Month: December 2011

Thoughts on burnout

I think at the end of 2011, maybe even the last 6 months of the year – I may have been suffering from burnout. Bad diet, lack of exercise, lack of socializing and feeling cut off left me feeling pretty de-motivated and down. I just wasn’t motivated to do anything. I first thought I was just being lazy, or disorganized – but when I didn’t even want do the things I really enjoy such as soccer or golf I thought I should re-evaluate everything I’m doing. I only really realized this might be burnout in December, and hopefully it is something that can be fixed by a few life style changes.

Below are some of the things I’ve been trying to change and some of the things I think I need to work on in 2012. I think every body’s situation is different – so there is no right or wrong answer for things like this. If it works – great, if not – try something else.

Stop being so competitive
I’ve always been a really competitive person. I used to think this was a really good thing, but now I’m not so sure. I thought being competitive gave you the motivation to push yourself, but recently I’ve started to think differently about this.
As you will read about shortly, I’ve started riding my bike again getting in some decent rides over the Christmas period. But as soon as I’ve done a few rides I start thinking about competitive cycling again – time trials, road races – things I used to do when I was a teenager. Compare this to my next door neighbour who regularly rides 50 miles a day and simply loves cycling. He has no interest in doing time trials or competing against other people – he just loves the activity for what it is.
This competitiveness not only covers sport though. Being on Facebook, Twitter and sites like Hacker News – people generally only post about the good things they are up to. Startups they’ve just sold or a great holiday they have just been on. While it’s great to read these things sometimes, on a miserable grey Monday morning in December the last thing I want to read about is someone who has just arrived for 2 weeks in the Caribbean. This is part jealousy and part “Keeping up with the Jones’s” – but I feel as though by spending time on these other sites you can start wanting to live someone else’s life.
Also it is important to remember life is definitely not a race. Someone posted on Hacker News the other day about being 30 and not feeling as though they have accomplished anything!!! 30?! Give me a break – you’ve got many, many years ahead of you. The media reports on people like Mark Zuckerberg as though they are the norm…every 20 something should be having success like Facebook. But if you try to compare yourself to Zuckerberg you will be trying to live his life and not your own.

Take your time, focus on what makes you happy, and work on things that you find interesting.

Hard physical exercise – get outside
As mentioned above I have been getting out on my bike doing between 20-25 miles every other day. I’ve also entered the Reading half marathon which takes place in April. I don’t enjoy running as much as cycling, but a half marathon is something I want to do. The cycling is much more important – it gets me out of the house, into the fresh air, into nature and not thinking about work and computers. Over the past couple of bike rides:
1, I got lost for an hour and ended up walking 3 miles down a muddy bridal way seeing some pretty awesome country side
2, Nearly got knocked off by a bunch of deer – but was amazing seeing them all
3, Pushed myself to the limit climbing up some pretty big hills (big for me anyway!)

The good thing about going down country roads is there are quite a few potholes and so you need to concentrate all the time. This stops your mind wandering back to day to day crap and keeps you focused on the task – as Jonathon Fields mentioned in his book this is itself a type of meditation.

I’ve not really played any golf for 3 months which is strange. A long trip away, crappy weather and lack of motivation hasn’t helped. I feel I need to take the competitiveness away from my golf and just enjoy it for what it is. Also you get a long time inbetween each shot in golf, and I found earlier this year in the 5-10 mins between each shot I was thinking about work. This isn’t really what you want to happen when golf is supposed to be the thing that relaxes you. I am hoping a mixture of golf and cycling in 2012 will be ideal as golf is quite a social sport and cycling is really great exercise and takes my mind off things.

Work the patterns I want to
I tried to be a morning person, and it just wasn’t working for me. My girlfriend is a teacher and unfortunately this means her alarm goes off at 6:15am each day. For the past few months I’ve been trying to get up at the same time and work a normal day eg 9-5. As many of you who know me will testify I’ve tried some pretty weird sleep patterns before such as polyphasic sleeping. During doing this I always noticed that I got more work done during the hours of evening and nightime, and I was the same at University. I never made it into the library as it was always closed when I wanted to do work at 10pm at night!
I think I’m the same now. Rather than try and force myself to work normal 9-5 hours, I’m going to work when I’m motivated and this has generally meant starting around 7pm after dinner.

Tidy office
I think mess creates confusion, and for someone that suffers with probable ADD – any kind of distraction is not good. My office seems to constantly be a mess – and Sophie always laughs when she asks what I’m going to be doing today and I say cleaning my office 🙂 But when you work from home you end up with papers, books, notes etc all over the place and trying to keep it in order is a job within itself. But when the office is tidier I think my mind definitely seems clearer and I feel I can concentrate more. I’m trying to move stuff out of the office to make it more minimal.

