Use a kitchen timer to maximize your productivity

I can sometimes find it extremely difficult to stay on task. Unproductive "necessities" like checking email, reading twitter, and blogging often squeeze out the productive hours in my day.

My worst days used to look like this:

• Wake up around 9-10AM
  
• 2 hours in the morning to "get ready" (go for a jog with the dog / take a shower / eat breakfast / check email / etc)
  
• Start work around Noon
  
• Open up Textmate and figure out what I'm doing for the day (15 minutes)
  
• Check twitter / hacker news / reddit (1 hour)
  
• Grab lunch (1 hour)
  
• *maybe* get a few hours worth of work done (2 hours)
  
• Check email and do some administrative stuff (2-4 hours)
  
• Dinner and hang out with friends (1-6 hours)
  
• Spend the rest of the night on twitter / hacker news / reddit / blogs
  
• Go to sleep
  

I felt like I should spend at least 6 hours every day coding and needed something to make sure that would happen. My solution was a kitchen timer. I recently bought one (pictured above) from Amazon.com and I'm pretty happy with it. I find I prefer its mechanical feel and physical presence on my desk to some of the software solutions out there.

In fact, this thing has worked wonders.

Every morning after my run I set the timer for a 60 minutes. That's the time I have to take a shower, get dressed, read email and check twitter, read the news, etc. After that hour is up I close my email client. The rest of the day is spent coding. Online Textmate, my terminal, and Safari are open.

In the afternoon I give myself another 30 minutes to check email, write a blog post, and do anything else I want to do. I'm spending my 30 minutes this afternoon on this post :).

This, along with finding a separate space to work (see my coworking post) have been two of my three most helpful productivity aids. I'll blog about the third tomorrow.

My impression of San Francisco coworking spaces

I recently spent a day visiting every coworking space in San Francisco. I thought I'd post my impressions (since I have at least one friend that's also looking at spaces).


My Favorites
Five star recommended!

Sandbox Suites ($495/mo) - Pros: Cool environment and convenient location. I like how the lounge area is separated from the desks. There are varying levels of privacy allowing you to choose the desk that best suits your need (and budget). There's a decent conference and phone room. They also have an active event calendar. Cons: It's expensive. Especially for a private desk.

SVT Group Coworking space ($300/mo) - Pros: The people seemed nice and the price is reasonable. Cons: Coworking is not the main intent of this space. It's basically SVT's office space with room for a few extra desks.


Seemed Interesting
I wouldn't mind working from any of these places, but they weren't my first choice.

2431 Mission ($175/mo) - These guys almost made it in the "favorites" category. Pros: The desks in the public area are probably the best deal of all the spaces I saw. I also liked the atmosphere - very eclectic. Wether you do will be a matter of personal taste. To get an idea of what it's like check out some photos. Cons: Everything (including the fuseball table) is in earshot of the work areas. Don't think you could get a private desk and play your music without it being heard throughout. Also, the people didn't seem too friendly. This is probably because there was no designated greeter when I stopped by - everyone was busy working. Most other coworking spaces had someone who's job it was to manage the place and show you around.


CitizenSpace ($425/mo) - Pros: The place is dedicated to coworking and has been around for a while. Convenient location. Cons: They had the worst work/play separation of any of the spaces I looked at. There's only one big space that includes private/public desks, a kitchen, and a "chill area" with couch, TV, and Wii. The floor was concrete and sound would easily travel from one side of the room to the other. If you have a loud keyboard (as I do) everyone knew when you were working. There were no dividers between the private desks. I never saw anyone use the Wii - probably out of fear that it would disrupt everyone else.


PariSoMa ($350/mo) - Pros: Cute place and the people seemed nice. There's a lot of light from some huge windows, which could be a pro(not depressing) or a con (screen glare). There's a cool little nook where you could relax and read a book. However you couldn't take a phone call there without interrupting the rest of the office. Cons: Only marginally more private than CitizenSpace. Most people there aren't coders (which was important for me). This would be better suited for indie designers (hence the name). Also, the space was a little small and not as well equipped as Sandbox Suites.

Yuck
I would rather work from home.

Dreamfish, SF - Way too cramped (unless you like working while standing up). I'd have a hard time working here even if I was good friends with everyone else in the room.

iList - Drop in only. No permanent space available. At the time I saw the place they were moving to a new office. I don't even think they had available chairs.

HatFactory - There was just one big common desk that everyone works at. I didn't feel like I could bring my own keyboard/mouse/monitor and leave them there. Also I think some guy lives here.

NASA CoLab - Seems inactive / nonexistant. Their wiki has gone offline.

taking quick notes

I usually email myself stuff I want to remember. That's nothing new - I'm sure most of heard of it before.

But what about quick notes that don't merit an email, or even a post-it?

