It was a hectic week – all the normal kid stuff (soccer, parties, trip to the emergency room), all the normal work stuff (regular business, this new thing we’re working on), a date with the wife (her turn to pick a movie – total chick flick, no car chase scenes), etc, etc.
And then on Friday night I had a problem with ShutterFly, went to bed mad, woke up mad, wrote a sarcastic blog post, made pancakes, and my business partner called me to say someone’d dugg the article and we were getting hundreds of hits. Whoo hoo, you say, hundreds of hits. Hey, we don’t *want* random people showing up at this point – they aren’t likely to subscribe to our service when we launch, so who cares.
If we wanted street traffic we’d post videos of CNN guys eating chili peppers or French mobile phone ads about naughty daughters. (Go watch that last one, it’s worth it.) We have done that for ourselves and clients when it was appropriate and it can work.
But my point is, I just did something NOT on the critical path. Really, that posting was pretty close to a zero value exercise. As my grandfather used to say: Experience is an expensive school and only a fool learns in no other. So when I make a mistake, I always try to extract something useful from it.
My conclusions are pretty simple:
- I’ve got too much on my plate – I’m losing some of my focus and some of my sense of balance. It’s hard to lead a team well with those problems, so I need to do something to recharge.
- I’m concentrating near 100% on this new venture – if I’d posted that screed on our other business’s website, we’d have probably made some decent money off it.
I think I need to take some time off – I’m gonna get the wife to cover for me on Wednesday and have an electronic-free day with a book somewhere. I’m also going to schedule some 1:1 time with my guys and make sure things are tickety boo on our current project. I’m hoping those two things will clear my quick twitch memory a bit and make sure that I’m properly focused on all my business.