Plants – green stuff! I bought a couple of plants to put around the office. So far so good – I can’t say they’ve made a massive difference, but at least they take up space on my desk that can’t be taken up by notes and rubbish as noted above!

Seek feedback
When I started working on sites and product ideas many years ago I’d be telling anyone who’d listen how great they were going to be and what they’d do. Obviously not everything turns out to be a roaring success – but revealing ideas early gives people the chance to try your things out and give you feedback (both good and bad). There is nothing more motivating than getting feedback – and if you leave your release cycle too long and work away on things in solitude it can become easy to become very introverted about what you do. Get things out there, get feedback and ideas from your friends and colleagues.

For more on this take a look at another blog post I wrote recently:
Keeping projects and goals public or private

Just because the Internet has allowed us to work from home and in solitude doesn’t mean we have to be lonely when working on stuff – get your ideas out there and get talking to people about them.

Work on a quick side project
Related to the above – sometimes we do find ourselves working on a large part of a project which can’t be revealed to others yet (should this be broken down into smaller chunks?). Or maybe you are just bored of something right now. So work on a quick side project – build something that will take 2-3 days (a weekend) and put it out there. Shout about it publicly, get some ideas and feedback from people – and then either dump it or perhaps take it forward in some more spare time. So many times I did this in the past where I chose a project which enabled me to learn some new tech – and then we ended up building that or using it in one of our core products.

Thanks Gabriel Weinberg for this one.

Get out and meet people
Well I’ve been getting out of the house more since getting back on my bike, but I’ve not been so good on the people side of things. For the past few months I’ve been trying to find events and networking things going on that I’d be interested in. Living in Reading and being so close to London certainly gives plenty of options – but I have developed a really bad habit of signing up to things with the full intention of going, but when it came time to leave the house and attend the event I’d rather jump into bed and sleep or hide in my office.
I’m going to make a real effort in 2012 to do something once a week whether it’s dinner with a friend or a presentation/networking events. I’m hoping as exercise and other work practices kick in my motivation to get out and attend these events will increase.

SAD syndrome
I do kind of remember feeling similar in previous Autumns and Winters. This might be ‘old wives tales’ but my two sisters who I caught up with on Christmas day are/were nurses and mentioned about people born in the Winter months (apparently called Winter babies) are susceptible to feeling down in Autumn and Winter. As the days are shorter, weather is crappy and skies are grey I’d have thought this would affect anybody no matter what month you were born in, but apparently if you are a Winter baby you are more likely to be affected. The answer provided was one of those blue light devices to get over SAD. I’m thinking more about moving to Spain for 4-5 months of every year – but if you own one of those blue light things and they’ve worked for you please let me know.

So…
Lots of notes, thoughts and hypothesis there. A lot more than I was intending to write so if you have got this far thanks for staying with it.

Has anybody else had similar issues, and tried things I’ve described above? What are your tips for dealing with burnout? Or do you think burnout is something made up by people just being lazy? Interested in all opinions and views.

Todo Lists, apps, and paper

Hello everybody, Merry Christmas – I hope santa brought you everything you wanted. I’ve been spending Boxing day catching up on a few videos online I’ve been meaning to watch. The highlight of today was the interview Kevin Rose did for his Foundation show with Jesse Jacobs.

I really liked his thoughts about using paper for capturing notes, thoughts, and managing what you want to get done each day. I definitely struggle with ADD and like the theory about how using a paper based solution can help.

I’ve been trying various solutions. Trello, Evernote, Onenote, Remember The Milk, Wunderlist etc etc I also keep switching from paper to electronic solutions, and then back to paper again.
I think these various electronic solutions (espcially Evernote) still have a space in my life for capturing content from the web, but not day to day management of what I want to get done. For this I’m returning back to my little moleskin pad. The one good things I did learn from using Trello was an interview Joel Spolsky did for helping publicise the app. The theory that you should only have 2 things to work on next and 3 other things for that day. You have 2 things for next instread of 1 just so you can switch if you get bored. Going to give this a try for the next few weeks and see how I get on.

Keeping projects and goals public or private?

I do not feel as though I’ve been as productive in 2011 as I have in previous years. There are various reasons and excuses I could give you for this but I’ll save you the moaning and just explain what I’m going to do about it.

