is clarity and discipline, it’s often at the end of the current workday that you can be most sure of what the next most important objectives are, also a significant time gap between planning and beginning the mission reduces the temptation to choose objectives which you want to complete rather than the ones you need to complete.

2) Primary Objective

It’s name is self explanatory, this is the all important objective of the day, the objective that you must do everything in your power to complete; no excuses. To finish the day without having completed your primary objective is a failure and a wasted day. Whilst to complete your primary objective is a success and whatever else happens, whatever distractions may arise to prevent you getting anything else done, you can go to bed on this day guilt free, comforted by the fact that today you took another step in the right direction.

3) Secondary Objective

The secondary objective which cannot begin until the primary objective is complete and is the difference between good enough and exceptional, the difference between guilt free and true satisfaction. Think of the secondary objective as a bonus prize, the extra push that when delivered consistently can turbo charge your progress. A day where you complete your secondary objective is not merely guilt free day, it’s an achievement. Something to be celebrated, something to strive towards each and every working day. These are the days that make the difference between success and failure in the realisation of your dreams.

4) Analytics

Progress tracking is a vital part of the Daily Mission Technique, it’s important to be aware of your track record so you can easily spot negative trends and periods of inactivity. The Daily Mission Technique uses a daily percentage score with 100% being a perfect day and 0% being a complete failure. The numbers are also aggregated into weekly, monthly and all time scores so that you can observe trends on a larger scale.

The 100% score is made up of five requirements each worth an equal 20%, as follows:

• Prior Mission Planning (20%)
• Starting Primary Objective (20%)
• Completing Primary Objective (20%)
• Starting Secondary Objective (20%)
• Completing Secondary Objective (20%)

You may question why starting and completing an objective hold equal weight? The answer is simple, in my experience the most challenging part of a task is often mustering the motivation to begin, especially when the task isn’t particularly interesting. This is the point where lulls of inactivity usually begin and the scoring system reflects that.

5) Retrospective

The retrospective is your chance to evaluate the days mission. If you didn’t reach 100% this is your chance to establish the reason why. Was it due to underestimation, fatigue or other distractions? Once you have identified the problem you should then think about how you can prevent this from reoccurring tomorrow. For example in the case of fatigue we could try decreasing the size of the objectives, going to bed earlier, not going to the pub tonight, completing only the primary objective for a few days or taking a day off. The purpose of the Daily Mission Technique is to creating and maintaining a manageable momentum, rather than trying to cram the most we possibly can into every waking minute followed by the inevitable burnout. A rolling stone gathers no moss.

Summary

Once you start using the Daily Mission Technique you will soon realise that the number of hours you work decrease while your outputs and the value of those outputs increase as you trim the fat by replacing general activity with focused productivity.

FAQ

Where does Daily Mission fit with other agile methodologies?

I use the technique primarily in conjunction with Kanban. Stories or minimum marketable features almost always require more than half a days worth of input. I break these stories into smaller parts and use those parts for my objectives. That same can be done for XP or Scrum.

Where does Daily Mission fit with other personal time management techniques?

I often use it in conjunction with the Pomodoro Technique, I simply estimate and break the objective into 25 minute pomodoros and continue as normal. The Daily Mission sits nicely between a macro level methodology like Kanban and micro level time management technique like Pomodoro.