NAME
MySpeed

URL
http://www.enounce.com/myspeed

WHAT IT DOES
Speeds up (or slows down) the playback of online video watching.

MY TAKE
Watching online videos at normal speed is so 2010. Our brain input is much faster than our verbal output. With MySpeed I zip through videos 2x the speed. In fact, now when I go back and try and watch a video at normal speed, it feels sooo slow.

MySpeed works on both Mac and PC and almost every browser. Their most recent update allows it to now work on Mac Chrome as well, which was the last element I was waiting for before talking about it. Seriously, this super simple little tool has saved me amazing amounts of time.

SCREEN SHOT

Think about the last time you went out of town for a trip or vacation. When were you most efficient and effective with your time in terms of getting the mission critical stuff done leading up to the trip date? Three months ahead of time? One week ahead of time? The day of? Unless you’re Captain Planner, you’re like most people and the day of your trip was when you got the most amount of important work done in the shortest amount of time.

In business there are companies that do literally work their employees like dogs with physical back breaking work. But the “working like a dog” mentality that Amilya was taking about, and I agree with, is replicating the output efficiency and effectiveness of the 24 hours before your trip but at work…every day.

One of the greatest assets of an entrepreneur in the startup phase is his/her hunger. Hunger drives an entrepreneur to try a little bit harder, experiment a little bit more, and overall work a little bit longer. Hunger comes from a combination of excitement over a new project and the reality of zero cash in the bank. While hunger has its disadvantages such as speed over quality or lack of work life balance, there’s no denying the pound-for-pound outcome hunger produces.

As we come towards the end of another fiscal year for Red Rover it’s exciting to financially be in a nice spot (money in the bank, salaries, loan paybacks, great team of employees, and hiring for growth). After six years without stability, stability feels nice. But with stability comes a lack of hunger. I already feel it creeping in. It’s a very natural human thing to want to move from chaos to order, from uncertainty to certainty.

I sense a new challenge in my growth from here on out is going to be maintaining nice company growth with stability money in the bank, but while mentally keeping hungry like a startup fighting for each dollar and crafting a team that feels the same way.

I’ll expand more about this in the coming weeks, but I suspect keeping hungry is going to take a combination of accountability to someone who is willing to dig into me on a regular basis, hiring hungry people, goal setting done with our company principle of Boldness in mind, and continuously re-aligning with how much more work there is to do to reach our long term vision of a world in which every person achieves self-actualization and helps others to achieve theirs.

I left my weekly meeting with Kevin today on a frustrated note. I went into the meeting with an outline of what I wanted to cover, however after an hour we hadn’t covered anything on my list.

We started the meeting recapping our respective work weeks. I had a busy week working on a plethora of things including our branding/marketing strategy and customer care timeline. But in recaping my week to Kevin I told it in such a way that it seemed like I didn’t have clear outcomes and tangible results. Based on my retelling, Kevin reacted with frustration. For the next hour we didn’t really talk about any of the stuff I planned to, but rather focused on defended myself from the frustration he was feeling. 

Normally, to plan my week I look at our project management tool (Basecamp), our CRM (Highrise), our Gantt Chart (Tom’s Planner), and our Calendar (Google Calendar). My hope is that by looking at these four areas I am blending together enough short term (fire in the kitchen) work with longer term (important, not urgent) work. At the end of the weekly planning I get an outline that looks like this…

It all sounds nice, but then I went into the meeting with Kevin and you’d think I twiddled my thumbs all week. Thus he gets frustrated and I get frustrated.

In thinking this through more I’m going to try two new approaches:

1) Turn my weekly to-dos into tangible actual goals – Last week I was working on our company principles to present at our monthly Team Huddle. On my plan for the week, I just wrote down “Principles.” If I were to go back and turn that into a tangible actual goal it would’ve been “Present Polished Version of Company Principles at Team Huddle on Friday.” That then becomes one goal for the week and I can map out what I need to do each day to make sure that happens. This way then when meeting with Kevin I can have a clear set of goals I achieved for the week verses something that just says “Principles.”

2) Better recapping - A favorite movie of mine is Big Fish. A theme of the movie is every story can be told different ways. As the storyteller, you get to choose which one you want to tell. I think how I tell what I did to Kevin is just as important as what I did. Even if I had the best week ever, if I poorly and inaccurately retell it, then I can’t expect my audience to achieve the outcome I wanted. 

Moving forward I’ll be testing my ideas out and report back soon. 

Today we had our monthly team huddle where I presented on our company principles. In preparation, I created an outline of how I was going to present each principle but didn’t plan how to open up the discussion to the group for further input. My lack of structure for brainstorming led to a rather scattered and unproductive brainstorm for the first 15 minutes at which time I realized it needed to be more structured. If I were to do it over, I’d set up a framework for both the presentation and the brainstorming. Wondering what type of brainstorming frameworks there are out there…

“Would you expect someone to get a good night’s sleep if they were interrupted all night? Then how can you expect someone to get a good day’s work if they are interrupted all day?” - Jason F.

Here’s an interesting quirk of mine. Whenever I schedule a phone meeting with someone, I always offer to be the one who calls the other person. Most people tend to want it the other way because they don’t have the responsible to remember to call, they just have to pick up their phone when the other person calls. I get that. For me it’s about focus.

Being the meeting initiator allows me to set the mental on and off ramps between tasks on my own terms instead of the other person. That way if I’m mentally crunching right up to the meeting time on something I know they won’t call early. The other advantage is not needing to wait around for the other party to call me. Not knowing if they are running one minute or five minutes late. With me as the initiator, I know the meeting will start on time.

For six years I worked from home and thought it was perfect to be able to stroll from the kitchen to "work" with my oatmeal in hand. For the past ten months I've been working, for the first time in my life, out of an office and now I know I'll never go back to working from home.

It's not that working from home doesn't have its positives, it's just that I didn't realize how much the negatives actually out weigh the positives until I wasn't working from home.

The biggest advantage I've discovered in "office life" is the separation of work and life. While working at home, I was never good at setting boundaries between when I was working and when I wasn't. The computer was always just an arms length away.

Now I've physically forced myself to have boundaries, and mentally I get excited for both. While eating my oatmeal in the morning, I mentally get excited for work. Like a basketball player prepping for a game. Then as my day winds down, usually around six, I mentally get excited to head home and not be working. In both situations, I'm more present than I've ever been before.

Another advantage of "office life" is in valuing my work. When I worked from home, work time was always a bit flexible. If something came up (family call, store run, mail, tv show, etc) I would easily be able to pause my work and go do it. Even more so than Annie, who also worked from home, because she had a boss she contracted for. I am my boss. Now my work hours are more defined and everyone around me treats them as such. It allows me to be more focused and present while at work.

On travel days, I tend to stay home before heading off to the airport, but I find it really hard to get into the work zone while there because I've trained myself so well over the past ten months to disassociate my home from my work.

I know some people work from home with great success, I realized I'm not one of them. All I want to do at home is spend quality time with family and friends.