Introducing ThirtyDayProject.org

The first thing I'll say is that if I've done my work correctly, most of what I'm about to write here is more clearly and accurately described by visiting www.thirtydayproject.org.

With that out of the way, on February 19th, in response to this post by Andrew Dubber, I committed to making an idea real by May 1st. All I knew at the time was that a man I had never met was going to publish one idea a day on his blog for thirty days starting on March 3rd.

As someone that works on a lot of projects, I pride myself on being able to get things done. I didn't know what the ideas would be, or what I would have to do to make one real, but I figured that there would be at least one that I could run with.

I'm very happy to announce today the launch of ThirtyDayProject.org, an implementation of Andrew Dubber's 5th idea in his series of 30 ideas in 30 days, the numberless calendar.

I really loved this idea because of the simple, but powerful idea that doing something every day for 30 days seems achievable at the outset, yet still requires enough of a commitment that it can have a lasting impact.

In order to implement the idea, I learned enough Ruby/Ruby on Rails and CSS so that I could build and design the application, and enough git so that I could share my code and so that I could deploy the application.

By no means am I an expert programmer. But I sure know a hell of a lot more than I did two months ago.

The end result is this: a simple web application where people can start their own thirty day projects and view the projects of others. I took Andrew's idea and added to it the inspiration from Seth Godin that I talked about in this post - that shipping things and sharing your work, your art, is vital.

So the site I built allows people to start a project, mark each day off as "done", and if they choose to do so, they can ship whatever it was they did that day. "Shipping" something is as simple as giving a day a title, and providing a link to whatever you did.

When someone provides a link to their work, I chose not to keep a viewer of that work inside the site I built, but instead just take them directly to whatever link was provided. The reason for this is simple. There was no point in me trying to make a website that stores photos better than flickr, or videos better than Vimeo, or music better than Bandcamp. Plus, there are too many sites in the world that are trying to confiscate people's creativity. I wanted to project it.

So the site I built is about the idea of what can be done in thirty days. If you want to take photos for 30 days, you should get a flickr account. If you want to write something every day, you should have a blog. And if you don't have one you should make one. I didn't want to fight that reality, I wanted to preach it.

I tried as best I could to tell the story of how this project got started, infuse some inspiration that I've received along the way, and encourage people to make something and share it with other people.

My hope is that people will be creative with the site. Maybe some people will ship something every day, while others may build a reputation for only shipping one thing at the end of thirty days. Most of all, I hope people use the site because I truly want to follow people that decide to do something every day for thirty days.

I want to see what they share. I want to see what they make. And my hope is that this website, and the story that it is a part of, will continue to inspire people in the same way that it inspired me.

I'm not trying to sound dramatic, but deciding to work on this project, and being a part of this little dance, has been really wonderful for me. I'm able to do things now that I couldn't just a couple months ago. And so my real desire is that maybe, someone will end up doing something positive that they wouldn't otherwise have done because of something I made.

That would truly make me feel pretty good, so I hope you check out www.thirtydayproject.org and think about whether there's a project you've been wanting to work on.

I'm really happy with the site, but I know it's not perfect. So let me know what you think I did well, and tell me what I need to change. I would sincerely love to hear your feedback.

Airplane mode

I was at the Shedd Aquarium with my family over the weekend, and I realized that I've been occasionally doing something with my phone that some others might find useful. Or, maybe you do this already.

If you're anything like me, you have some sort of smart phone that gets your email, twitter feed, RSS reader, and a few other things that command your attention. I've even caught myself taking out my phone to take a picture of my kids, seen that I had an email, and then started to read the email!

How terrible is that? A few times lately I've just put my phone into Airplane mode.

I figure, when I get on an airplane I'm not worried that I'm out of touch for a few hours. So why not do the same thing if I want to hang out with my kids? I'm all for being connected, but if it starts disconnecting us from the people closest to us then that's not a very winning proposition.

I was just talking to another small business owner tonight and I think doing the same thing can help us with anything we know is important. If you need to be working on a design or recording a podcast, forget about just turning off email - why not unhook from the internet completely for three hours?

Next time you're feeling like you should be focused on something, maybe the best thing you can do is pretend you're getting on a plane and go into airplane mode.

