“Big data” or no, many businesses are still learning how to have any sort of data at their disposal. Heck, many will never get organized. Learn the skill of organization and ruthless pruning, or continue to run a time-suck of an organization with unhappy employees. Your choice.

These types of systems prove to be the most challenging to keep under control:

• CRMs (customer relationship management)
• DAMs (digital asset management, sales/marketing asset libraries)
• CMSes (content management systems)

It’s ironic that all three of these include the word “management” in their titles. Whether your system truly helps you organize and manage data is a point of conversation that I will bring up later. But all three tend to become “the enemy” after some use by folks in your business.

At the very least, general feelings of hatred and despair are signs that these systems are important to you. Treat them like they’re important. They really do want your love, the lost puppies that they are.

As soon as it gets warm outside (it’s not yet warm here in Ohio), it’s time to doing a little spring cleaning. Audit your data and how it is organized.

• Is a single person in your organization the only one who recognizes the need for a certain category or tag? It’s time to either rename it, document it, or delete it.
• Are you hoarding records or even systems? Delete or archive unneeded records. Export your data from systems that you don’t need anymore and kill those accounts.
• Delete blog posts and web pages that are generating little business or just plain suck. No one will miss them, not even you. I promise.

Seriously, challenge yourself to remove things. We’re always adding, adding, adding. Why not take away for a change?

Stop torturing everyone with information overload and too many needless choices. We have enough data as it is, and it’s only going to get worse from here. Stop the bleeding!

Interesting: having something worthwhile to say

Being uninteresting is one of the most disrespectful things you can do when posting on the web because you’re doing it at a larger scale. Hundreds or thousands will waste their time at your hands if you decide, What the heck, let’s just post that shit.

I’ve worked with folks in the past who have had that attitude: just invent news when times are slow. I’ll never understand that mindset. The landfill of garbage time-suck content is piling up every day, and they’re just adding to the problem.

Being interesting is also hard work. It forces you to flex a muscle. The more that you flex, the stronger you get.

Consistently: all the time

Let’s face it: if someone comes by your blog’s main page and sees that you haven’t posted in a year, they’re probably not going to stick around. If you’re trying to sell yourself as a marketer and technologist like I do, you’re going to communicate that you’re not eating your own dog food if you don’t update your own blog.

You’re also missing out on the opportunity to let blogging grow you into a better you. Who doesn’t want to be more interesting, curious, and knowledgeable?

Like many other disciplines, blogging consistently can end up improving other areas of your life. If you’re constantly on the lookout for opportunities to be interesting, you’re challenging yourself to think more critically about things. You get smarter.

• Want to spruce up your posts with photos? Maybe you’ll be moved to buy a nice camera and learn how to be a better photographer.
• You’ll start communicating more effectively, both verbally and written.
• You may end up meeting some interesting people during your quest to improve and market yourself and your company.

You can be cheap with your blogging, or you can do it right. The right way is clearly the road less traveled. And hey, there’s value in that.

The Project: an organization doing the expensive work of building relationships

I’ve been serving in a Columbus-based youth mentoring program called The Project for several years. This group does the expensive work of befriending and serving teens who struggle with poverty and, more often than not, have no father present. While the adult leaders of The Project can’t be these kids’ true fathers, we can try our best to help fill that void however we can.

We also fill needs that we discover along the way. Imagine growing up without a winter coat or having a completely empty refrigerator. We’ve filled those needs before and will undoubtedly do it again.

The Project has been around for 12 years. I think it’s important to mention those 12 years. This organization is not about just hanging out with kids for a few weekends and sending them along their way. The Project builds a family amongst its members and sticks around for the long haul.

Some guys who started attending 12 years ago still hang around and teach the next generation of adolescents with their experiences. The ministry is becoming self-sustaining because of this, which I’m told is pretty rare.

Our Father’s Project

I now have the privilege of serving on the board of directors for Our Father’s Project, The Project’s newly-formed parent organization. This organization’s mission is to provide the resources needed to build relationships with and to serve the impoverished in inner-city Columbus.

The point of having the parent organization is to be able to extend our resources to other programs in the future. We have some work to do before we get to that point, but we’re building the vision.

Want to get involved?

If you feel particularly moved to help out with Our Father’s Project, there are a few ways. All of them make a difference.

