My Next Startup

I'm collecting notes on lessons learned from past professional experiences (both my own, and that observed from others) as background material for when I do my next startup.

Totally a work in-progress and expect lots of change as I iterate.

GTD

Everyone in the company, and especially anyone in a leadership position, must use or at least understand and use basic GTD (Getting Things Done) techniques such as splitting work between collecting, processing, doing, and understand terms and phrases such as "waiting for", "date time dependent tasks", "next actions". Exception: if someone is a new college-hire, then they should be paired with a GTD expert in the company and mentored on the use of GTD until they become self-sufficiently proficient at GTD. All other professional hires should be expected to know or teach themselves GTD. Mentorship is an option for professional hires as well, but they are expected to be sufficiently self-aware to explicitly ask for it.

Wiki

Everyone in the company must be proficient with wiki editing and use the company wiki daily to collect work related inbox items, keep status on projects, etc.

Hiring

Required skills (this is just a start)

• GTD. See above.
• Wiki editing and use in personal productivity as noted above.
• IM (Instant Messaging)
• ... more to be added.

Desired skills (not required, but certainly will make many things easier)

• IRC
• ... more to be added.

Meetings

Currently pertains only to face-to-face (F2F) IRL meetings.

Meetings are such a common source of inefficiency and other problems that they need to be explicitly addressed.

• Avoid meetings. Most meetings are an exceptionally inefficient use of time. See CommunicationProtocols for how to communicate like 99% of what people think they need a meeting to communicate.
• No meetings before noon.
• Build rather than blab. Be creative and constructive rather than communicative. I have found that I'm mentally most alert, and most creative before noon, and thus prefer to spend that time creating, writing, coding etc., rather than communicating.
• Physical condition is more important than meetings.
• Physical workouts enhance mental alertness, creativity, energy, and motivation. In addition maintaining and enhancing physical fitness is for me a higher priority than any meetings (and should be for you too) and thus I prefer to keep the morning completely clear in order to provide the most flexibility in the combination of physical workout and creative work output that seems optimal or ideal as of that morning.
• Physical health is more important than meetings. Sometimes your body needs extra time (asleep) to recover, for any number of reasons:
• fighting off some virus (cold/flu) and a few more hours of sleep may help crush it. The economic trade-off here of spending a few hours fighting off a cold rather than days in downtime when you come down with it are obvious. And yet, morning meetings force people to go to work when they are in the process of getting sick (they might just feel extra tired) and thus really get sick.
• worked out a bunch the previous night (like 3-4 hours of climbing) and your body needs extra time to repair/restore itself.
• returned from a trip to a different time zone (especially more than 3 hours) and your body needs more sleep to recover from travel stresses, and reset its body clock.
• Noon-2pm meetings must provide food. Whoever calls/organizes a meeting from noon-2pm must provide healthy food to at least all requested attendees, and preferably all attendees.
• People typically eat lunch sometime during noon-2pm. Don't presume to make them schedule their lunch around your meeting time. If you insist on taking up someone's time between noon-2pm make sure you at least offer healthy food to any/all attendees. Be sure to know ahead of time or ask explicitly what everyone's FoodPreferences are. If you are unable to provide healthy food in line with everyone's food preferences, then schedule your meeting 2pm or later.
• No status meetings.
• These are a complete waste of everyone's time in the meeting and the existence of such meetings are usually are a sign of bad management, irresponsible employees, or both. Instead: every employee should continuously keep their status on any company project up to date on their wiki page(s).
• If an employee isn't keeping their projects up to date on their wiki, then as their manager talk to them 1:1 about it, and figure out what's blocking the employee, and remove any obstacles. The far too common practice of calling an employee on the carpet in a status meeting in front of their peers demonstrates a lack of respect for the employee, sets a bad example, and hurts company culture - a sign of really bad management. If you're a manager, don't do that, and if your manager does that, tell them, let's discuss this matter in a 1:1. If they continue to berate you, walk out of the meeting. Yes, you should be prepared to quit if your manager is a) dumb enough to behave in this manner, and b) disrespectful enough to ignore your request to discuss the matter in a 1:1.
• No standup meetings. Theoretically a "stand up" (often called a scrum) meeting is supposed to be a quick meeting at the start of the workday (often starting around 9am to 10am) where everyone in the room gets a chance to indicate what obstacles they have that others in the room can help them with. In practice this almost never works and fails in a number of ways:
• People treat it like a status meeting and list all the crap they are working on, probably because they are insecure, or have big egos (or both) and thus like bragging about how important all the things they are working on are, hearing themselves speak, or maybe because they enjoy the powertrip of wasting everyone's time in the room.
• People start discussing the issues rather than just saying hey I need 5 (whatever) minutes of your time to discuss topic X.
• People end up going around in a circle and going thru the motions of saying "nothing for the team". Day after day.
• ... I know there are other reasons these are a waste of time, and will document them later.

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Inspiration

• Every company I've ever worked for, plus my own startup, 6prime.
• Tara's post that mentioned her annoyance with 9am meetings got me to finally start writing this stuff up publicly.

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