Why do people start projects and don’t finish them? Why does something seem so much more fun when you first start doing it. Do we get that quickly jaded? Or is it just how humans are pre-programmed to operate?
Remember when you purchased your first car? You drove it around the block a couple times before you came home (I remember I almost got a speeding ticket on my first ride home). The point is that you were super excited about your newly acquired vehicle. The first weekend came around and you spend an entire morning washing it, vacuuming and waxing your new toy. A couple months went by and suddenly you lost interest. Washing the car became a chore, you no longer looked forward to driving it. You took the quickest route home, as the goal shifted from enjoying the ride to arriving at your final destination.
How did that happen? What changed so drastically that made you shift priorities? I don’t know exactly but I suspect it has to do with focusing on the outcome instead of the journey. Before you purchased the car, you spent a lot of time thinking about it, comparing prices, looking up reviews and pros & cons. All of these tasks kept you focused on the desired outcome. When the outcome was achieved, you quickly started losing focus and interest.
The same can be said for completing projects. You decide to refinish your kitchen table, you focus on the outcome: having a nicely re-stained table. You start building a new web application or a piece of desktop software, and your focus is on the final product. How nice it will be when your application is being used by 2,000 people. What you are gonna do with your time when you have hundreds of users purchasing your iPhone app for $2.99 a piece. There is great power in visualizing the outcome, as something to strive for but the focus should be on the journey. How are you going to start? How will you market it? When will you ship version one? Who will likely be your first customer? Focusing on the journey will hopefully keep you motivated the whole way.
Achieving small daily goals goes a long way towards renewing your energy. Starting is easy, because you focus on the end result. You tell your friends about a new idea, and it makes you feel like you have already started. You spend a ton of time selecting a name, and this part is fun, but in reality you are no closer than you were when you first began.
Next project you start, try to focus on the steps and daily goals necessary to achieve the outcome, instead of focusing on the end result.
It is easy to waste an entire day chatting online, IM, Email, you know the rest. Being succinct may allow you to get the point across more quickly and get on with your life. However people may mistake brevity for lack of interest and sometimes even confuse it with rudeness.
A typical online conversation tends to start off with a greeting followed by mutual exchange of small talk. Usually people ask you questions just because it is the norm, even thought they couldn’t care less about the answers. This is pointless and wastes time.
My days of over-productivity incentives are done. I am not advocating filling every second of your day with ultra-productive tasks, multi-tasking to the extreme to cross off hundreds of items from the almighty to-do list. I am talking about getting the small talk out of the way in order to allow focused time.
Why do we need the initial greeting? I can understand when you run into someone at the mall, you certainly don’t want to startle the person by walking up and them and completely skipping to the meat of the message without at least saying the usual ‘Hi’. But online is different. You are not going to be startle if the first message on a Skype window is: “Please resend the resume file”.
Why not just drop online chatting altogether? If you do, people will call more often, which is even more distracting. Not only that but people will email you asking you to get on IM. I find the combination of GTalk inside Gmail perfect, at intervals which I am checking email, I get to answer a few succinct chats online. On a schedule daily, I am on Skype for about two hours to iron out some work discussions. This has been working really well.