Matthew Lang

Curtis McHale sums up why clients should wait for their favourite consultant.

Think of Gandalf (Lord of the Rings wizard if you don’t know). He was always running from one place to another. Someone always needed his help. He was a busy dude and couldn’t just take on every issue at the drop of a hat.

Any decent consultant is going to be like that. Really if you need more than a few hours of work, you should be expecting to wait.
— Wizards are Busy People by Curtis McHale

Never thought of myself as a wizard before though, but I do like the idea.

No way could I build an online product.

That was me two years ago. Thankfully my confidence has went up since then, but it took me some time to get to the point of shipping a product online. To do this I wrote about my product and what I hoped it would do. I put it down on paper and then started to realise how simple it would be to build.

Michelle's 11 point list is a great place to start if you want to "pick yourself".

1. Write. Set aside time to ask questions, dream, think big. Put your phone on silent and set an alarm twenty minutes out.
   — 11 ways to "pick yourself" by Project Exponential

Read on for the full list. It's worth it.

Last week I started work on an idea for application. Just a small prototype of the idea really. No tests, no fancy user-interface, just the bare bones of the idea. In typical agile fashion I wrote out some of the basic features that I needed for the prototype as user stories on index cards and then set to work. Then a call from a client came in and before I know it, it’s two days later and I’ve not started work on the prototype.

My problem is that I’m starting client work as it comes in and my own projects are getting done in really small pieces. I am not keeping a daily schedule.

Truth is I haven’t kept a schedule of my work for at least a couple of years now. Not since I worked at a consultancy where you could plan your day most days. There was days where you would have interruptions to your schedule, but as it was customer support calls, you had determine if the customer’s support issue was that important that it had to be resolved there and then. With interruptions like this mounting on daily basis, I abandoned my calendar of work and just did work ad-hoc.

Now though I am more in control of my own time and schedule. I am my own company and I need to schedule work to ensure that client work gets done most days, but I also allow for some time to work on ideas and products.

Scheduling your work in a calendar is a commitment to getting that work done. I have the benefit of having a laptop with an external monitor so I use my laptop as my secondary screen. On here I have my calendar and I leave it open while I am working as a reminder to stay focused on the task I have set myself.

I’m using Apple’s Calendar application and the iCloud service to synchronize my calendar to my phone. This makes it easy for me to schedule stuff in my calendar when I am away from my desk. I use the brilliant Fantastical app to manage my calendar from my phone. It has a great agenda view for upcoming appointments and it has a very easy appointment entry system that means you don’t need to fill in four different fields to make an appointment. It’s smart enough to know that “10am Meeting with client” should be scheduled for 10am.

Scheduling your day and your week is a great way to making a commitment to getting things done. It’s more structured than a to do list, but provides a way of breaking your day down into chunks so that you’re not working on the same thing for hours or days at a time.

There’s a great line from the start of “Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest” spoken by everyone’s favourite pirate Jack Sparrow.

Complications arose, ensued, were overcome.

If only it was that easy. It is never that easy. When complications do happen, are we making things complicated for ourselves?

I do. I make things ridiculously complicated sometimes when I’m writing code. I’m always thinking too far ahead. What if we need to do this, what if the format changes? I’m always thinking of edge cases for features that won’t be encountered on a daily basis. I find it quite a hard habit to break.

Take for example this form I was working on yesterday. It required three things:

1. A question
2. Your email address
3. A list of other email addresses

So handling the first two things is easy, but I wanted to do something smart with the list of email addresses so that people could input any number of email addresses. I ended up with a form like this:

Handling the code to add and remove the email addresses from the list wouldn’t be too difficult but it’s clearly not the easiest thing to do. Annoyed at the complicated form I would need to build, I left my project to do some client work that had been scheduled in.

Then it hit me that night. What else uses lists of email addresses that are not constrained by size? When you are writing an email you simply enter the names of the people you want to send the email to. In one textbox. It’s that easy. The next day I changed my form to use a single textbox for the list of email addresses. A complicated form made easy.

