Getting Seb Doing

Why ?

Great question !!! This is exactly what I ask to our members at Geovation all the time. Why do you need an app ? why do you need it to scale ? Why do you need those tests ? why do you need this great and complicated architecture ? why do you need this clean code ? If the answer is something like “it is good practice”, it suggests that they may not need it. And believe it or not, most of the time the answers are on those lines. Outside the startup world, things are not different: we are all humans after all. We tend to do things… very often big things not really needed to achieve whatever we are after. And we may rush and get stressed about it.

Time Management

Do you know the Pareto Principle. I don’t know if it has an official definition but it expresses the concept that If you know what you want, you may achieve 80% of it just doing 20% of the effort (required to achieve the 100%). I definitely witness the inverse of it every day, at work, and outside: people running, working long hours and still not achieving what they were after: achieving the 20% with 80% of the effort. People have explained the same principle using different theories and methodologies: from the KISS principle, to minimize the ROI. There are countless books and public speakers explaining the same concepts with different words. One very popular is the GTD (Getting Things Done) methodology by David Allen. And it is great. It helps to focus and achieve things. Many years ago I used to use a software for that… and I promised… it was great: mGSD. (Getting Stuff Done: they have to use STUFF as they have been contacted by David team).

Purpose

Recently I was looking for an alternative but could not find any that worked for me. I’m looking, not just to be more productive, and to deliver more things, but to do that 20%. And that cannot be done until when we don’t know the real reason of why we do things. If you have never done it before, just do the “why technique” on yourself and you may discover new interesting things. In order to have my inner ways (you can call it life purpose or mission statement) connected with action, I am modifying an open source software called GSD5. It is based on the amazing TiddlyWiki (in browser wiki). My focus is more on the whys as if you know them, you can move on and just do things…. the right things.

how ?

If you have ever done any kind of coaching, NLP or alike, you may be familiar with the values, pains and gains, wheel of live etc… in a very lean fashion, of implementing a small feature that may work for a customer segment (me), validating it, measuring the results, analyzing and repeating, I’m incorporating some of those concepts. The idea is to start from the most inner why: the life purpose. Then to move on describing how the ideal life would look like in that context with the life vision. From here, It can broken down on different areas. We can measure those areas and create goals for improvements. From here down it connects to the traditional GTD: Some goals are small: just actions. Some are big: projects. I called it GettingSebDoing as it is focussed on what works for me. In the future, the customer segment could diversify and at that point it may change name to something more general.

Work in Progress: for ever

I’ve been very busy deleting features that I don’t need yet such as multiple realms. Why ? for the same reason… cut any unnecessary cost that does not contribute to the cause. What about if I’ll need it in the future ?… I’ll implement it :) It is not finished yet… and probably it will never be. It is getting to a point in which I can focus more on the actions but I expect to add more tools, and documentation that may help my customers (just me) to define his mission, and therefore KPIs that will enable him to create and execute an action plan.

You can find the code in https://github.com/sebastianovide/GettingSebDoing and download or play with it from https://sebastianovide.github.io/GettingSebDoing