I came across a guy on IndieHackers who called this "Maker Paralysis, which is like the equivalent of writer's block for makers".
He put himself on something he called "Ship Therapy" - "committing to ship at least one new product every two weeks, while writing about the process and progress once a week".
IT HAPPENED. I clicked the wrong button on my phone today and lost a few months of notes. Instantly thought of this message haha. Going to transition to Google Keep instead....
Having some structure and more than anything, intention and persistence is key.
IMO most people blame the lack of the Personal CRM, but really the bottleneck is they're not recording information they want to remember about people.
I personally just use Google Keep to store notes I want to remember on people close to me. As for acquaintances, I just respond to Facebook updates and prompts as they happen.
Absolutely. I come up with a lot of crappy ideas, but there's usually something worth exploring every now and then.
(1) I have an asana project called Ideas. Each task is an idea. I've set up a workflow where I can just send an email to the Asana project inbox and a task gets created. I've kept up this practice for more than a year and I have almost 300 ideas I've logged.
(2) Whenever I think 'alright, I want to work on a new side project', I go through the list of ideas and categorize them. A ton get categorized as trash, and a very small number get categorized as worth moving into customer discovery and validation.
Ask him if he's talked to prospective customers and keep urging him to! The risky assumption in this whole venture might be whether customers have the problem and want their solution, not the technology behind the solution.
Entrepreneurship is a big focus for me right now, so here's what I log every day:
In the AM: (1) What are the current goals for different areas of my life and what does it mean I have to do today? (2) What are the biggest challenges I have with #1? What are the skills I wish I had right now which would have been really helpful? --> Those seem like good areas to research and read up on.
In the PM: (1) What are my accomplishments today? (2) What were my total # of productive hours? (3) What am I grateful for today?
I'd encourage a multi-pronged approach:
* Job boards make it easy to find jobs, but it's a volume game
* If you find a job or company you like, you can go the extra mile by cold emailing someone on the team for an informational interview -- you can learn a lot more about the job, the team, and get a leg up versus other candidates
* You should definitely tell your friends you're looking and ask for referrals
Like @pradpk said, the quality of your resume and anything you apply with is key. Job search success is basically (Volume ) x (Conversion Rate).
Two things have helped when I've felt adrift in the past:
* Reflection: Think about what activities are really useful for introspection (this is person-specific) and do a lot of it. For me, it's journaling -- I started writing a lot. I came across an interesting site recently (750words.com) where people write 3 pages a day and it trains you to just get your thoughts out. Seems interesting.
* Make a big change to your environment: Take a sabbatical or a big trip. Go to a place where you can immerse yourself in an environment that feels completely different. Actively try to get inspired and to find yourself.
I used to absolutely hate it, to the extent where I would actually take the time and effort to switch to old.reddit.com whenever I got served the new redesign.
BUT after a few months of having the new design being pushed in my face, and forced to engage with it, I've kind of mellowed out. Infinite scroll is annoying, otherwise I find the look and feel is reasonably pleasant, and a little more "2019".
It does feel like a pretty unnecessary redesign though. Does anyone know if Reddit has published any stats showing what the redesign accomplished? I'd be curious to know.
I've found that I don't bookmark for the sake of bookmarking -- What I'm really trying to do is to build a knowledge bank on something; like a blog post formed by snippets of articles I've found over time.
Realizing this, I now have a bunch of documents related to topics of interest. Whenever I come across a site of interest, I'll add to the relevant document. I haven't quite figured out the right software to manage those documents. Right now, I use Asana a lot in my personal life so those documents are Asana tasks.
Quantitatively, there's two things I track daily: (1) My progress at the gym (which, surprisingly I track in an ongoing draft email*) and (2) the number of productive work hours I've worked that day (to make sure I'm not just bumming around).
Qualitatively, I have a bunch of reflection questions I ask myself in the AM and in the PM and I log my answers in a journal electronically. LMK if you'd like to learn more!
P.S. Is this crazy? Does anyone else keep a running notepad using draft emails?
He put himself on something he called "Ship Therapy" - "committing to ship at least one new product every two weeks, while writing about the process and progress once a week".
Really interesting and seemed to work for him: https://othmane.io/posts/ship_challenge