Productivity tricks for independent workers

Over the last half year of working remotely in Beijing, I’ve developed a few tricks for how to keep myself productive:

1. At Home – It’s easy to get distracted at home, so if I feel my concentration slipping, I will often set a timer for 45 minutes or an hour and tell myself that I can’t look at any websites, check email, etc. until the timer goes off.  This is enough time to get back into the flow of getting things done, and sometimes when the timer goes off I don’t even want to stop working quite yet.
2. At a coffee shop – Don’t sit on the couches.  If you’re not talking with people, couches are just there to make you doze off.  Plus, they’re too low and far from the table, so they’re usually bad ergonomically.
3. On the road – Get a cell phone with tethering.  It’s usually not fast enough that you’d want to use it as your primary internet, but if you end up in a coffee shop and their network goes down right as you’re trying to send a big file to a client, it’s great to have a backup.
4. Anywhere – Work with other people you know.  Coworking locations are great for this.  If you see the same person every other day and you always ask each other what you’re working on, it can give you a little bit of direct accountability; you see them working, plus you already told them what you’re trying to finish for the day, so now you have to get it done.

How to start a coworking community incrementally

A few months ago, I decided that Beijing really needed a coworking location, and I would be the one to build it.  I immediately started to look at office leases here and quickly became discouraged because of the extremely high cost.  At the same time, however, I’d been reading  about lean startup techniques and customer development for my own startup.  Lean startups focus on ensuring product-market fit before investing a lot of resources, so I decided to apply some of these ideas to my coworking project.  I’m glad I did, because they forced me to slow down and saved me from making an expensive mistake.

If you’re also starting a coworking space and would like to know how I’m starting small and building up, here is the process I’ve used so far:

Ideas for Blog Posts

Last week, I looked at my blog stats and realized that I’ve been getting far far more visitors than ever before.  August had over 700 views!  In a fit of passion, I promised on Twitter to write 7 new blog posts in September.

Unfortunately, I’ve been really busy so far this month and every day after I finish my work, I’m too tired to think of a good topic.  Now it’s already halfway through the month and I’ve only written two posts.  Therefore, I’m asking for some help.  What do you think my next post should be about?  There’s a poll below with a few broad topics I know about, and if you have anything more specific in mind (like a particular post title?), you can put it in the comments.  After three or four days, I will check the results and write a really good article on whatever wins.

Beijing Startup Founders Twitter List

I’ve started a list on Twitter of startup founders in Beijing that tweet – See it here.  Let me know if there are any I’ve missed or if you want to be included!

Automatic networking

Networking and keeping track of my contacts has always been hard for me.  Other than the occasional guilty feeling at forgetting someone’s birthday or sending late Christmas cards, it was never a big deal before February.  However, after I moved to China, I realized that I had no friends here, no one to go talk to about tech, and because I was working at home every day, I wasn’t meeting anyone.  On top of that, when I did meet new people, I was very bad at following up with them – maybe because I felt it would be awkward to offer to hang out with someone I didn’t really know yet.

For a while, I became fairly depressed, but eventually I realized that I was going to have to get over these feelings and go find some friends of my own or else I was going to go crazy.  I knew there must be a way, because every day I could see how easily my girlfriend was able to make new friends and very quickly start a meaningful relationship with them.

One of the big skills my girlfriend has that I lack is that she always knows who to call on any given day.  She instinctively knows how long to wait between contacts for friends vs. business contacts, and she can remember for whom it’s been too long.  I don’t know if my brain is just different from hers, but I find that requires a lot of effort.  If I haven’t seen someone for a long time, I’m probably less likely to think of hanging out with them, not more likely…

Luckily, I’m an analytical programmer, so I can use a computer to do this thinking for me.  I made myself a spreadsheet that keeps track of my contacts and calculates when the next that I should reach out to each of them is.  Every person can have their own period of time that I should wait, so if someone’s a good friend, I can remember them every three weeks, but if someone just needs an update every once in a while, I can send them an email every three months and be ok.  I now check this every week to see who I should get in touch with.  For example, this week, I need to email my friend Jason and see how he’s doing in Boston.

After using this for a while, I feel much more confident about getting more people in my network and not worrying that I’ll lose track of them.  I can safely say that I’ve made more new friends in the last month than in the first five months I was in Beijing.

I actually think this would be a fun web app to build.  Would anyone else be interested in getting an email every Monday that reminds you who you should be in touch with this week?  If there’s a positive response, I’ll take a few days and build an MVP for this and send everyone an invite.

Beijing Coworking – Making Progress

Last time I posted about Beijing Coworking, I’d had 10 responses to the survey and was starting to evaluate locations in Beijing.  In the meantime, a lot has happened.

Startup Mastermind

This year, my friend Simon has been working a Mastermind game for the Blackberry, and when I went back to Boston I got a chance to try it out.  It looks great, but I was actually much more impressed at how good he’d become at the game after thousands of testing sessions.  I took quite a few guesses to finish games with 4 and 5 secret numbers, whereas he has been able to finish games with 9 slots in only 13 guesses!

When I asked Simon what his secret was, he told me that you have to make each line teach you something you can be sure about.  You can’t just guess randomly, and you can’t try to learn too much at once.  When Simon plays, each line is an experiment; he knows what every possible result will mean to him before he submits it.

Not only is this great advice for a game of Mastermind, it’s great advice for a startup.  Lean startups are all about feedback, but it’s very easy to start looking at your Google Analytics reports without knowing what they’re really telling you and how you should react to them.  Now, I have a spreadsheet on which I write down any hypotheses that I have, a test that will allow me to test the hypothesis, and what the next step is if the test confirms or denies my hypothesis.  The actual column names are ‘Hypothesis’, ‘Test Idea’, ‘Required Results to Confirm’, ‘Required Results to Disprove’, ‘Action if Confirmed’, ‘Action if Disproved’, ‘Real Test’, ‘Results’ (these last two are filled in over time as we run the tests).