For example, whenever I'm on the phone with some company I get a confirmation number... they're usually worthless but sometimes can come in handy. I don't want to clutter my inbox or my desk with these confirmation numbers.

Instead, I google them.

For example, I just talked to USPS about an address delivery problem. They gave me a confirmation number, which I promptly googled: "usps confirmation #CO329235921" There's a google bar in most browsers these days... so and I leave my browser running throughout the day so this is pretty convenient. Then if I ever need to talk to them again, I hit CMD-Y (for history), and search "usps conf..."

Of course google searches aren't 100% private - so be sure to only google stuff you can afford to publicize.

Another tip: I set my browser to keep a 120-day history (I find I'm always looking for stuff I visited several months ago, and storage is cheap, so why not). You may want to consider changing your default expiration if you think you're going to need your notes for longer than a month.

One concrete tip for the self-employed programmer (that procrastinates)

I just read an article about procrastination that I found interesting (mostly because I agree with it). Procrastination is great - as I explained in the comments:

... procrastination paid my way through school. When you don't start studying for tests until a few hours before, you suddenly find yourself with a lot of time on your hands.

Procrastination teaches you how to work efficiently under pressure - a very important skill to have. The experienced procrastinator becomes a pro at putting out fires, and ironically, quickly getting things done. So why do procrastinators fail at life? Partially because there isn't enough that absolutely needs to get done. Procrastinators need pressure.


So what's a procrastinator to do? Start fires.


In software development this translates to setting artificial deadlines. Make promises - and judge your performance by whether you keep them. Here are some examples:

• Promise your mom that you'll blog at least once per week (I do).
  
• Promise a new feature on your website by a specified date.
  
• Make promises on your blog, to whomever will listen (if you don't keep your promise, publicly apologize too).
  
• Promise your clients you'll have respond to their emails within 12 hours.
  

And here's my favorite example: find someone important to you and make them your boss (I've chosen my girlfriend). At the beginning of every week spend an hour with that person and explain to them what you're going to do in the next week. Make promises. Then, check in with them throughout the week, and at the end of the week, conduct a "performance review." It helps if you can create some sort of incentive to meet your targets (you can be creative here... ).

Resources for new entrepreneurs

This is a list of online resources for entrepreneurs. I use this stuff on a daily basis and find it extremely helpful.

• Office tools:
• Quickbooks Online - I do all my business accounting using QBOE. It's a cheap way to use the Quickbooks software. Downside: $20 / month & only works on Windows / MSIE.
• AnswerConnect - I get a lot of calls. I'm not always around to take them, but I want don't want the customer get the impression that no one is here. For $100 / month, AnswerConnect answers my calls 24/7 when I'm not around. Best part: when they pick up the phone, they act like they're OdioWorks employees. It might not be worth it unless you have high-paying customers that you really want to take care of.
• Harvest - Great for time tracking, but there's got to be something free out there that does the same thing. Plans start @ $5 / month.
• Vonage - I use vonage for business phone, comes with an toll free number for $30 / month. Today, you might be able to use skype for a lot less - although it doesn't have as many features. Downside: you need a rock-solid ISP.
  
• Advertising:
• Google Adsense - top of the list, of course. Great for PPC advertising.
• Overture - Google's main competitor
  
• PayPerPost - a cool site that will get your product / service mentioned in blogs
• SEO Tutorial - this how I got myTeks.com first for the search "virginia computer repair" on Google.
  
• Site analytics:
  
• Google Analytics - all I can say is, wow. I can't believe this is free.
  
• Alexa web traffic - a great way to evaluate the traffic of your competitors
• Site publishing / hosting:
• OSWD - Open source web design. It's where I get all my web templates these days. When making a new site, I start with a free template from OSWD and modify it in photoshop. Works great, costs nothing.
  
• NameCheap - I use them for all my domain name hosting. They're cheap ($8.88 / yr) and have a ton of features (like URL / Email forwarding).
  
• EveryDns - When I create custom DNS records, I use this place. It's free & reliable.
• Mosso - great hosting solution, if you have the money. Otherwise, use DreamHost.
• If you're interested in running your own servers, I love gentoo. Almost all my sites are run off my own servers, but fair warning: don't try this if you don't have time & money.
• BluWiki is great if you want to make a quick site for free (of course I had to put this in there!). See an example of what you can do @ http://ncstate.bluwiki.org/.
  
• News / other stuff:
• techcrunch - web 2.0 blog. A must read for any web startup
  
• paulgraham - a great resource for undergraduate entrepreneurs. This guy is my idol - he funds early stage startups, like reddit.com & wufoo.com. I suggest you start with his articles.
• Young Entrepreneur Journey - a cool blog of one entrepreneur's experiences