Branding David

I am all about new projects. I dislike being stuck doing one thing for any lengthy period of time. This is pretty apparent in my career, but it is a personal failing that I am working hard to alleviate. Today, on twitter, I asked people how they stick with projects over the long term, and these are the responses I received:

@andrea_r wrote: set a time line, get someone to hold you accountable (re: Nag you ) Pick one to finish first.

I got this same response, more or less from @jeremywright who wrote: for me, 120 day plans. Gets you out of forest for the trees mode. Consecutive ones keeps you moving.

See, I knew this tip and tried to do so when writing my work in progress novel. I had actually paid someone to help me in part by nagging me about updates. Unfortunately, I didn’t feel accountable to this person, and they weren’t the type to push me hard enough to deliver results, and so the project fell by the wayside.

I am getting ready to pick it back up, but before I do, I wanted to work towards learning the tricks to keeping the project going to completion.

After Jeremy, came a response from @chrisgarrett and @malcolmbastien about accountability as well.

Doing something in the public light doesn’t equal accountability though. As sort of a double-shot at trying to give my writing the potential for success, I published it online as I wrote it, in its unedited form. I had hoped the story would gain a small following of people that would help compel me to continue.

This didn’t work out and even today, most of the traffic to the site is related to spammers.

@chrisgarrett then put forth the idea that I didn’t really want to complete the project, saying “sometimes we don’t actually want to finish, no matter what.”

I felt a little attacked by his message, but, at least in part, he was right. People that really want to finish something are able to find the determination that others lack. For me, determination is linked to my perceived sense of difficulty. I’ll skip sleeping to figure out a programming problem. I’ll play the same level of a video game hundreds of times to unlock the secret to beating it. The potential reward at the end has very little to do with my interest in completing the puzzle. I just like victories, and I like feeling victorious as often as possible.

Many people have noticed and commented on this trait of mine, both in a positive and negative way.

andrea_r then said “so.. what’s holding you back? Not into the project? Is it still viable, still a good idea?”

Thankfully, the projects I want to complete are still good ideas, and they are still viable. All they need is some time and attention, and maybe setting them down for a while, to focus on other things will, in the end, have benefited them.

I have always found it hard to pick back up on a story though, as my emotions, ideas, and experiences shape how I attack the story, and lead to it being very disjointed. Personally, some of my best articles, posts, and stories have all been written within a day to a maximum period of a week.

I don’t yet understand how other writers deal with this constant shift of perception and emotion, but as a barrier to continue a project, it is fairly weak, and something I need to be aware of so that it doesn’t stop my progress.

chrisgarrett then asked, “what is different about the projects you DO finish?”

To which I responded, “they are short term, highly focused, with a very finite beginning, middle and end. They are challenging.”

I think my issue on focusing over the long term has more to do with two things: goals and perceived challenges.

chrisgarrett then gave me two great tips: “my secret for writing books? In my head they are not books, they’re blog article series. Write an article at a time” and “find someone who is also doing the same type of project and make a bet”

These tips bring together the two things I need most in order to keep pushing ahead. They help me find a challenge by putting myself in direct competition with someone else, a technique that I’ve used successfully before in tracking my blog against other blogs in my same niche, as well as reminding me to give myself constant goals in order to stay focused on the smaller victories that will help build out the larger project.

I will likely follow both of these by working on making public goals once again on this blog, tracking my progress publicly and finding someone, hopefully, on the Problogger.com forums that would like to have a friendly competition with me.

In the end though, any long term focus has to come from me. I need to take this advice, and practice it. I won’t always be successful, and since I am also my worst critic, I also need to learn to be more forgiving when I stumble or hit a wall, so that I can then turn around and start running again.

If you are on twitter, I hope you all follow:
andrea_r
jeremywright
chrisgarrett
malcolmbastien

They are great people, with great advice.

So, five more days have gone by, and due in part to my special circumstances of not having a home phone line, I haven’t been able to talk to the representative they’ve set up to help me with the problems my wife is having with the Dell laptop that I bought her.

I have since bought a cell phone, so that should help. And I’ve been contacting them as often as I can through Skype, but every time I call, Sunny is on another call.

I am getting more and more frustrated, and each time I talk to my wife, she mentions about how quickly the laptop is degrading. Now, the screen is dim most of the time, with it only going to a normal brightness when she presses on the frame near the hinge. She just told me today that we should send it back, and they’ll be able to see the issue no matter what this time but she forgets how narrow minded the technicians are at Dell. They’ll fix the cable for the back light display, but probably won’t look to fix whatever is shorting out on the wrist rest area or the other weird quirks that her laptop is quickly picking up.

I truly believe that we received a lemon for a Dell and that we should receive a replacement with the same features. The laptop isn’t very old, and so I assume they still have one sitting around. My wife wouldn’t even care if it had slightly less hard drive space, or was slightly slower, as long as it was mostly comparable. The goal of course is to get a machine that is built right and that will make her happy.

The longer this goes on, the more layers I am exposed to within Dell’s corporate structure, the more frustrated I get. I still believe that Dell has good products, but that they do sometimes have build quality issues that need to be resolved quickly. The reason why Dell gets so much bad press isn’t because their products suck, but instead because their support in dealing with products that don’t work is poor.

Had Dell been wise enough to vigorously test the laptop when we sent it the first time, I am sure they would have come across our issue and been able to fix or replace the components with issues. Then all of this fall out, and negative press that I am working so hard to write, would have never occurred, and I would have continued to sing their praises.

Skipping over that, if Dell had been wise enough to put me in touch with someone that could instantly just ship out a replacement unit of similar specs, and taken back the one that I had issues with, they could have reconditioned it, and sold it as a discount. Their loss on this exchange would have been noticeable, but the good will would have been huge.

Now, I am sitting here, frustrated that I still don’t have a working laptop for my wife, and she starts school in a week, and all of this goes back to Dell not being able to solve an issue that was brought to their attention more than a month ago.

If you couldn’t tell from my resurgence of posts on this blog, I have Internet access again at my new apartment.

I had to go with Eastlink, apparently a well know ISP in the east coast of Canada.

I was hoping to go with Rogers, but they don’t service this area, since it is too sparsely populated I assume. While the cost is fairly comparable, the speed is about half of what I am used to. The technicians came and set it up fairly quickly and were nice. The support personnel on the phone have also been very nice.

Honestly though, I am just glad to have Internet where I live again. Working from coffee shops and whatnot isn’t ideal.

If you live in Bruce County, Ontario and are looking for a decent ISP, check out Eastlink. So far they get my vote, despite the crummy install timeline.