Two things I took from this:

1. Keep it simple stupid

The KISS principle is a recurring topic in software development, but we developers tend to think of the YAGNI (You aren’t gonna need it) principle. The two are similar, but what I need to remember is the simplest and stupidest way is always going to work. It might not be clever, but as long as a simple design works, we should use it. If the simple design can’t handle an edge case in the future we can fix it then. There’s no need to worry about it for the moment.

2. Look to other examples

When building software, there’s no shortage of examples that you can refer to for influence. I’m not suggesting that you take a straight copy of a unique feature for another product, but when designing processes for your application, it can help to look to other examples to see how it is handled already. It’s probably going to be simpler than you first thought. I didn’t even think to initially look towards other examples of how this could be done. I could have saved myself a lot of time.

So there we go. My complications were not as quickly overcome as Jack Sparrow’s complications, but then he doesn’t write code does he?

Journalong is just one of a number of options that I could recommend. But there are others if saving your journal entries to Dropbox isn't your thing.

Peter Aitken kindly informed me of a new service, Oh life, that uses just email for your journal. Looks great.

Realise your own energy distribution with Nicholas Bate.

Great analogy on deadlines for engineers.

Similar to a soccer game when your opponent leads 0:1 and there are only 5 minutes left on the clock. The team will try everything to score asap. But outside of such pressured situations the team simply focuses on ball possession and making good plays. There is nobody asking the players at what time they will score the first goal. Not before the game and especially not during it.

— It Ships When It Ships by Bjoern Zinssmeister

Over the weekend I was looking for a replacement for Google calendars. I was sure that I would be at least using Apple’s Calendar service and iCloud, but I wasn’t sure what other tools would be great to support this. So I asked my ADN friends for their recommendations. Within minutes I got a few from people with their favourite scheduling apps and tools. There was a clear favourite but I wanted to wait for more responses. I left it to the next day for more people to reply. The next morning I reviewed all the responses that people had sent to me.

As a thank you, I composed a single post the next day just saying thanks to all of the people that replied to my question. They didn’t need to reply to my question, but they did and I’m thankful for the responses they gave me. Trawling through the responses was a bit of a chore but I managed to get everyone’s name in one post and sent it. It would be nice if you automate this kind of thing.

It gave me an idea. An question and answer management tool for App.net. It’s probably not on the priority list for many users on App.net, but for those that are looking to streamline the question and answer process and make it easier I had a vision for a small service that would do the following.

1. It would allow you to compose #askadn questions with optional hash tags for preferred answers that people should give.
2. It would aggregate the results and keep totals for each response by looking for preferred hash tags in replies or by looking for recurring words in the replies that are given.
3. It would compose thank you posts for all the people that took part. If all the respondants don’t fit in a single post, the thank you post could be split into a number of posts to thank groups of respondants.

It’s just an idea, but the reason I am putting it here is that someone else might already be in the process of building something similar to this idea. Maybe no one is building it, but perhaps someone will. If no one builds it, then I will.

I’m just throwing this out there.

Amazing account of the moving of these spy planes from the Lockheed plant to Area 51.

Dorsey Kammerer was appointed to head up the activity to build and use the transportation carriage system. An early-on step was to equip a pickup truck with a set of extension poles sized to the width, height of the main transport carriage trailer. An initial plan was to drive the best estimate route of travel, noting the obstacles to easy movement of the carriage boxes. Several photos show this arrangement and its use along the roads.

— Transporting the A-12 by Roadrunners Internationale

Great timeline animating.

When I worked for an ERP consultancy, I would frequently no sooner get my backside at my desk in the morning before the phone would start to ring. Customers looking for support, developers asking for tests to be done and the managing director looking for that new feature for the high profile client of the week. Some days I would simply keep working right from the moment I got to my desk through to home time without a thought about working on the right things. Then I would realize that the day has completely passed by and I’m not even sure if I had done what I originally set out to do that day.

It was at this point that I started giving myself 5 minutes each day of breathing space. At the start of each day I would block out some time to get my day into order. Just a chance to ask myself a couple of questions:

• Did I leave anything undone from the previous day?
• Are there any high priority issues that I need to resolve today?

