I’ll start off by apologising for the radio silence over the past few months. I’ve taken a step back from contributing to this blog on productivity and mindfulness to focus on a brand new adventure. Since September 2021, I’ve joined a startup venture as a co-founder!
As the nature of startups is extremely volatile and I’m already juggling a full-time job on the side, I’ve had to focus more time on the business over these past few months. Unfortunately that means I have less time at the end of the week to contribute to my original passion project, Mind & Practice.
The transition into the startup world has been particularly tough, especially since this blog helped me understand what I’m capable of. But after a couple months of startup life, I now understand the real-world value of all the lessons I’ve learned and written about in this blog since August 2020.
That’s why I’m taking this opportunity to write about my experience with the startup and how I’ve used the concepts of productivity, Stoicism and mindfulness to stay focused in a chaotic world of constant change and self-doubt.
Hopefully this post will act as a guide if you’ve started a new business or if you’ve just always been interested in starting your own business. I’ve found that keeping mindful productivity front-of-mind is one of the most effective ways to achieve our goals.
But before I start telling my story, it might help you to have some context on the startup. So let me tell you…
What Is BuildFaast?
BuildFaast is an online community of web developers and web designers interested in completing new projects and learning together. Compared to other programming and web design classes, our cohorts make new tech skills fun and easy to learn in a group setting.
Everything in our community is geared toward cohort learning.
How do we approach cohort learning?
We organise each of our learning groups into a 10-person cohort where everyone works to complete a specific piece of content together over a 2-to-4 week period.
Each cohort starts with members introducing themselves, before setting the learning milestones that we’ll aim to complete over several weeks. We then chat throughout the cohort to share our progress, start relevant discussions and ask any questions about the cohort content.
At the end of each week we’ll have a video call with the group to discuss our key challenges and takeaways from the week’s content.
A Sense of Accountability
The point of these cohorts is to encourage people to learn and complete new projects. Signing up to a cohort gives you a sense of accountability to the group. This feeling will motivate you to complete the project.
Even if you would have given up tackling the same project alone, you’re more likely to complete it with the accountability of a group. We check in with each other regularly and help each other overcome difficulties with the course material.
Getting Support from the Cohort
Another clear benefit of cohorts is that you get support from the group, as you can ask questions whenever you get stuck with the course material. I’ve had an experience like this in one of the cohorts I attended.
I couldn’t figure out a specific design technique in the Figma cohort, and after about 20 minutes I gave up trying. Instead of spending more time on it, I asked the group my question and continued with the tutorial. Within a day, I had three different solutions to my problem!
The general idea behind BuildFaast is that we learn best together. If you’re interested in web development or web design (even if you’re a 100% complete beginner), you can join us today!
Sign up to the BuildFaast app, join our Discord and we’ll show you the ropes!
Now onto my take on leveraging mindful productivity in a startup environment!
Productivity & Batching
The most important rule in productivity is to focus on effectiveness over efficiency. It doesn’t matter how good you are at a specific task. If the result isn’t positively impacting your KPI, it’s not true productivity. That’s a key lesson from Peter Drucker’s Effective Executive.
Once you can ensure that your core actions contribute to your main goals, you can begin to focus on streamlining these actions. That’s where batching comes in.
Batching is a common productivity technique that allows us to really get into the groove of whatever we’re working on. It’s related to the concepts of flow state and deep work. Whenever we switch our focus from one task to another, our mind slows down. This attention residue stresses us out and gives us fewer results to show for our time.
That’s why I always try to group my work day into a few different activity blocks. An example day might spend an hour scheduling tweets for the week before moving onto an hour of brainstorming new content and outreach ideas. I’d then spend an hour or two writing new content for the blog and guest blog features.
Ideally I’d have more time for each of these activities, but from my experience that’s just how startups work. The team is small and the work is plentiful. We need to fit as much as we can into the 24 hour day.
Here are some of my favourite tools and techniques for batching
Tweetdeck
I schedule tweets for the week ahead to keep the account active on Twitter. Otherwise, tweeting could easily eat up a large portion of everyday. That’s why I use Tweetdeck, a free platform Twitter offers to schedule tweets (in addition to other features).
Scheduling 30 tweets in an hour means I knock out most of the week’s Twitter activity in a fraction of an evening. That means we’re always outwardly active and sharing our message with the community. It also means I can log onto Twitter whenever I have a spare moment to engage with our followers in real-time.
Follow BuildFaast on Twitter if you want to see this method in action!
Content Repositories
I use Google Docs and Sheets all the time. Mainly to organise my thoughts and create templates for future use cases.
Whenever starting a new type of marketing activity, for example, I tend to fill up a new document with paragraphs of copy I plan to post on Reddit, Quora, Twitter or wherever we think our target audience hangs out online.
