The Official To-Do List

Image by BigBlue via FlickrIt's 3am and you've just woken up from an entertaining, yet extremely confusing dream.. you can't find any pants, but you're pretty sure you're wearing a bathrobe and it might even be on right-side-out today. You have to start effective working in less than 5 minutes or else you'll be losing precious moments that you need to use to get things done. If only you could remember what the hell that was supposed to be.

In order to hit the ground running at any given moment I find it critical to have a to-do list and to keep it constantly updated. When you are just about to fall asleep at night and your tasks are fresh at hand make sure you've captured everything you need to on your to-do list. I like to pick one task to start off with and I usually highlight it, or put a start next to it, so that when I look down in the morning all I have to read is one thing; the one with the star by it. No matter what else is going on around me, (or not going on around me) I know what I'm supposed to do, and sometimes it takes some forcing to get the hand and brains to do it, but I know I've got to do what I need to do to get it done.

If this kind of list is not present, it can sometimes take a while to hit the ground and pick up where you left off. Especially if you're groggy and can be easily distracted. To have a defined task to check off makes ignoring work much harder because it gives you a direct short term goal to look forward to.

Don't litigate over meaningless details

I ordered business cards the other day. I probably spent 1 hour total doing the graphic design for them; fairly basic stuff. Nothing to get hung up on now. What I'm looking for is just something that I can hand someone and it will be something official so that they will take me seriously, and it will be functional so that they know who I am and how to contact me.

I only ordered 250 cards so that if I do get more serious about the design and want to make it more impressive, it's not a big loss. And I'll have to re-order within the next 6 months anyway and if the company has evolved at all that will be reflected in my business cards during the upgrade.

The cards I got aren't even that great, I'm not super impressed with how they look, but they are professional enough. They are NOT printed on Avery paper with perforations and floppy paper, but they are only one step above that.

1. Would I change them? Yes.
2. Do I think it is worth it to change them right now? No.
3. Am I glad I only spent an hour designing them? YES!!

Don't let yourself get hung up on these details, there are more important things to worry about.

First Tip: Don't start a BLOG!!

Whenever you find yourself doing something new, taking on a new task, getting distracted, etc., take a minute... (sometimes several are needed) and ask yourself:

1. What is my end goal and is this going to benefit me in the long run?
2. Will the outcome of this task be worth my time to myself and my new company?
3. How can I complete this task most efficiently?
4. Can this somehow be a tax write-off??

I'm justifying creating this blog because I really don't have any idea how to start a company and I'm much better at communicating and formulating thoughts via written language so it will be a benefit to me to get my thoughts into writing so that I can go back on them later and more easily discuss them.

Enter: The Chicken Entrepreneur

A "Chicken Entrepreneur" is a term I recently came upon that describes my current endeavor. This is a person who would like to start working for themselves, but is just a little too chicken to quit their job and take the leap into uncertainty. I'd like to start this blog as a detailed account of my entrepreneurial attempt to create my own company during the wee hours of the night and in any spare moment I can snatch up.

I'm a 27-year old mechanical engineer with a wife and probably a young one within the not-so-distant future. So I will be juggling, for your entertainment and education:

1. Family life
2. Romance
3. Finding a house to settle down in
4. Eating, so I don't perish
5. A full-time job (a one-hour commute from my apartment)
6. And everything that goes along with starting a business
7. Oh yeah... and writing a blog.

FIRST TIP for the chicken entrepreneur:

DON'T START A BLOG!!

These are precious moments that I could be getting work done, but I'm going to try it so that I can document my progress and also attempt to give YOU a first hand account of what really goes on, and some tips from things I've learned along the way (usually the hard way).

My company and products will go nameless until I've reached a comfort level that I'm not yet at, but they relate to and support my childhood dream of being an inventor. As an engineer I'm pretty close to fulfilling that dream, but there's something lacking, some degree of independence that I don't have and will never have working for someone else. I work on consumer, medical, and military products for a small design firm in Massachusetts. But the projects are inherently not my own and that's what I'm looking to gain. That, and the financial and temporal independence that everyone wants these days, at least us "Millennials" that can't stay put for more than a few years and incessantly strive to improve our lives any way we can. Which means that no matter what, we always ask for and expect just a LITTLE bit more than we have.

So stay tuned and hopefully we'll all learn something through this!