Once I got into the habit of doing this I started to see where my day was going and the progress (or lack of) that I was making. Updates for customers were taking too long, support calls were being left for too long and most days I wasn’t doing the work that I wanted to do.

Once I spotted these recurring issues, I started to clear them off my backlog of work one at a time. Each day I was making this list smaller and smaller. I was starting to see some real progress.

I do this little routine every day now. It’s just a few minutes of my time, but the benefits are worth it. I’ll sit down with my notebook and review the previous day’s work and pull forward any outstanding tasks to today. I’ll then check my master list on TaskPaper and include any work that is scheduled for today or the current week.

Now that I am freelancing and working from home, it’s important that I continually measure my progress and ensure that I am always making progress on projects and products but more importantly on client work. I need to deliver good results for my clients and ensure they are getting value for money.

Having this little moment of breathing space is a great way to start the day. It’s just a few minutes of time reflecting on what you need to get done today, but it is time well spent.

Don't be.

Owen Williams covers the reasons why your opinion matters and you should write about it:

Yes, there are probably a few thousand other content creators out there airing their own opinions on whatever topic you're talking about, but if your opinion is sound, quality and unique then a community will eventually gather around you.

— Too busy consuming to create by Owen Williams

Ever since the news that Google was sunsetting it's Reader service, I've been looking at alternatives for the Google services I'm already using. I've started using Path as a replacement for Google Chat, and I'm using Apache OpenOffice instead of Google Drive. I'm not against Google as a service provider, but depending one company for a number of services is not a good move.

Two areas where I haven't found alternatives though is email and calendar. The calendar functionality I'm not too bothered about as there are plenty of options for scheduling apps and services.

The big decision I need to make is whether to move my email from Google to anything else. Gmail remains one of Google's key products that continues to work well. I'm looking at a couple of services for email, but the switch and migration of data will be a key consideration.

For the moment the cull of Google services will continue.

Spectacular paint job on this

via FGGT

Last night our oldest son gave us a bit of a scare. He started to run a very high temperature after dinner and through the night he was sick a couple of times. This morning he was shivering and still had a fever. No school for him then.

Why am I telling you this?

It sets the background for one of the key benefits to working from home. In the rare occurrence that your children are ill, it makes child care a lot easier.

Depending on your child's illness you can still look after them and get some work done. I said some work because of course your child's health comes first. Do some work while they are napping or watching a movie. You're never going to get a full days work in on these days, but being a freelancer it is great to have this option.

Work has been a little slow this week, a morning here, an afternoon there.

With the free time in between slots, I should be using that time to get my head round some of my side projects and turning them into products, maybe even start preparing for another NaNoWriMo, or even just fine tuning my programming skills by learning another programming language. Well the truth is I haven't started any of these things this week.

It was time to re-focus again and get my head cleared.

I took a look at my desk and noticed rising piles of paper appearing on the edges. Wireframes, contracts, invoices, tax documents and other stuff. All grouped together, but all of them encroaching my desk space. My work space. While this stuff sits on my desk, I get distracted. So I started clearing my desk. Filing documents away, throwing out old wireframes (in the recycle bin of course), leaving out only the absolutely necessary things that I need to action before the end of the week.

After half an hour I had my desk back, my work space. And I was ready to go again. I scheduled work for my side projects into my calendar for the rest of the day and got back to work on them.

I should clear my desk more often.

We've all been there. You're given a link to a new great product that is going to do wonders for your productivity but when you are done installing it you get a sign up screen that let's you sign up with only two different options.

1. Facebook
2. Twitter

If you're lucky (or not so lucky), you get a third option of Google+. Where's the option to use your email address though?

Opinionated sign ups like this have always been a problem for me. I don't have a Facebook account and I barely participate on Twitter these days, to the point where I am even thinking of deleting my Twitter account. So if I don't have an account for either of these social networks (and yes there are people like this) then what's left for me to do?

It's easy. Give some other product a try that will let me sign up with my email address.