Before I post to one of these sites I make sure to edit the wording in the document. This helps me detect any potential spelling or grammar issues quickly. And it works great when I can use old sentences as a template for new posts without needing to reinvent the wheel for each post.
The template approach is a shortcut that keeps my brain fresh and focused in the moment.
Internalise the Four Stoic Virtues
Stoicism teaches that to live a good life, you should live ethically. That’s why they devised the four Stoic virtues: Wisdom, Courage, Justice & Self-discipline.
Reflecting on how these four virtues apply to your daily life will help you live a happier, more fulfilling life. I regularly reflect on these virtues to make sure my daily actions align with my greater purpose of living a good life. Below are my thoughts on our work with the startup.
In terms of Wisdom, I truly believe we have a good idea and continue to move the business in a sensible direction everyday. We use logical reasoning and constant experiments as our guiding force for finding truth in the startup’s environment.
For Courage, we need to keep moving forward and doing what’s necessary regardless of anxiety or any other negative internal emotions. Start-ups are not meant to be easy and there’s great risk involved. We’ve found that often the best thing for us to do is the things that scares us most. Showing up everyday with a courageous attitude helps us achieve our goals and never cower away from what we need to do.
In terms of Justice, we strive to make people’s lives better. We think there’s a big market in the ed-tech space that wants to learn together. We’d never want to compromise on our vision or try to just “make a quick buck”. We are truly in this to make a difference in people’s lives and make it easier to learn new practical skills online.
For Self-discipline, we just need to keep at it, making incremental progress and improvements everyday. We can never be discouraged from our vision. The only way to lose is to decide our purpose isn’t worth defending anymore. As long as we keep at it, we will continue to make incremental progress toward our vision of universal cohort learning everyday.
Focus on what you can control
I first got into Stoicism because I had a hard time being productive without getting stressed at work. Focusing on what I could control was the first lesson I learned from Stoic philosophy.
It’s easy to fall down the rabbit hole of “what-if this” and “why not that”, but when you’re building a startup you need to have laser-focused vision. Your first objective should be super simple, often just building a minimum viable product (MVP). That means we need to focus our thoughts and actions around the activities that will help us achieve this goal and those to come.
It’s easy to get bogged down by debilitating thoughts and fears, but you must focus your efforts on the actions that will bring you the most benefit in order to achieve your most productive and Stoic life. That’s how I devised the Stoic To Do List.
For me that’s involved not worrying if this business doesn’t grow as big or as quickly as I know it’s capable of. Instead I focus on how I can contribute to the business’s growth in the meantime. I constantly ask myself “What can we do right now to improve our product and the users’ experience?”
Amor Fati with Acceptance & Tranquillity
At the end of the day there are so many things outside our control. We must learn to accept these events so that we can move forward in the most effective way. Nietzche coined the term Amor Fati, which means there is good in everything that happens. That’s why we should love everything that happens and never avoid anything.
If you complain about things that happen in your life, you resist the exact conditions that have brought you to this moment. Everything that happened in the past needed to happen for you to be here right now. And there’s great joy in seeing it that way.
Sometimes you won’t get that thing you were working towards. Most startups go through phases of fundraising, and BuildFaast is no exception. We received our first two VC rejections in the past month. Rather than taking this to heart, we’ve tried to focus our energy around building a great business.
Again this comes down to what we can control. We can’t control how other people value our ideas and projects in the present. But we can control our daily actions and take the steps necessary to build a great product for our community of self-learners. Everyday we get one step closer to our goals.
We just need to refocus our idea of winning the startup game. If we don’t raise capital now, we can always raise it in the future. As long as we don’t give up, we’re winning. Sticking to what’s important, even when it’s difficult, is my definition of an atomic habit.
For now, we can only focus on what truly matters. And that’s building something great!
Startup Mindfulness & Productivity in a Nutshell
I’ve had a blast the past few months. Working on a start-up is something I’ve always wanted to do, but deep down I never felt I would take the first step in taking this risk. I feel I’ve learned so much in the past 2 years about Stoicism, productivity and mindfulness. And this venture has been a great test to put all my concepts into action.
Productivity has taught me to focus on which actions drive the greatest results. Batching helped me optimise my output while I’m in the right mindset for specific tasks. The four Stoic virtues helped me refocus the work we do and our approach around my values.
Focusing on what I can control helps me complete the task at hand, which is building a great business, instead of the rewards like VC funding. With this approach, we can accept our current circumstances with amor fati and not take it to heart.
Building a business, much like anything else that’s worth doing, is challenging. Keeping a focus on mindfulness and productivity techniques helps us stay focused on the task at hand without unnecessary mental strain.
We are capable of so much development in our lives as long as we stick to our goals and put the effort in daily.
That’s how we can improve the world and ourselves a little bit everyday.