1. Sign up for our email newsletter. You’ll hear stories about what’s been going on lately, our successes, and our needs.
2. Donate money. It helps us feed the poor, buy clothing and outerwear, and do things that fathers normally do with their sons: baseball games, bowling, the state fair, etc. You can donate online with a tax-exempt donation.
3. Pray. Send good vibes. Whatever you believe.
4. Come hang out with us. If you live in the Columbus area, come by The Project on a Friday night. Even just hanging out one night can have a positive impact on someone in unexpected ways. (In other words: no pressure to feel obliged to keep coming back.) Get in touch with me if you’re interested.

Do what’s important first.

My muse: test-driven development

A popular software development methodology is test-driven development (TDD). It is possible to write scripts that test software for defects after a programmer makes changes to it.

A common problem is that software testing is an extra step, and often it’s tempting to skip it. TDD dictates that you write your tests first to avoid the temptation to just skip it. In this way, you’re prioritizing the testing by doing it first.

Why not treat screenshots for your documentation the same way? Do them first.

Story-boarding with screenshots

Doing screenshots first actually makes the process flow more smoothly. You end up using the software that you’re documenting to make the screenshots, running through the process step-by-step, taking snapshots of key steps along the way. This helps you make sure that you’re describing the steps correctly and in the right order.

Actually, this procedure is similar to storyboarding, used for creating movies, videos, and animations. You lay out how the story is told with images before constructing the story with the actual content.

A bonus with this particular process is that instead of storyboarding with sketches, you’re story-boarding with the actual screenshots that you’ll be using in the final documentation. Win.

Your page may end up starting out looking like this (taken from the Uploading Files from Your Hard Drive documentation from Live Editor):

No words. Show, don’t tell.

Fill in the cracks with text

Sure, our start to the documentation doesn’t make a whole lot of sense on its own. This is where you will in the cracks with text:

Within the Files section, you can get started by clicking the New File button in the upper right:

On the New File screen, you’ll be presented with two choices:

1. Upload File from Computer
2. Open File from URL

To upload a file from your hard drive, click Upload File from Computer:

Next, click the Choose Files button to select 1 or many files to upload:

Et cetera, et cetera…

The end result: your text ends up pretty light, letting the visuals drive the story. The user can make sure that they see what they’re supposed to be seeing every step of the way. And using hard examples is far better in this situation than describing everything in abstraction.

Believe me, it’s usually much worse when done the other way around: heavy text with sparse usage of screenshots. Companies with thick, hard-to-understand technical documentation like Oracle and Microsoft come to mind. You don’t want to be like them, do you?

Real artists ship.
- Steve Jobs

After I released Live Editor File Manager into private beta, my relationship with the product changed quite a bit. I can attest that putting your product live and letting users in is one of the most powerful and vulnerable things you can do.

Of course, much of what I am able to describe will have more impact when you experience it for yourself. I hope that sharing some lessons from my own experience will inspire you to make the leap and put your idea out there. Don’t spend all your time setting up your GI Joes. Ship it.

Embarrassment will drive you to do better

If you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you’ve launched too late.
- Reid Hoffman, founder of LinkedIn

As soon as I put my code into production, I hated my product. I immediately experienced one of those “life flashing before my eyes” moments where I could see 200 different things that I wanted to improve.

As I drafted emails to trusted friends with their logins, I was embarrassed that Live Editor couldn’t do certain things yet.

When I received responses from my friends with a list of problems that they encountered, I was humbled.

One thing that I can say about these seemingly “negative” emotions is that I was energized to start improving. Once your hard work is released into the wild, you don’t want to waste another moment with it in an imperfect state.

The negative feelings that you have can be a positive thing if you let them be.

Perfectionism kills

It’s easy to get into this comfortable place with your project by seeking perfection. I just need to spend one more week to add feature X or improve feature Y, you tell yourself.

Yes, some of these decisions are entirely valid. But those “one more feature” moments delay you from the riches of actually putting your product out there.

Remember: perfectionism is a process, not a goal. If you like being perfect, nothing will drive you to be perfect more than releasing your product in an imperfect state. Believe me.

You cannot anticipate what your problems will be after launching

I spent a good part of last year imagining for there to be a small wave of new customers shortly after releasing File Manager. I anticipated that my some of my time would immediately need to be sliced into addressing customer support issues. That is part of the reality of building software.

For some strange reason, I worked myself into this pretty strong state of fear over this. How would I continue to work on the product while answering so many emails and spending so much time on the phone? I realize how silly this sounds.