The only time where I will use a product that requires such a sign up is where it allows me to participate on the social network or platform I choose to use.

I've signed up for many products over the years using Twitter, Dropbox and Google. Each time the product was tied to the preferred login that I choose in a way that required a specific login. Journalong uses Dropbox to post journal entries to your Dropbox, Feedly uses Google to sync your Google Reader across, you get the idea. These are specialist products and services that depend on a specific social network or platform.

I will not however sign up with my social network for a product whose only connection to it is to read the list of people I follow on that network and from other networks.

Where a product isn't tied to one social network but offers the choice, I'll always use my email address. If the product wants to connect to my social networks after I have signed up then fine, I'll connect them separately. It means that I can disconnect those social networks at a later date without having to completely stop using the product.

There's a time and place for opinionated sign ups like this but for generic products we should always be given the option of using email.

... Rebel Alliance or The Empire?

I struggled with developing features for Journalong over the last six months. Always at the back of my mind was that I needed Journalong to be profitable. It was this thinking the blocked all development on Journalong. Ideas were put to the side until I could get more paid subscribers using the product.

In time I realized that Journalong as a product was never going to happen. So I let go.

Over the weekend I stripped out all the paid subscriptions from Journalong and it is now a free product for everyone. As soon as I shipped the changes I felt a huge weight off my shoulders. Now with no pressure to build a customer base I can get back to developing a few more features for Journalong over the next few months.

Mmmmmm, shiny!

via FGGT - Photo by Father Tu

Bought myself a couple of books this morning for some light reading. Not the digital kind mind, actual hold in your hand, dead tree books. It's been ages since I done this. For the last couple of years I've bought all my books on my Kindle, but my reading has decreased in the last few months as a result of this.

I put it down to technology wear. I just can't face burying my head in another screen again when it comes to reading at night. Amazon tout the Kindle as a close experience to reading an actual book, but you can never replicate the feeling of reading a book with anything other than an actual book.

I'm not going to completely stop using my Kindle. It's still great for my programming books for quickly looking up something and I've got a ton of books on my Kindle that I read again quite often. There's lots of other reasons why I'm buying books again but the main reason is just to spark my love of reading again.

It's been a year since I started Journalong. It's been a real learning experience. While it might not be the success that I envisioned it to be, the experience of building a product has taught me a few things that I would like to share.

1. If there's no market for it, don't build it

When I first hit on the idea I immediately created a small Google Docs form that asked two questions.

• Would you be interested in using Journalong?
• How much would you be prepared to pay to use Journalong?

Feedback was quite low. Well, really low. Looking back now it was clear that there wasn't demand for Journalong. I should have abandoned the idea and moved onto something else. I didn't though. I wanted Journalong to use for myself so I built it anyway, and added the ability for others to pay for an annual subscription to Journalong if they wanted to use it. Was I building Journalong for myself or others?

What I should have done was simply build Journalong for anyone to use for free. Interest in the product was so low anyway that it wouldn't have made much of a difference anyway. With the focus taken away from trying to market the product to customers, I could have focused on delivering a better experience in using Journalong for myself and others.

If there's no market for your product, then don't build it and put a price on it. Of course you can build it for yourself, just don't expect to profit from a personal project with low feedback.

2. Measure user interaction

The only way to know if your product is being used is to measure key activities in the product. I didn't do this, so it was difficult to see how often Journalong was being used on a daily basis other than looking at page views provided by Google Analytics.

Decide on key activities and interactions you want to measure and build the monitoring of these straight into the product.

For Journalong I should have measured one thing:

• How often were people writing to their journal?

As Journalong writes journal entries straight to Dropbox, I didn't have any record of how often journal entries were being written for each user.

Building metrics like this into your product is just as important as the features your product has. Metrics like this can provide you with data on in-frequent users of your product. You can then survey these users to determine what's stopping them from using your product more frequently and possibly taking a higher tiered plan if you have them.

3. Gather product feedback frequently

Getting feedback using surveys on your product is critical. It let's you find out what's not working, what's attracting users and what's missing.