I’ve only just started doing this, so I only have one completed test so far, but it’s a good reminder to think critically about what exactly I learn from any action I take, and I hope it will help Bespoke Row improve quickly in the future.  If I get enough comments here, I’ll write a follow up in three months or so on how it works out.

Mac OSX – tabbing in forms and skipping select controls.

The fact that when I tab through a form on my Mac, it skips the drop downs, which forces me to use the mouse, has been bugging me for a long time.  I finally decided to try searching google for an answer and came upon this old, but still very relevant post by Tony Spencer:

http://www.tonyspencer.com/2006/05/02/tab-skips-select-form-fields-in-mac-browsers/

Awesome.  The only difference between 2006 and now (Snow Leopard) is that in System Preferences, Keyboard and Mouse have been split into two separate menus, so you should go System Preferences >> Keyboard >> Keyboard Shortcuts to find the ‘All controls’ radio button.

Beijing Startup Resources

I recently read a great blog post from Jon O’Shaughnessy that lists all the startup resources in Boston and a similar post by Rob Go provides a todo list for new entrepreneurs in the area.  I thought it was a great idea, so this is my attempt to do the same for Beijing.  Beijing’s startup scene isn’t quite as cohesive as Boston’s, which should make a list even more useful.  I’m going to keep adding to this as I learn more, so please add anything I miss in the comments.

Events and Groups

• Beijing Coworking – Beijing Coworking is a group of independent workers who like to work together better than being lonely working at home.  For the most part, we’re techie/startup people, so the biggest benefit is having other people to talk to about ideas and problems with our businesses.
• Beijing Web Wednesday – Startup and tech folks who meet once a month at Nearby The Tree.  Usually there’s a presentation and then some time afterward for networking.
• iWeekend Beijing – This is part business plan competition, part networking event.  The first one in November was a huge success, and they’re planning to have more later.
• StartupWeekend Beijing – Very similar to iWeekend, except that it focuses on slightly later stage ideas.  At the end of the weekend, there will probably be a few ideas that get funding.
• Beijing HackerLab – Hosted by Yuanfen~flow incubator, the plan is to have an open space every two weeks to give people space to work on random projects.  The first one will be December 11, 2010.
  
• Mobile Monday – I haven’t had a chance to go to this yet, especially since my startup isn’t mobile related, but I hear it’s also exciting

People

• Benjamin Joffe – Twitter Organizer of Mobile Monday and deep thinker about tech in Asia.  I really enjoyed his presentation at the Geeks on a Plane Beijing mixer
• Frank Yu – Twitter Edits the Beijing Startup Digest newsletter
• Lee Kai-Fu – Twitter Ex. Google head and founder of Innovation Works
• Me – Twitter – only partially joking here; I’m trying to learn as much as I can in Beijing as well, so if you’re doing cool stuff, I’d love to follow you.

Newsletters

• The Startup Digest Beijing – currently edited by Frank Yu.  Fairly new, so only about one event per week listed.  I’m sure it will get better and bigger.

Blogs

• Mobinode China 2.0 – This is a big blog that covers tech all around Asia, not just startups.  I linked to the China Web 2.0 category, which has more focused content, but there’s a lot on there.  To be totally honest, I’m not sure how good this will be, as I just added it to my RSS reader today.

Incubators

• Yuanfen~flow This is an art gallery/incubator based in 798.  They host Beijing’s Hacker Lab, and currently have a few projects that they’re incubating.

Angel Investors

• Intuitive Capital – I met a woman from this company at Web Wednesday in August.  She said they’re interested in funding startups that have some traction, but haven’t yet needed to raise any outside money.
• Chris Evdemon – Twitter I saw him on Angellist as an Angel in Beijing.  You can pitch him here.  I believe he also works at Innovation Works.

Venture Capital

• I don’t actually know who the VCs are that are active in Beijing yet…  Add them to the comments!

There are also occasional one-off events, like when Geeks on a Plane showed up, that are great but don’t repeat, so I haven’t included them here.

Boston’s Betahouse

I’m back in Beijing from my US trip now, but I’m still going to try to go back and fill in some of the blog posts I wanted to write while I was there.  This one is a brief reflection on what I saw when working at Betahouse in Boston.

Betahouse is a coworking location that is currently in a Central Square apartment/loft; they’re moving soon, though to somewhere else.  There are no bedrooms, but there is a kitchen with bar.  The whole floor is open with a high ceiling and wood floor.  Altogether, they have 9-10 desks, so it’s fairly small compared to other places I’ve seen. Pretty much everyone has monitors and full size computers and a reserved desk, so there are not many temp people.  This means the place is really focused on working and it’s easy to be productive.  Also, everyone has a key, so there are no open/closed hours.

I think this set up gives them a tight community, but it’s a little intimidating to walk in the first time.  You can’t help but be a little unsure of where you’re going, since it is just an apartment and you have to go up the stairs by yourself.  Also, there’s no secretary or door greeter, so it’s possible no one will say hi and welcome you.  You have to say the first word.

Overall, I think betahouse’s environment felt the most productive out of nearly everywhere I’d been; you could tell people were there to get stuff done while they were working.  They do relax, though; on my Friday in Boston I had some drinks over there after five and talked to people about startups and coworking.

What I learned at Betahouse is that having permanent members who are really permanent, and have their whole office setup there, not just people who come in every day with laptops, can make the place feel more productive.  Once I can get a coworking space up and running here, I’d like to encourage some people to really make it their permanent office.