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How to organize yourself as a solo founder

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Re: How to organize yourself as a solo founder

#41

Post by gekkostate »

smartmic wrote: post #39

Hey, a little bit off-topic, but: here comes a very original HN experience. The author himself writes that tools are the least important, but for the HN crowd, it seems that tools are above anything. In consequence, the thread here is mostly about the tools only. Combined with the favorite topic of self-organization, this can serve as highly illustrative material about HN.

OP here. Thanks for reading the post! I agree with you. It seems that the HN crowd is very much interested in tools while I explicitly mention that the tool question is the least important one. I'm curious to know why folks are more interested in tools than principles or why there is little discussion about the principles.

Re: How to organize yourself as a solo founder

#42

Post by cseleborg »

stingraycharles wrote: post #14
cseleborg wrote: post #12

I use a mix of bullet journaling and GTD, and it has worked quite well for me (though not perfectly, of course). The physical bullet journal (notebooks from Leuchtturm) is a log of sorts, a place where I can take notes from calls etc. and write down anything that comes to mind, in the spirit of capturing every idea. Pen and paper just works better for me. My GTD context lists with next steps for all ongoing projects…

I’m not sure if it’s appropriate to ask, but what kind of layout / system do you use with your bullet journal? What I understand is that bullet journals are typically most effective when you adapt it to your own work / domain, but most examples of what others use (including the subreddit community) are almost art projects. I would be very curious what a more “HN-approved” bullet journal would look like.

I keep it very simple, just a black pen and very little decoration. I draw a horizontal line to mark the beginning of a new day and skip all the other "logs". I mostly use the symbols (note, Todo, migrated Todo, etc.)

The only fancy thing I do is my weekly plan, which also includes some KPI tracking. For this, I have a template slide that I print out on an A5 sized sticker, slap it in there and fill it out.

Re: How to organize yourself as a solo founder

#43

Post by revicon »

I’m addition to the other great ideas posted in this thread, I’ll throw out something that has helped me a lot… I have a folder called "Captain's Log" that I constantly post things into. Everytime I hear something on the radio I want to look up, I type a few of the lyrics into a file and save it and it goes into the Captain's Log for perusal later. Everytime I have something I need to remember to do I post a note into the Captain's log and add a "todo" tag to it so I can sort those out when needed. All meeting notes go in there too. When I start coding something I take notes on what I'm working on in a note so that I can go back and remember what I did when I was working on that thing I can't quite remember. I can sort that folder by "date created" and see a log of my life going back in time and I've found it very useful.

Re: How to organize yourself as a solo founder

#44

Post by 1123581321 »

dnndev wrote: post #27
paul_f wrote: post #20

Having tried everything, nothing works better than 5x8 yellow pads. Write down everything you need to do. Draw a line thru when done. Every few days, rebuild the list. Everything has to be on one page, or there are too many to-do's, and you can delete ones that just don't make the cut. No technology, just pen and paper.

This would be a good idea if I could read my own handwriting. I get this works for some, but never has for me. I have never been a notebook type of person. I love your general approach and very similar to a digital version I use.

This might sound weird, but check your diet if your handwriting is shaky/cryptic or mentally anguishing to perform. I looked into this upon recommendation of someone else, and now I always notice when mine is worse after certain meals. Not advocating for one particular diet.

Re: How to organize yourself as a solo founder

#45

Post by marcosdumay »

mellavora wrote: post #29
dnndev wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be a good idea if I could read my own handwriting. I get this works for some, but never has for me. I have never been a notebook type of person. I love your general approach and very similar to a digital version I use.

You could work on improving your handwriting. You might notice other benefits. I read about one person whose math comprehension increased dramatically when they improved their penmanship; something about a mental link between the ability to visualize the formulas in their mind and the ability to create/visualize them on paper.

I'm not the OP, but I'm on a similar situation.

I can draw formulas quite well. I can also draw text quite well if I'm drawing it. But my cursory handwriting is so bad that I often can't read it.

I don't think it's worth putting time into improving it on the case I need to write some long-form text by hand. There just isn't enough value int there. (But then, here I am, spending time on HN...)

Re: How to organize yourself as a solo founder

#46

Post by anon2020dot00 »

revicon wrote: post #43

I’m addition to the other great ideas posted in this thread, I’ll throw out something that has helped me a lot… I have a folder called "Captain's Log" that I constantly post things into. Everytime I hear something on the radio I want to look up, I type a few of the lyrics into a file and save it and it goes into the Captain's Log for perusal later. Everytime I have something I need to remember to do I post a note int…

Makes sense actually. Most people I think would just use one notepad text file per day I think but I can see the advantage of creating one text file per idea or note.

Re: How to organize yourself as a solo founder

#47

Post by marcosdumay »

timwis wrote: post #10
urban_winter wrote: post #7

I've never found a way that I like to integrate dealing with email into a to-do list. Reading emails is a perpetual need but it is damaging to focus and I often find that it saps my energy by reminding me of all the things that are not yet done. I've tried having fixed times of the day where I always deal with emails; adding "30 minutes of email" to my task list; reading them between each switch of tasks. None of the…

Indeed it does! And the key lies in separating “defining work” from “doing work.” GTD’s “get clear” process involves going through everything in your inboxes (not just email but physical papers etc), and determining what is the actual _next action_ for this thing (if it’s actionable at all; some emails should just be referenced, delegated, or archived). You log that next action in your system and move on to the next…

Yes, from my point of view, GTD does two things very right. One is separating the "defining work" from "doing work", the other is keeping contextualized task lists for "do this next time you are at that place, or meeting that person, or whatever".

And of course, both feel obvious in retrospect. I don't even remember if there is anything else in GTD, but the value I get from those is enormous.

Re: How to organize yourself as a solo founder

#49

Post by bachmeier »

smartmic wrote: post #39

Hey, a little bit off-topic, but: here comes a very original HN experience. The author himself writes that tools are the least important, but for the HN crowd, it seems that tools are above anything. In consequence, the thread here is mostly about the tools only. Combined with the favorite topic of self-organization, this can serve as highly illustrative material about HN.

I think part of it is that the nature of the work done by a solo founder is very different from that of many HN readers.

It's a matter of scale. "Why use a database? CSV files do everything I need." That's true for many projects but not as much when you have a few TB of data.

Some jobs require you to scale in several dimensions: types of projects/data, number of observations of data like email, number of reference files, and people you interact with. I'm not a solo founder but I've been there too. Once you're managing data that's too large for your brain, you need a system that scales, like GTD. Tools are useful but not at all as important as the system. I've tried a lot of tools, but GTD has been the constant that has (to some extent) kept me from giving in to the stress. You can't understand the scaling issues until you've worked in that type of position, where the stress of managing stuff and dealing with stuff constantly coming at you can overwhelm you.

Re: How to organize yourself as a solo founder

#50

Post by bachmeier »

urban_winter wrote: post #7

I've never found a way that I like to integrate dealing with email into a to-do list. Reading emails is a perpetual need but it is damaging to focus and I often find that it saps my energy by reminding me of all the things that are not yet done. I've tried having fixed times of the day where I always deal with emails; adding "30 minutes of email" to my task list; reading them between each switch of tasks. None of the…

At a certain point you have to be realistic about how long it takes to deal with email. No system is going to give you more time. You're either going to have to allocate more time to email, respond to fewer messages, or spend less time responding. Email is, unfortunately, an unpleasant part of the job for many of us. Some days it's better than cleaning toilets, so there's that.
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