CoOrganizing CoStructure
So, Greg Palmer, Whitney Hess and the affable Tony Bacigalupo and I have joined forces to attempt to organize our lives. As independent professionals, it's difficult doing everything for yourself. Doing all the bookkeeping, data entry, scheduling, and the actual work all yourself can be a daunting task. We're all facing similar issues with our lives, so when Tony approached me on the idea of CoStructure, I was intrigued. CoSutructure, Tony explained, is the notion of working together towards one single goal so that we can all achieve a higher level of productivity.
For example, I have STACKS of business cards (we're talking embarrassing quantities) that I have yet to put into my address book. Many other people have this same problem, so our first idea was to bring ourselves all together and input this data all together all at once during a time set aside specifically for it. But this doesn't quite cover everything. We spiraled into talking about the root of the problem. We boiled it down to two things:
- Time Management (Maker/Manager)
- Task Completion
In diving into the task management issue, Whitney brought up the notion of Maker and Manager schedules that Paul Graham talked about (link below). Essentially, what this entails is separating your tasks into specific times in which you're making your product (developing, prototyping, putting your head down and executing), and others for managing your business (prospective clients, meetings, calls, etc...).
All of this sounded great, but we still needed something to drive us to stick with it. We need a way to incentivize this lifestyle, other than our own well-being. Whitney chimed in at one point and mentioned how easy it is to cancel on herself, and I think that is the key. We need to stop cancelling on ourselves through putting the responsibility for our actions on each other, more specifically, people we trust. We need to have stake in one another so that we can create positive and negative incentives to motivate our productivity, and more importantly, our sanity.
Now, we're just getting started with this whole idea, but we hope to share our respective thoughts throught the process. We're really excited to start getting things done in a way that allows us to be productive and have time for ourself to keep ourselves healthy and running at peak condition. Keep it here and on the CoStructure Posterous for all of our input.
-Mark Burstiner
www.markburstiner.com