So far, this fear of mine has not come close to being a reality. I can only recount two times that I’ve had to work with people on fixing problems. I’m sure having a higher volume of support issues is coming, but it’s probably farther in the future than I can even guess.

I actually wasted a lot of mental and emotional energy worrying about this. Kind of like how programmers will sink a lot of time trying to “future proof” their app so it can handle millions of users, only to be lucky to see a dozen users on launch day. Stop it.

Just get something built and worry about problems of scale later, when they’re actually problems. I know it will be a problem later as my role shifts from technician to entrepreneur. But it’s not a problem now.

Time to take action

It’s been my dream to get into the world of content management. There is a long road ahead of me, but I’ve taken an important first step by releasing Live Editor File Manager. The year of hard work that I’ve put into this actually means something now as people are starting to use the product, and I can’t wait to keep getting better and better.

What can you do to get your product good enough? What features can you put on the shelf for now to just get something out there? These are questions that I’ve been learning to ask myself more frequently as I work on the next wave of features.

• List
• Table
• Grid
• Details

The following are some examples that I’ve noticed.

Moo business card designs

 Basecamp projects listing

Google Drive files listing

Railscasts episodes listing

Inspiration from OS and application design

I suppose most of this inspiration comes from the view switchers icons in the Mac Finder (Mac’s equivalent to the Windows Explorer for the uninitiated):

And iTunes:

And even the Windows 7 Explorer:

It’s difficult for me to admit this publicly, but sometimes I’m just not feeling it when it comes to work. And it’s hard for me to “trick myself” into following a certain behavior. I’m sure I’m not alone, so I’m going to share a little piece of advice that has been helping me out for a few years now.

The solution: the Seinfeldian Chain

I read a great article on Lifehacker a number of years ago called Jerry Seinfeld’s Productivity Secret. What is Jerry’s secret? Seinfeld’s goal is to be consistent with his craft and write jokes every single day. He puts a calendar on the wall and puts an X over the current day after he’s completed his task of writing.

This builds up a chain of days that you’ve spent completing a task, and the more days that you build up, the more guilty you’ll feel about breaking the chain. If you miss a day, then it’s easier to miss the next. And so the cycle continues.

The article describes the positive effect that this method can have:

It works because it isn’t the one-shot pushes that get us where we want to go, it is the consistent daily action that builds extraordinary outcomes.

For me, this has helped me exercise consistently. It’s helped me train for a full marathon. It’s now helping me read books little by little. And now it’s helping me build my own business one day at a time.

FreshBooks is a great tool for seeing the chain

Granted, I’m starting a business, so this may only work for this particular scenario. But when I first log in to FreshBooks‘s time tracking section, here’s what I see:

I can log in and see how many days this month I’ve set aside some of my free time to invest into my business. Hmm, look at the previous week: 100%. Not bad. And it keeps me jazzed to keep it going (which in fact I’m doing right now).

While tracking all of the time that I spend isn’t the most fun thing to do, it has also helped me in some other ways. If you look at February 6, that happens to be no outlier. As it turns out, I’ve been having problems “showing up” on Mondays. Because I have the calendar in front of me, I can identify the problem (no Mondays) and figure out how to fix it (be more intentional about showing up on Mondays). That’s what I did last week, and it’s something that I’m going to pay close attention to over the following weeks.

Discipline is where it’s at

I’m really excited about where life has been leading me, and I’ll have more to announce soon. I just thought I’d dig up a tip that’s worked well for me, and I hope it will help others out there who are joined with me in the trenches.

There has been a wave of Internet folks bemoaning the death of RSS. They’re getting it wrong. RSS is not dying exactly, and its fate is expected and appropriate.

For those of you who need a refresher on what RSS is, see my post on RSS demystified.

Why RSS sucks

There are some big reasons why RSS sucks. Most of it actually has to do with RSS readers.

On the surface, RSS seems really kind of awesome. “I can get updates from all of my favorite sites all in one spot.” Many people in fact do want to browse less so they can get on with their lives.

But many of us do not know our limits and find ourselves hoarding information through RSS readers like Google Reader. There is no cost or immediate consequences involved with subscribing to RSS feeds for everything that the Web has to offer. But then we find ourselves with an RSS reader list so long that it’s paralyzing to try and keep up.

