When you have a long stretch when you arent bothered, you can get in the zone. The zone is when you are most productive. Its when you dont have to mindshift between various tasks. Its when you arent interrupted to answer a question or look up something or send an email or answer an im. The alone zone is where real progress is made.
via Getting Real: Alone Time by 37signals.
I feel that I get more things done when I’m alone too.
When we first started Intraix, I keep thinking that as founders we have many things to do. Things like pitching, developing products..etc etc. But looking back, I realized I am wrong. In fact, I feel that I have more free time or rather ‘alone’ time where I could sit and down and Think.
The true ‘busyness” comes when you get your First customer, because we have to devote our 101% of our commitment to them. Now that our customer base have grown, it is ever harder to find that alone time. Heading to the office is just to reply emails, phone calls and addressing our customers issues.
I’m sure many founders find it hard to have time just to do their stuff. When I have a bit of time to sit down and start jotting down my notes, the email notification appears or the phone call rings. Sure, I can turn off notification, I tried it before but the reaction from my customer will be: “hey I called/emailed you a few times, where were you?…You know the…” And this broke my chain of thoughts. Plus I do not want to do this often because this would affect (IMHO) customer satisfaction.
What I’m doing now is to wake up early at 5:30am to start my alone time and I find it the most productive time spent for it. Product roadmap, cashflow management and milestones planning are done within this period of time. I still leave emails and phone calls to the “normal working hours”. I would love to stretch this alone time longer but getting up at 4:30 is really tough. So friends and founders, please share with me if you have altnatives or better ways of getting the productivity time.
