Stefan Ukena's Blog

As I mentioned in yesterday’s post, I am planning a 7-day challenge to work on a personal project called MembershipNerd. The most important principle for this challenge is that I will focus on the process, the daily routine, not the outcome. The reason for this is simple: This exercise is about doing something daily, not about completing the personal project.

Without further ado, here are the rules:

• each day, I must work at least 30 consecutive minutes on the project
• blogging about the project does not count as working on the project, but everything else counts

Why not an hour or more? Why only 30 minutes?

I have had much better results when I start with a lower threshold and exceed it, instead of setting a higher one and failing to reach it. I have chosen 30 minutes, because I am confident that it will be easy to do that most of the days. When I instead imagine having to sit down at least 60 minutes a day to work on it, then I am not so confident anymore. I even start dreading the thought of doing it. That’s not a good way to start a project. So I settled on 30 minutes. Pick a threshold that is right for you and your project.

I have been pondering the idea of beginning a new personal project. I do have a couple of ideas, but I am hesitant to really commit to one of them. One reason for my hesitation is that none of the projects really excite me. And at this point I don’t really want to commit to a project if I am not genuinely excited. Especially, because I know from experience that I will feel bad about myself when I eventually drop those projects.

So, you are a software developer or a tech entrepreneur and want to start your next project. Sooner or later, you need to answer the question: What technology should we be using?

Before you try to answer this question, ask yourself one more thing: Is this a project I will be doing primarily for profit, or this a project that I will do primarily for fun and pleasure. If your answer is “for profit”, then the following suggestions apply.

In yesterday’s post I used the image of going on an adventure to overcome the perceived pressure of an empty page. I find that a special type of adventure, an expedition, is also a very good metaphor for the topic of project management, especially iterative, agile project management for software development.

Because a project is a team effort, the image of an expedition to unknown territory is really fitting. Like a project, you need a whole team of people for such an expedition.

Writing is like taking a trip. What if you feel like you want to take a trip, but you don’t have a destination? If you don’t know where you want to go, how can you even get there? How do you know you are on the right path? How do you know when you have arrived? So many unsolved questions.

That’s what it feels like to me when I sit in front of a blank page. Trying to plan a trip without having a destination. It fills me with anxiety, because I don’t even know where to start.

Once you start thinking about feedback loops, you will find them everywhere. In nature, your body, your personal life, your professional life, your neighborhood, your city. Everywhere.

Feedback loops are incredibly powerful. Their main feature is the power to change the system that is receiving the feedback. A system that is receiving feedback, can and most likely will change over time.

What feedback loops are in your life? Have you thought about designing your own feedback loops? Designing a feedback loop that pushes a system towards change, is a powerful way to bring about the change you want to see in the world. Whether that system is yourself, a team you work with, your business, your environment. Thinking carefully about the feedback loops in your life, is an important skill. One more thing that wish I had understood much earlier in life.

Ten days ago I decided to challenge myself: Can I write one blog post every day for ten consecutive days? Today, the results are in. It turns out, yes, I can.

But I am a little surprised how I feel today when reaching this goal.

Ten days ago I expected to feel much more satisfied on day ten. I thought it would feel great to look back, and I would be proud to achieve it. Today I even feel embarrassed to admit that expectation. Ten days doesn’t seem like a big enough accomplishment to be proud of, at all.

When I have to make a difficult decision, I have these voices in my head. One voice that says I should pick this one option, another voice that says I should pick the other option. When I learned to listen more closely, I realized that there are even more voices that have an opinion about the situation. I believe most people experience a similar thing. Have you?

Friedemann Schulz von Thun developed a model that captures this experience, when he was teaching Psychology at the University of Hamburg, Germany, from 1975 to 2009. He called his model “The Inner Team”. I first learned about the Inner Team when I read his book Miteinander Reden 3, probably around the time when it was published in 1998 or 1999. This book was never translated to English, but I would roughly translate the title as “Talk to each other, part 3”.

On a recent rainy weekend I began reading a book. A paper book. When I was about to take a break from reading, I looked around for a piece of paper to use as a bookmark.

“When did I stop using paper bookmarks?”, I thought to myself.

The next morning I was inspired to create my own bookmarks. I remembered that I had used Moo some years ago to print mini business cards. I love the quality and paper. The cool thing about Moo is the option to print every single business card using a different image.

I recently listened to a bunch of episodes of the Grownups Read Things They Wrote as Kids podcast. What is it about? The title says it all: grownups get up on a stage and read from their diaries they wrote as kids.

It seems that many people wrote letters to their future self when they were kids, usually prompted by their parents or teachers. One of the letters, or rather one particular sentence from one of these letters stayed in my head: