A buddy of mine brought the 10,000 hour rule to the forefront of my mind at an ever punctual time, the New Year, the only part of the year where we collectively agree that it’s time to look inward, self-inflect, and take an honest look at what we’re doing in our lives.

My resolution was simple, be more intentional.  I realized that I was doing so many things, that I wasn’t doing any of them well… taking on projects that didn’t add value to my life, spreading myself too thin, “multi-tasking”, etc.  I decided to try a new strategy on how and where to focus my energy.  Week one has not gone well.

After one week of attempting my new strategy, I’ve determined I still don’t know where the heck my time is going, so I decided to do the math.

According to Gallup, the average American gets 6.8 hours of sleep per night(we’ll round to 7), that means that in a 24 hour day, 17 hours are spent awake.  Now couple that with the average workday clocking it at around 9 hours per day, and you’re left with only 8 hours per day for your enjoyment.

That outlook is bleak, at this pace, you’ll need 1,250 days to achieve perfection… almost 3.5 years.

I’ll be the first to say that Gladwell’s concept is naive, and I’m not looking to be world-class at everything I do, but nonetheless, it gives me pause.  Turns out, all the productivity in the world can’t overcome the unbendable constraint of time.  Alas, I am the Play-Doh in the mold of time, and must succumb to it’s will.

For me, it’s back to the drawing board with only 8 precious hours per day to allocate to those things which are most important to me.

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Customer here… long time no see.

You probably don’t remember me, I think the last time we spoke was when you retired my favorite photography app, thanks for that. I think it’s worth your time to get to know me again.

It seems to me you’re a little lost with why I use you. You see, I’m not in any way interested in a touchable bar of random buttons. The fact that you think I am makes me wonder if  you know me at all.  I find myself wondering why a self-claimed student of design and usability such as yourself, would see it as a good choice to have a tiny screen of ever changing buttons as a valuable form of input for us(Pro users).

I’ll go into a bit more detail since you don’t seem to understand my work. You see, being a Pro user, I spend my days waltzing around my keyboard, and like any good dancer, trying my hardest to not look down. Now, don’t let me lose you here, this is the important part… having an input that requires me to look away from my screen and hunt and peck to input anything, is terrible usability, and is useless to the workflow of a Pro user.

So now you’re asking yourself, “Well who are you Pro users, and what do you want if it’s not a tiny little bar of unreliably placed, moving target buttons?”. Best question you’ve asked since retiring Aperture…

What would be useful is a device that keeps my eyes *on* my display. I’m just spit-balling here, but, one idea is a, hmm, ooh a touch display! And heck, while were at it, maybe add a stylus, kinda like your Pencil! You know who else would like that!? My buddy, he’s a designer(he’s also a Pro user in case you were wondering).  We’d both love the ability to interact directly with the thing that’s providing visuals, rather than interacting with yet another peripheral, especially with one who’s prime intent is to change, making it possibly the least adoptable input device ever created.

Thanks for listening, it’s been great catching up.  Maybe we’ll talk again soon, hopefully on better terms.

Your old friend,

Pro User

The post Apple MacBook Pro Touch Bar appeared first on Collin Brewer.

Admittedly, it kind of crept up on me this year with moving, Christmas, and the general flurries of life, so about a week ago I decided I’d block off a few hours on the 31st of December to reflect on 2016.

I thought a bit on what went right and wrong throughout the year and put pen to paper on what I wanted to change in 2017, but one thing kept coming back up.

That New Car Smell
I think of it like those first months of owning a new car. You make a rule that no one can eat or drink in the new car. You wash and vacuum the new car every week. All of the sudden all the parking spots are just a little too narrow for the new car, so you park closer to the back of the lot.

Then a few months slip past…new turns to newish. You notice that first little ding in the bumper, you let your guard down, and your buddy drops a ketchup’ed fry on the seat. You clean it, but nonetheless, newish eventually turns to old, and the brake dust begins to cake up your wheels and you can write “wash me” in your rear window.

This is the same progression we go through every New Year. It’s become a laughing matter about how quickly we’ll break our New Year’s resolutions, even though we set out with such strong convictions to keep our new car in new car condition.

Something better

My newfound passion for the New Year led me to come up with a concept for not letting the convictions of the New Year fade away.

The concept is simple, much like we all use the New Year to set resolutions, I’m going to set a resolution for the entire year, but I’m going to break that down into smaller, more achievable, quarterly resolutions. And those into monthly resolutions. And those into weekly resolutions.

I want to feel the self-inflection and freshness of the New Year…. EVERY WEEK. Just like the New Year, I want a chance to look at last week and say “well I screwed that up, what can I do better this week”, or “last month was great, let’s do that again this month”.

Do I sound crazy? Yeah, that’s what my mom said… but nonetheless.

Here are the rules:

1. Review
   At the end of every period, review the progress from the previous period, and re-evaluate for the upcoming period.
2. Each resolution/todo/goal should be quantifiable or completable
   You should be able to track if you succeeded or failed. Are you off target, ahead of schedule, behind in savings, etc.
   Bad example: Lose some weight Good example: Lose 2 pounds
3. Each goal should match it’s time frame
   The granularity of the goal should be respective to the granularity of the review. In other words, don’t set overly specific goals for the year. Bad example:
4. Failure IS an option
   …as long as you learn from it.
   That’s really what this is all about… growth and learning. Instead of having a New Year’s resolution, failing by January 14th, then waiting until next year to try again, re-evaluate and pick back up on the 15th.

The Setup

So, I’ve set up a recurring reminder for every Sunday at 5pm to look at the goals I set for the previous week.

I will do two things, first, review the previous week:

– Did I hit the goals I set at the beginning of the week?
– If I missed the goals, why? What could I have done to hit them?

Second, I’ll set goals for the upcoming week. These may be repeats from the previous week, and that’s okay, as long as I’m learning and understanding what I’m doing wrong.

In addition, if this week’s review cycle also ends out the month, I’ll review the month, and plan out the next one… so on and so forth with quarters and years.

To all the weirdos,

Happy New Year! Happy New Quarter! Happy New Month! Happy New Week!

The post Happy New Week – Review Process Part 1 appeared first on Collin Brewer.

Today in “Mistakes Were Made”… Getting Too Big for Your Start Up Britches…

When I started Horse and the Rook a year ago, I made a boo boo. I got too big for my britches. I looked far, faaar into the future, and started planning for every contingency. Good business right? A true strategist? Eh. Not so much.

Gobs of Customers

I spent a lot of time, carefully making sure my servers could handle the gobs of customers I’d surely cater to. After all, I didn’t want to have this thing come crashing down at the most inopportune time ya know? Wrong. Turns out, I maxed out at about 30k customers, well within the capabilities of a far less complex, and expensive set of servers.

I had great foresight on making sure that I was prepared for a massive influx of customers, but I did little preparation on who my customers even were, or how I’d get them to these high-performance servers I’d set up. Turns out, after a few months of my flagship product Gusto being out in the wild, I learned a lot about my customers and my market. I learned that there weren’t that many iPads out the world yet, which meant there wasn’t much traffic to my servers. I also learned that as sales of the iPad steadily increased, so did my customer base… and you guessed it, so did my server usage, in a very predictable way actually. In retrospect, had I opted for a dead simple, low-fi server set up, I would have saved time, and precious start up dollars, and exactly nothing would have changed. At one point, I think I actually heard my servers yawn at my traffic.

Appearing Professional

Days after I launched the mobile version of Gusto, I started fielding support tickets. Luckily, I had gotten set up with Desk for handling support. The problem? The first time I ever needed the power of ticketing, was when I launched Gusto Mobile, which means I had been paying for the help desk software for over a year without really needing it. In hindsight, I got too big for my britches. I spent a year paying for software that was way overkill for my little startup with one employee and one product. Was it helpful in the end? Sure, it became invaluable as my product offering and customer base expanded. Was it helpful in the beginning? No. I could’ve just as easily offered up my direct email address, and saved myself the learning curve of the software, and again, the precious start up dollars I was whisking away to Desk before I had even turned a profit myself. Rookie mistake… don’t do it. Instead, get connected to your customers. Like _really_ connected. Especially the early ones. They want to hear from you, and you should want to hear from them. They’ll help you shape your product, and be the ones paying your bills… don’t add the complexity of support tickets to the mix, and don’t pay for something you don’t absolutely need.

Now What?

These days, having made the mistakes, I take pride on squeezing the most out of my tooling, and my time. When I start a new project, or advise my consulting clients, I always kick it off the same. I focus on what’s happening now, instead of what might happen later. I pay for the lowest tier of the Adobe suite. I run on inexpensive servers. I email customers directly. And I do it all on a 4 year old laptop that I got used.

In the end, these mistakes needlessly cost me thousands of precious, early start up dollars, and even more in time that I could’ve better spent serving my customers, and improving my product.

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