When I say survey I don't necessarily mean a 10 point questionnaire on the users experience with your product. Bogging users down with surveys like this can turn them away.

A couple of questions would do or you could do something as simple as a 'like' button beside a new feature. A simple button next to a feature could prompt the user when they use the new feature for the first time and ask them if they like it. Once they click it, the response is logged and the button disappears. If they don't click it for a few days then simply remove the button to stop the user getting annoyed.

Using the metrics that I mentioned earlier, you should also survey users that don't use the product very often. The feedback may turn out to reveal a missing feature or an obstacle in your product. You want to convert as many users as possible to using your product

The last place to survey your users is when they delete or cancel their account. This is your last chance to find out why your product isn't to their liking. Is it too expensive? Does it lack something?

Getting the feedback from the customer here, allows you to refine your product for the better to stop users cancelling their accounts for similar reasons.

4. Iterate often

This is important in the early days of your product. After I built Journalong I sat back for a couple of months and watched the activity on Google Analytics. Looking back it wasn't a wise move.

Metrics and surveys will point towards missing features or changes you could be implementing. Getting these in as quickly as possible will mean that less users stop using your product and will attract others. Be selective of the features you implement though. You don't want to burden your users with changes to the product every day. Common sense prevails here. If 90% of your surveyed users are asking for a specific feature that falls inline with your product, then implement it and ship it.

5. Adjust your price based on facts

I've made three pricing changes to Journalong over the last year and making it free next week (that's another blog post) will be a fourth. Pricing products is difficult. I arrived at my initial price based on the value that I thought Journalong would be offering to users and on how much people were offering to pay for the product from my initial survey.

Three pricing changes later and there's still no bite for Journalong. These pricing changes didn't come from any information I had though. I simply thought that reducing my price might spark more interest in Journalong. A stupid assumption to make and one I advise you don't do.

Adjusting your price isn't a big issue. In the early days of your product you should be continually refining the product based on the feedback from your customers. The pricing of your product is no different. Adjust your price based on feedback from customers. They use your product, they'll tell you if they are getting value for money from it.

6. Set a product trial period

Don't flog a dead horse. I've spent far too much time on thinking how to get customers for Journalong when I could have been using the time to build other products. After six months I should have called it a day for Journalong and moved onto something else but I didn't.

Setting a trial period for your product gives you the chance to review if the product is heading in the right direction. Are you getting sign ups on a daily basis? Are you converting enough users to paid accounts in order to be sustainable?

They say Rome wasn't built in a day but that doesn't mean you should continually hold out for a stampede of new users after you deploy that new fancy feature for your product.

After six months ask yourself:

Is it worth investing another six months of my time into this product?

If you have a number of paying customers using your product then it might be worth pursuing the product for another six months. If not, then I say stop working on that product and move onto something else. Six months working on a product is a lot of your free time taken up. If you're like me and have a backlog of other ideas, then it might be better to leave your product and pick something else up.

There's no secret formula

I started this product with the full realization that it could end up like this. A handful of customers and sign ups that bottomed out three months ago. Not all products end up being successful, but there's no rule to say that your product will definitely be a success. Coming to terms with this fact will make the day you give up on your idea a lot easier.

It's not the end of the road though. There's always that next product idea!

... are you going to take at the fence?

When I started working on Journalong over a year ago, the primary goal for building it was to scratch an itch. I wanted an online journal for my Dropbox. Putting a price on it and charging for it came a close second.

For me it was more important to build something useful rather than build something profitable. So why did I put a subscription price on Journalong? Mostly hope. Hope that a few people will take a recurring subscription on it and I would be able generate some side income from it.

It hasn't exactly worked out this way. Subscriptions are now almost non-existant and user activity is down for the last few months. I just don't have the time to focus on creating marketing for the site and generating more interest in Journalong. So I'm calling it a day on Journalong subscriptions.

AS of next week, I am going to start work on removing the subscriptions from Journalong and making it completely free for everyone. You heard me. Free. For. Everyone.

It's time to stop chasing rainbows.

... with Nicholas Bate.