I always used to speak quite loudly about my projects, plans and goals – telling anyone in earshot about the next great thing I was working on. Some of them I’d see through to the end and some would drop by the wayside. I read a blog post by Derek Sivers a little while ago titled ‘Shut up! Announcing your plans makes you less motivated to accomplish them’:

http://sivers.org/zipit

Firstly Derek is an amazing writer, has an awesome book – but most importantly always says what works for him might not work for you.
After reading the article above I started to think this may be the reason why some of my projects fell by the wayside. As I’d been talking about them to friends and colleagues I wondered if I had fallen foul and tricked my brain I’d already accomplished something.

So in 2011 I stopped talking about my plans and ideas, and therefore undertook a number of projects/ideas and built them quietly by myself. Some were shared internally with colleagues, but very little made it out into the public gaze. Generally in 2011 I do not feel as though I’ve produced enough.

Over the past month I’ve been reading Prof Richard Wiseman’s books, and in particular :59 Seconds. For me it is one of the most interesting books I recently read as it talks about many of the theories that self help books cover, and then shows how actual experiments undertaken prove or disprove if something works. In the chapter on motivation it covers 5 steps to increase the chance of finishing your projects or reaching your goals. I won’t mention them all as hopefully you will buy the book, but the one for interest in this blog post is ‘Tell other people about your goals’.

It is interesting, as Derek mentioned in his blog post that ‘Keeping things secret’ is also backed up by experiments and data. So which method to choose? Well I think you should try both – I think different methods will work for different people. Consider where you find yourself at the moment – if you feel you’ve been letting your projects and goals slip but you’ve been keeping them quite, go public with them and see if that gets you up and going.

Changing tact this week and going public with a project has been quite eye opening. I’ve been working on a new project called Swan Sites (the name may change but I’ve not been able to think of a better one yet!) I’ve been posting on Twitter about the project and linking to posts actually on Swan Sites that contain updates and already there has been :
– feedback on features
– an offer to help

The feedback and offers of assistance are so motivating. You could easily spend 6 months on something like Swan Sites before revealing it to the public. Without feedback, ideas and even usage from friends, colleagues and the world in general I think I would loose motivation and drop the project. Six months seems an eternity to me to work on something behind closed doors, even a few weeks seems like a long time. And I don’t think there is an issue with putting ideas out there and risking them being copied. I mean how many ideas are completely original anyway – certainly none of mine have ever been. They might be a mixture of existing things and concepts – and I’m a firm believer in the theory that ideas are worthless and execution is key.

So 2012 is going to be the year of going public with ideas and plans, plus small steps and iterations. My main project that I’m going to be focusing my spare time on will be Swan Sites, but I’m also going to use this principle with any projects I work on at Lightning Tools.

Sending emails from Heroku using SendGrid and Rails

Using : Ruby 1.9.2, Rails 3.1.3 – also using the cedar stack on Heroku
Please note : I’m new to all this Ruby on Rails stuff, I’m posting these articles so if I make mistakes hopefully people will point them out.

I’ve spent around half a day trying to get this to work so I hope by putting up this post a few others might be a bit more productive. I’m pretty sure I over complicated things originally as working from the start again to write this post – things have magically fallen into place and worked first time! The documentation on Heroku is confusing to say the least – one page says to do one thing, another says something different. But as of writing – this is how I got my Rails app running on Heroku to send out emails using the SendGrid addon.

I’m presuming you already have a Rails 3.1.3 application up and running on Heroku. My application simply stores friends birthdays, and I want to get an email notification each time a new friend is added.

1, From within your application directory in Terminal, run the following command:

heroku addons:add sendgrid:starter

2, In textmate, add a new .rb file called mail_setup.rb in config/initializers directory and paste in the following:

ActionMailer::Base.smtp_settings = {
:address => ‘smtp.sendgrid.net’,
:port => ‘587’,
:authentication => :plain,
:user_name => ENV[‘SENDGRID_USERNAME’],
:password => ENV[‘SENDGRID_PASSWORD’],
:domain => ‘heroku.com’
}
ActionMailer::Base.delivery_method = :smtp

3, Now add an ActionMailer to your rails project.

rails g mailer AdminMailer

4, In app/mailers/admin_mailer.rb add the following method:

def user_added
mail(:to => “your@email.com”, :subject => “New friend added”)
end

Obviously change your@email.com to wherever you want to receive the email 🙂

5, Now you can add, commit and push up to heroku

git add .
git commit -m “AdminMailer added”
git push heroku

6, We can now test to see if we can send an email by running console commands remotely on our Heroku app. At the terminal type:

heroku run console

7, And then try:
AdminMailer.user_added().deliver

Hopefully you will get an email delivered to your inbox!

8, Now to add this code so you get an email delivered whenever a friend is added, simply add this to the create method within your friends controller:

AdminMailer.user_added().deliver