What should I be doing with my time?
02 Dec 2021A problem?
So I mentioned in my first post that I might have ADHD – it’s far from official but it’s a strong feeling that I have. One of the symptoms (I guess in absence of a diagnosis I should say “one of the things about me”) is that I find it hard to evaluate the relative important of competing demands on my time.
Over the last ten years of my life I have become very good at managing this (and hiding it) within the scope of running Ugli. Not a naturally well-organised person, I’ve managed to find the right tools and the right routines to get done what I’ve needed to get done, and to keep Ugli’s projects moving smoothy through the sausage machine.
‘Progress’ in my old life (which is actually continuing alongside my new life) was measured in terms of:
- Sales enquiries followed up on, proposals written
- Development progress checked up on
- Client needs met
- Team needs met and general administrative duties done
If all of that was under control there was nothing stopping me going to the pub. Apart from my children.
Now that I’m in a world where a) Ugli work seems to be slowing down, and b) I’m newly obsessed with this project to launch one or more recurring revenue businesses, things are very different, and I’m finding this confusing.
It is really hard now to prioritise tasks, to plan, to figure out which if any of these ideas to pursue, how to do so and in what order. I veer between gloomy “imposter syndrome” and an optimistic urge to just pick one and get building (a terrible idea!). Partly I’m just not used to having so much to do, and partly it’s very hard knowing which bits to do first.
A possible solution?
I’m halfway through reading The Lean Startup (among a bunch of others … see ADHD comments above) and the approach it recommends to building a startup seems to offer a remedy for this problem:
An idea for a new business is essentially a hypothesis, and as such it can and should be tested. Eric Ries talks about the value hypothesis (“my product/service will generate value for its customers”) and the growth hypothesis (“my product/service will reach new customers and grow at a good rate”).
So for my “Admin product or concierge service for … campsite owners” (idea #1 in my list) the hypotheses would be roughly as follows:
Value Hypothesis
“We are able to devise and supply a service to campsite owners which will save them sufficient administrative time and/or money that they would be prepared to pay for it with a monthly subscription of £x per month.”
Growth Hypothesis
“Campsites are sufficiently a) numerous and b) easily-contacted and c) under-served by similar offerings that it will be possible – in time – to sign enough of them up to the service at £x per month to a) cover costs and b) make an attractive profit.”
Ok so there are still some variables in play (ie. “£x per month”, “in time”, “costs” and “attractive profit”) but if both of those statements hold more or less true then ladies and gentlemen we are in business. And, while I won’t 100% know whether they are true until I’ve set up the business and am banking the “attractive” profit, a very good indication of the truth of these statements can be obtained from some simple investigations and experiments (“validated learning” in the terminology of the book).
(To this end I have had cold-call conversations with (so far) ~15 campsite owners and the response has been quite encouraging: they are easily contacted, they do spend a lot of time doing coms and admin, this coms and admin could be out-sourced to a team I put together (perhaps offshore though this is not unproblematic). It remains to be seen how much that service would cost, and how much if anything the campsites would pay for it. But more on this in another post.)
In general the resoundingly clear answer to my AHDH-induced state of not knowing what on earth to do with my time, now, is … distil my business ideas into the kind of hypotheses described above, and test the hell out of them until I know which ones are true.
So let’s do that then.