Just One Deliverable Today

Productivity, work-life balance, saying no… these are things I’m always struggling with. Always have, but hopefully not always will.

It’s gotten harder since I started working for myself (and my two partners) instead of a boss. Because now, I’m in charge of my own todo list. This is scary. Left to my own devices, I tend to work on what is most interesting to me at the moment. 90% of the time, it’s not what the company needs most at the moment. And when you’re bootstrapping a company, there isn’t enough time to spend all day on “fun long-term” projects.

Incidentally, working on fun long-term projects all day is one of the rewards I’m looking forward to when we have a highly profitable company that doesn’t need me on a day-to-day basis. Forget the yacht, I want to work on interesting things with no looming deadlines.

Anyway, one trick I use to keep from falling too deeply into the rabbit hole of a non-critical but supremely interesting project is to deliver at least one thing a day. Just one solid deliverable a day.

Here are some signs that something has been delivered (in my world, anyway):

1. Email partners or other people I’m accountable to (eg., bloggers counting on me for tech support, outside bloggers waiting for a response, etc) regarding some open question or issue. Puts the ball back in their court.

2. Write or update documentation. It’s not done until it’s been documented.

3. Commit code, increment the version number, and add an entry to the changelog. Look! A record that something changed!

4. Resolve a trouble ticket. Closed ticket! Yeah!

When I find myself exploring (read: being distracted by) something new and cool, and I realize what’s happening, I tell myself I can come back to exploring this thing after I do one of the above.

Just deliver one thing today. Then you can go play.