Lastly, an RSS reader is yet another inbox. Lately, I’ve found it to be stressful to have so many inboxes to check up on: email, Facebook, Twitter, Google Reader, Netflix queue, podcasts, DVR queue, voicemail, text messages, OmniFocus, and the physical inbox on my desk. Enough is enough.

Seriously, all of these queues have turned my life’s purpose into unbolding all of the new shit.

Problem: RSS has been about the technology, not the user

RSS to this point has been about the technology, not necessarily about the users of the technology. If you have trouble understanding that statement, look at what RSS widgets used to look like:

So confusing. Sure, most sites didn’t show that many widgets, but many of the icons on their own are confusing unless you understand what RSS or XML are.

What does RSS mean? What about XML? What does it have to do with coffee cups and pills? Really, the only good buttons have said “Subscribe,” but I can imagine how confusing it would be to click that button and get a bunch of XML back. What do I do with that?

Good uses for RSS

Here are some valid uses for RSS. Notice that none of them really involve adding a little RSS icon to your interface. All of these uses are really about masking the technology behind the features. RSS enables the feature but isn’t the feature itself.

1. “Subscribe by email” option

RSS at one time was a hopeful attempt at replacing email (or at least minimizing it). Google Wave was also an attempt to replace email. But people love their email! It’s not going away anytime soon.

Services like FeedBurner allow you to send daily emails to subscribers with a digest of the latest items from your feed. You create a post on your blog, and people receive notification about it via email within a day.

The user doesn’t know or care that RSS is powering this mechanism. They just know that they’re receiving updates from your site.

2. Automatically tweet links to your new articles or blog posts on Twitter

Services like Twitterfeed and FeedBurner (again) can watch your site’s RSS feed and tweet links to your new articles automatically. People following you on Twitter see your tweets, not an RSS feed.

Again, the user doesn’t know or care that RSS is powering this. They use Twitter, not Google Reader.

3. Podcasts

When you subscribe to a podcast in iTunes, you’re technically subscribing to RSS. There’s a chance that you may not have even known that, dear reader.

Again, people call that a podcast, not RSS. Heck, podcasts even have their own icon that I bet more people recognize than RSS’s.

4. News and link streams on your site

With some programming, you can mash up any number of RSS feeds and display the latest headlines on your site. Use an interface like Yahoo! Pipes, publish that feed, and use it to power a news stream on your site.

Again, visitors will see the news stream, but they won’t know or care that it’s powered by RSS.

Again, notice a theme here?

All of my suggestions above are about using RSS for what it is: a technology. RSS as a technology is only a means to an end. It is not a feature.

The users of the Web have spoken. Highlighting this particular technology just isn’t effective with your normal everyday person. So stop it.

Many (lucky) entrepreneurs like myself need to work a day job while trying to start their business. A start-up doesn’t usually rake in the money immediately, so the bills need to be paid somehow.

I’ve have made a few observations lately about where I’ve gone wrong in balancing my priorities over the past few years and how I want to adjust the course. I need to get this thing going!

The need to set aside time every day

I remember reading a free report called 279 Days to Overnight Success a few years ago and being inspired by one particular story:

For the past nine months, Dave has been getting up at 5:00 a.m. every day to work on his business before heading out to an office. His “real job” is as a senior software QA Manager for a major defense contractor, but lunchtime and late evenings are also spent plugging away at the business.

I often get this false sense that anyone who starts a successful company does it with this magical time in their lives where they don’t have a job and become shabby hobos until they “make it big.” But here is a story about a guy who puts his nose to the grindstone and does what it takes to make it work.

Also to quote the report:

I can tell you from experience that unless you set aside dedicated time to produce your art, the art will not get made.

So you need to set aside time every day to work on your business.

The need to set aside the right time every day

For quite some time, I had been working on my business in the evenings, and that tended to not work so well.

1. I want to spend a little bit of time with friends and family. Evenings are when people tend to be free to socialize.
2. I want to exercise and stay in shape. Also, I’ve found that going to the gym is not a great motivation to get out of bed in the morning.
3. I have a lovely fiancée. She needs my love and attention and the occasional phone call. This usually needs to happen in the evening. (I’d hate to see what this would look like at 6:00 am.)
4. I do fairly similar work at my day job. As I crank out code during the day, I run out of gas by the evening.

That last point has been key. I cannot count how many nights I finished my day job and felt paralyzed when it was time to start working on my business in the evening. Many times, this would lead to firing up Netflix and starting it at, drooling helplessly.