Why companies shouldn't pay contractors hourly

It's not that hourly pay is bad, I used to charge hourly too. It was the way I knew and it was how I thought things worked. Now though I believe there is a better way for companies that hire contractors and other businesses that provide services. And once you know of a better way, then that's the path you should try to go on right?

So why is a flat monthly fee for services better for a company that's bringing on some type of contract worker? Quite simply, because you're then paying for the service you needed and not the number of hours it took someone to provide that service.

These are two entirely different things.

In my line of work, sometimes the absolute best thing I can do for a project is sit down with a VP or the CEO and have a difficult discussion to set a project on the right path again. It may take all of 30 minutes, but it may be where a ton of my value came in for a given week.

Compare this with a PM who simply isn't willing to have a difficult discussion. They'll keep "working" on a project, checking their email, writing up documents, and having hallway discussions that are doing absolutely nothing to fix whatever is broken with a project. Yet, they continue to rack up their hours and the customer pays for it.

What if you're paying someone 40 hours per week for work that someone else could do in 20? Maybe you turned that more efficient person down because their hourly rate was 25% higher. Wait - that doesn't make a lot of sense does it?

The other thing that's nice about paying service providers a flat monthly fee is that it allows you to, if the need arises, negotiate a price based on the service you're going to get - not on an hourly rate.

If you pay contractors for some of your projects, instead of asking yourself "what hourly rate am I willing to pay?" try asking "How much am I willing to pay for this service each month?" $10,000? $5,000? $2,000? $500?

Then, try to get someone to provide that service each month for that dollar amount. There's a good chance you'll find that you can get better service and pay less for it by caring more about the results and less about the hours.

* = Not really

We've all seen the ads, articles and commercials. Something like "Get one month free!*"

Of course, the month isn't free and before we even read whatever foot note we're supposed to read we know that the little star means "actually - not really".

So why do so many companies use this tactic? Does it really work?

If you're writing an ad, or a promotion, or describing something on your website and you find yourself putting a * in the text somewhere I think that's big trouble.

Instead, why not just say "Get one free month when you pay for two months" or "Get $5 off the book as long as you're a member of our book club."

Whatever the purpose or the promotion, it shouldn't be necessary to put that little star in there so much. And, you'll likely find that you're writing is better and the description of your promotion is clearer, more concise, and may even be more effective.

Next time you're inclined to put a * somewhere, just remember it means "not really" and try to describe what it is that you actually want to promote.

First impressions or lasting impressions?

I'm not sure we can worry so much about our first impressions if we want to have lasting impressions. Making a good first impression is great, I just don't think it should be a primary concern on places like a blog.

The problem is that when you write to make a good first impression, you do so at the expense of not creating stronger connections with the people who are already visiting you.

It's a little bit of a challenge to think this way because it's true that on any given day someone new could visit your blog, and whatever article you happened to write is going be their first impression of you. And usually we want to make good first impressions.

I don't think we can have it both ways though.

The alternative is to write in a way where you simply accept that some new visitors will not stick around because you didn't make a great first impression. That's fine. Because what you're doing instead is appreciating the people that have already decided to give you their attention, and strengthening a bond that already exists.

This creates a lasting impression, and when you make a lasting impression with someone they're far more likely to stick with you and be a fan. You may not get as many page views, and you many not have a bunch of mentions on twitter, but I think ultimately it's a much better strategy because the visitors that you do have are likely going to be more passionate about your service or your product.

The opportunity is that most people don't do this.

It's a lot more difficult to measure passion and loyalty than it is to measure page views, clicks, and unique visitors. And since it's easier to measure that's what more people do. They can see the impact some article had, it looks like they're being effective because more people came to their site, and it makes them feel good because there's more immediately tangible evidence of what "worked".

But just because something is easier to measure doesn't mean it's more important. In fact, it's probably the opposite; the harder something is to measure the more valuable it probably is. (I read an article arguing the same thing that I wanted to reference and I can't find it. I'll keep looking.)

I do concern myself with first impressions on my main company website, because part of the reason it exists is to get people to want to learn more about me and my company. My blog however is where I want to make lasting impressions.

Not surprisingly then, I find my blog to be a much bigger asset.