Three thoughts on staying focused while working for yourself
From my first three months of doing it
After working on my own startup for about three months, I’ve come up with a few ideas on how to stay focused and get work done outside of a corporate environment. I think about each of the guiding principles below at least once every day - if you’re on a similar journey to mine, maybe you’ll also find them to be useful mental touchpoints.
Idea 1: Carefully choose what you spend your time daydreaming about
When I was first starting out, I would daydream in the shower about what it would be like if our app, Remi Journal, reached ten thousand, a hundred thousand, or a million users. I’d do mental math about how much revenue we’d need to be profitable at scale. I’d negotiate term sheets in my head about whether we’d be okay raising at a $5 million or $10 million valuation.
I knew I was (at that point) just fantasizing, but I figured it was harmless. I don’t think it’s totally harmless anymore. When you spend your time imagining those sorts of moments, your brain starts craving them and treating them as the only goals worth getting excited about.
A much better way to enjoy work day-to-day is to daydream about the subgoals. At the beginning of the process, I was the only user of Remi, so it was much more effective for me to spend time imagining how awesome it would be if Remi had a particular new feature I could use the next day, or, more ambitiously, how cool it would be if I could get a couple friends to use the app with me.
When I spent time picturing how good it would feel to reach quickly attainable milestones like these, the work required to reach the next moment worth celebrating seemed much less intimidating.
The best part was, when I started daydreaming about these sorts of goals, they started coming true relatively quickly! I found that I could train my brain to actually believe that the moments I imagined could become reality.
I had vividly pictured showing a friend a beta version of my app, and then having them call or text a few days later that they’re hooked. When it actually happened a couple weeks later, not only did it feel great, but it reinforced to me that I am capable of developing plans to reach my goals and executing them successfully. It’s a positive feedback loop that becomes more and more effective the more you put it into practice.
My strategy:
Purposely get excited about goals that are achievable within a month.
Spend time daydreaming about milestones that are within an order of magnitude of where you’re currently at.
Idea 2: Never spend time not knowing what to do next
There’s a certain feeling of disengagement that I sometimes notice when I realize that a problem is going to be both novel and difficult. It’s an interruption to my flow state during the work day, when my brain’s engine of absorbing problems and churning out ideas to address them gets interrupted by a problem so big or new that it breaks the normal process.
That moment of disengagement is dangerous, because it can feel like a natural place to pause working. After all, your brain just turned off the problem-solving machine, so you might as well go get a coffee and recharge, right?
Wrong! That’s the worst time to take a break, because you’re going to be faced with returning to a problem that seems insurmountable,. That’s going to dramatically increase the amount of time it will take to get yourself to even consider working on the problem again.
The key is not to solve the problem on the spot. It’s to get in the habit of taking at least one step towards solving it, so that when you’re thinking about coming back to it, you know that there’s at least some direction waiting for you.
For technical problems, this could be to pull up documentation and read a tiny bit about some dependency that might be causing an issue so that it doesn’t seem so much like a black box when you come back to it. For something administrative, it could be just to write a bullet-pointed game plan of subtasks that both provide clarity and give a sense that the task has at least been started.
Every conceivable task is, at the end of the day, a series of subtasks that each take a few seconds (Google this, type that, etc.), so the trick is to get in the habit of identifying what the first one could be and doing it before taking that coffee break.
My strategy:
When you feel your brain come into contact with a problem that’s “too big”, get in the habit of taking at least one step towards solving it before taking a break.
In other words, if a problem seems like a brick wall, you should make sure to punch at least one hole in the wall for when you get back to it.
Idea 3: Practice proper threat identification
It would be terrible if, one day, after Remi gets some media attention, I get invited to do a conference about app development, but on the day before the conference I have a kidney stone attack and I have to cancel it. Or would I cancel it? Should I try to power through and do the talk anyways? Would that even possibly work, or would I end up curling up into a ball on stage and embarrassing myself? Or would that end up getting media attention and sympathetic headlines, which would actually end up being a good thing?
This is the other side of the coin from Idea One - it is useless to put yourself in hypothetical moments of crisis and try to game-plan exactly how you would successfully extricate you and/or your company from the situation. I’ve gotten in the habit of asking myself the following question whenever I catch myself feeling anxious about a negative hypothetical:
“What about that imagined moment could apply to the real one I’m currently in?”
Usually the answer is nothing. Sometimes, like in the above example, it’s that I should drink a lot of water to try and minimize my risk of recurrent kidney stones. Every once in a while there’s something actionable that I put on my to-do list, just in case, but overwhelmingly there is no utility in staying inside those imagined anxiety-crisis moments.
Regardless of whether you identify any utility after asking the question, you can practice simply moving on afterwards. Note a to-do in your planner, or don’t, but either way dismiss the thought as “processed” and go on to the next one.
This is easier said than done for fears that are particularly emotional, but I’ve found that even in those cases it’s just a matter of practice and mindfulness - I can notice that I’m feeling some negative emotion, notice that it’s linked to the thought, use the above method to process the thought, and trust that the emotion will fade more quickly than if I were to keep ruminating on it.
My strategy:
When I’m feeling anxious imagining a hypothetical bad future moment, ask “What about that imagined moment could apply to the real one I’m currently in?”
Then, add any useful conclusions to today’s to-do list and dismiss the thought as “processed.”
What’s next?
Maybe I’ll make a post that’s more about the process, growth, and mechanics of starting the business at some point. I also might post things that summarize my very amateurish thoughts about how various systems work. If they’re useful to me sometimes, maybe they can also help out someone else.
If you’re interested in living with intention, peace, and in remembering the fun little moments from each day, you should check out Remi Journal (the easiest way to remember each day) on the iOS App Store!