As for the evening, anything that I can muster up after 8 hours of working the day job is also spent on my business. But if a social event comes up (or a haircut or exercise or a call from the fiancée), I can do that in the evening too. And I can rest assured that I’ve already invested a few hours into the business that morning. Win.

The need to prioritize

Of course, the hard part is setting priorities. (Isn’t it always?) Which is more important, my day job or my business? Which needs to suffer a little? Something needs to suffer if you’re prioritizing anything in your life effectively. You can’t say yes to everything.

I ultimately needed to make the decision that starting my business is more important to me. So now I get up early to work on the business first. So far, I get a little tired at the end of the day job, but it’s doable.

Good news: this is only temporary

The final key ingredient is knowing that this entire plan is temporary. One day, I’ll be able to use Clear Crystal Media to pay my salary. I just need to make some sacrifices now in order to make that happen.

When that day comes—if I do everything right—I won’t necessarily need to get up at an ungodly hour in the morning to continue building the business. Utopia is the dream, right? Let’s get to utopia.

Photo credit: IMG_1058 by kevint3141. Some rights reserved.

At first glance, I am intimidated by the idea of documentation of this type. Web design and development changes rapidly. It’s insanely hard to keep up. Sometimes it feels like once I’ve finally mastered a technique, a new tool or technique comes along to replace it. But then again, this very problem makes me a slave to those very things.

5 Reasons to write an operations manual

Now I’m working on getting past those worries and investing some of my limited time to write policies and procedures. Let me clarify that when I say, “policies and procedures” or “operations manual,” I mean more than just an HR handbook with sick day, vacation, and sexual harassment policies. I’m talking about a set of documents that record a business’s day-to-day operation as well.

If you haven’t read E-myth, do it. If you have read it and need some inspiration, here are 5 ways that I’ve further reasoned with myself on the need to write documentation.

1. Writing everything down forces me to make some decisions

This is probably something that most entrepreneurs like myself struggle with. Committing anything to paper forces me to put a stake in the ground and decide how things must work.

The scary part is that I very well could make some mistakes in my first iterations (and beyond). But reviewing documentation will help me to identify room for improvement and fix it.

2. I have an opportunity to focus on my vision and craft an experience

I want to be more than just “some guy” creating websites for money. I want to create a great experience for customers who want websites and technology that work for them. “Some guy” cannot do that, especially if he ever wants to take vacation, retire, and die peacefully one day. Really, the best place to start is by writing all of it down.

Many wildly successful businesses are prototyped, tested, tuned, and documented. The late Steve Jobs and his team prototyped a full-working Apple Store in a gigantic warehouse before building a real one, just to make sure that Apple got the experience right. Ray Kroc used his first McDonald’s location as a testing ground to get things right before building more locations and a killer franchise business.

Instead of spending all day focusing on the drudgery of tasks at hand, writing documentation gives me some time to craft and tune my vision. And it’s an investment, not a waste of time.

3. I will be well on my way to being able to hire help

If I want to change the world in a significant way, I’m not going to be able to do it by myself.

Creating policies and procedures means that tasks can be delegated to others. If the policies and procedures are written well, then employees can be trained in a way that empowers them to deliver a particular experience to customers.

4. The operations manual gives employees ownership of the company’s operations

You would think that it would be the opposite, and I suppose it could be the opposite if I ended up running my company in an oppressive, draconian way.

I am excited about having employees that take ownership of the operations manuals for their own roles. Areas identified for improvement can be prototyped, tested, and refined in an objective manner.

Those who “get it” the most can be promoted to a position where they take ownership over a team’s operations.

5. Tacit knowledge needs to be squashed

Oh, tacit knowledge. Often, I’ve heard technicians joke about their knowledge being job security. In the end, this attitude hurts a business and its customers. What happens when that guys leaves?

As long as the documentation is taken seriously, everything important to know to keep the business running will be recorded. If someone moves on to another position at another company, they should leave behind some of the knowledge in the form of policies and procedures.

I’m not saying that documentation should turn employees into cogs that can be easily replaced. But the business must survive and be bigger than any individual person’s talent. Ultimately, this is in the customers’ best interests.

Now the rubber hits the road

I’m sure that I will learn some stuff along the way, and I plan on sharing some tips. Does anyone out there have any tips to share? Leave them in the comments!

Photo credit: Checklist by peretzpup. Some rights reserved.