Scott H Young

How often do you get that next “great idea”? How often do those “great ideas” result in something you can hold in your hands? It’s easy to have that work-in-progress sit in your basement or hard drive for months without ever being “quite ready”. It’s even easier to start projects that get pushed aside after two weeks.

Feature creep is dangerous in projects because your initial three-month endeavor quickly becomes a multi-year odyssey. Projectitis, or recklessly jumping from project to project without completing everything, is also a common disease. The best way to control these two problems is simple: know what you’re buying into before you pay for it.

Do You Know What You’re Buying Into?

A project, whether it’s writing a book, taking a course or setting up a business represents a commitment. Although most people don’t view it this way, a similar form of commitment is a mortgage. You need to make regular payments each month and if you can’t pay the debts you’ve signed onto you lose everything.

Knowing what you’re buying means that you are completely aware of the up-front commitment and you decide how much you are willing to spend ahead of time. If you don’t budget yourself, it’s easy to sign onto deals that potentially put you in a time-debt for the rest of your life. Worse, if you don’t understand your commitments, it’s easy to rack up debts without the resources to pay off any of them.

Time-Budget with Deadlines

A deadline is a budget for your time. Keeping firm project deadlines and aiming for finish as quickly as possible keep you from racking up a huge time-debt. When I take on any new projects, whether it’s another product, a website or program, the first decision is how much time I’m willing to invest.

Is your project going to take a month? 3 months? A year? Setting an unmovable deadlines forces you to stick within your commitment. Otherwise feature creep and procrastination will expand your time-debts to the point you can never pay them back.

Reach Beta As Soon As Possible

Whenever you invest in a project, your first goal is to reach a point of accomplishment. Have a working prototype, beta version, unedited novel or anything that you can hold onto. Once you’re done this, any leftover time can be used for perfectionism. When you build the habit of finishing first, perfecting later, projects actually get finished.

Keeping projects deliberately small has an added advantage. If you only work on year-long projects, then your learning cycle takes a full year. It takes at least one year for you to see the whole picture of how your efforts translate into measurable results. Whereas if you focus on month long projects you can keep the learning cycle short and adapt quickly.

With this blog my learning cycles are incredibly short, it can take as little as a week for me to get information about how my posts have done. I finished my first free e-book on this website in two weeks and the second in a month. By keeping the cycles short I reduced the unknowns when setting up new projects.

Enthusiasm Doesn’t Finish Projects

It’s easy to get enthusiastic about your “great idea”–for a moment. But when you look at a 3, 6 or 9 month scale, those emotional surges are only tiny blips. Instead of relying on the emotional ups and downs to pull you towards the finish line, establish the clear, logical reasons why pursuing the project makes sense.

Write out your reasons on a piece of paper and store them in case you forget. By having clear reasons for why this project is worth the costs of time, money and effort, you are more likely to see the project through until the end. Reading through this list of reasons should make the benefits of finishing your project obvious.

The other benefit of having a list of reasons written down is that it gives you the basis for deciding whether to quit a project. If the assumptions your reasons were based on change, you may need to kill the project.

A lot of people I know don’t bother starting projects because they know they won’t finish. What’s the point of writing a book, mastering a new skill or setting up an online business if you won’t see the end result. But there are few things more satisfying than holding a finished product in your hands after months of effort. Setting deadlines, aiming for short cycles and writing out your reasons are the best ways to reach that.

I just finished a 30 Day Trial to set up the habit of using a morning ritual. After using the habit for over a month I’ve been able to gain an extra hour each day. Because using a morning ritual has also given me greater control over how my time is spent, I’ve been able to squeeze out an extra hour and thirty minutes of useful time every day.

What is a Morning Ritual?

How often do you hear your alarm, silence it with the snooze button once or twice and drag yourself to make that first pot of coffee? The idea behind a morning ritual is to take the pain out of waking up by making it automatic. A well-designed morning ritual also offers you extra time in the quieter hours of the morning to devote to something important.

My morning ritual was fairly simple:

1. Wake up at 5:30 each morning.
2. Do a few push-ups to shake off any remaining grogginess.
3. Read for 90 minutes.

A couple of the benefits I’ve noticed from using this ritual for the past month:

• Easier to wake up. For you night-owls, it may seem hard to believe that waking up earlier would be easier than staying in bed. But if you can wake up at the same time consistently it takes a lot of the pain out of deciding to get up or sleep in.
• Increased strength. Improving how many pushups I could do wasn’t the motivation for starting this habit, but when I started I did around 45 pushups each morning and now I do 55-60 (the most I’ve ever done is 100). My benchpress also went up from 165 to 185 lbs.
• Read more books. Adding the extra ninety minutes of reading time puts me back on schedule to read about 60-70 books each year. With all my in-class reading, assignments and work, my rate was slipping. It’s nice to bring back the literary gluttony.
• An extra hour each day. My wake-up time went from 7:00 to 5:30 or 1.5 hours earlier, but my sleeping time only went back about 30 minutes. This means an extra hour awake each day.

This isn’t actually the first time I’ve set up a morning ritual. Over a year ago I set up the habit of waking up at 5:30 and starting each morning with a half-hour jog. That habit didn’t last too long as I started to face the Canadian winters, but it was still a useful experiment.

How to Set Up Your Own Morning Ritual

Here are a few suggestions for how you can set up your own morning ritual to get an extra hour out of the day and invest it somewhere useful:

1. Pick a Wake-Up Time. I decided to go with 5:30. Depending on your schedule and social calendar, you might want to go with an earlier or later time. I find that waking up earlier tends to afford more quiet hours, but if you live by yourself this might not be a big issue.
2. Pick Your Investment. With this morning ritual I wanted to invest the gained time in reading. I’m a big fan of consuming ideas as a way to hack reality. Other good investments for your morning ritual include:
   • Exercise - Jog, hit the gym or stretch to start your day.
   • Projects - Get some work done on your novel, website or building the next killer app.
   • Study - Learn something new, build skills or practice an ability.
3. Set a 30 Day Trial. The core element in changing habits for myself has always been the 30 Day Trial. This great tool, first proposed by Steve Pavlina, forces you to focus on the hardest part of changing behaviors–getting through the initial conditioning phase.
4. Get Moving. The hardest part of waking up early is getting over that initial grogginess where you might easily drift back to sleep. My solution was to do a few pushups right after waking up. By getting yourself moving you can boost your heart rate, making it easier to keep from falling back to sleep.
5. Procrastinate the Unimportant. Aside from putting on clothes and using the washroom, my morning ritual started immediately after I woke up. Don’t delay your ritual by eating breakfast, answering e-mail or having a shower.
6. Write it Down. As always, I find writing down any habits I take on to be helpful in making them stick. If you don’t write down exactly when you’ll wake up and what you’ll do when you wake up it’s easy to go back on your commitment.
7. Stay Consistent. Stick to your wake-up time or investment plan for the whole thirty days. If you skip a day or two throughout the trial you sabotage your efforts in making the habit stick. When I did this that meant a very early start to my Christmas morning and New Years Day.
8. Work on Something You Care About. This should be so obvious it doesn’t need mentioning, but it’s easy to setup a habit because you feel you should rather than you really want to. Studying because you feel you need to rather than reading more books about subjects that fascinate you. Pick an investment that you’ll be really happy about waking up an hour earlier to work on.