Actually Make Something

Posted on May 10, 2012 by Michael Schechter • 14 Comments

I come from a world of physical products, a world of wholesale and retail, and people offering up their hard earned money in exchange for a physical product. It’s a very different world from this one. It’s different from a world where our ideas, our words and our time might be all that’s needed to make a living.

There’s been a lot of discussion surrounding the realities of making a living solely from online advertising and how it’s creating a race to the bottom. Gabe over at Macdrifter made an excellent counterpoint, talking about how it’s truly a race to the top. I agree with his take and if you’re looking to make a living online, I strongly suggest that you read it. There are a ton of websites that are going to contradict me, but let me be blunt: there are very few people who will be able to sustain making a living solely by sharing their opinions on the internet and putting them next to ads. It’s going to be difficult no matter how they seek to make that living, no matter how important they, or even their audience, think those opinions are.

It often seems large, but those who make a full-time living writing for the web are the tiniest visible tip of the iceberg that is people writing on the web. And those who sustain that living for a lifetime… well, let’s just say that we should probably start a hall-of-fame for achieving that feat. It’s also rare that web-based writing alone will generate enough income regardless of how you “monetize”1. There are speaking gigs, book deals, consulting jobs, book tours, side projects, paid products. It’s a lot like a musician’s life. Seemingly awesome, these jobs are actually ton of hard, occasionally soul-crushing work.

I probably have no business talking about this considering I’m not looking to make my living from these words. This is a passion project and a regular attempt to sharpen my own pencil (while occasionally, hopefully helping others). All you really get here are opinions, experiences and occasionally a little bit of fact. No matter how good I get at serving those up, it’s unlikely that this will ever feed my family (although it may help keep the lights on and might even put some beer in the fridge).

Unless you are that rare anomaly, you’re going to have to do more. If you want to make a living doing this, you’re going to have to go one step farther. You’re going to have to make more than words, you’re actually going to have to make something. Actually, scratch that, you’re probably going to have to make a lot of things. Things that we want. Things that make it easy for us to help support you living and that enable you to sustain it.

The reality is, if you’re looking to make a living by typing words and posting them on a website, you’re going to be cobbling that living together for a while… you know, just like every other early-stage business owner out there. Encourage your readers to help, give them a reason to help support you, but if you really want this to be your livelihood you’re going to have to make something more than just your words alone. No matter how valuable they actually might be.

  1. Yes, I hate that word as much as the rest of you. [↩]
Filed Under: Creativity

More on Evernote’s Endgame

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Michael Schechter • 0 Comments

More from Ben Brooks on Evernote’s endgame:

Evernote, in my head, has always been billed as a tool of that nature of: “you only need this tool, it does everything.” In that sense Evernote is a lot like a Leatherman — very handy, but not the best at anything other than being really handy.

That’s not to say it doesn’t have its place — I own three Leatherman tools — but it is to say that what makes a Leatherman handy is that all the tools are in one package. What Evernote is doing is selling the Leatherman, but also saying there is a neat hammer and a neat drill that you can buy to go along with it — which makes the entire package a bit less handy.

The Leatherman is a perfect analogy for what Evernote has always looked to be for its users. The toolbox is a better analogy for what it seems that they’re looking to become. It takes time and thought to break that Leatherman apart, acquire the missing tools and put it all neatly inside a box. At the moment, as Brooks points out, we have a bunch of good tools. If I’m right we’ll soon have a potentially great ecosystem and much needed toolbox.

Filed Under: Productivity

More

Posted on May 9, 2012 by Michael Schechter • 10 Comments

There are two kinds of more.

The more as in “I need more of this” or “I have more to do”.

And then there’s More. As in, “I want more out of life” and “this means more”.

When I started getting my act together, I wanted to be able to do more. As I begin to feel like I’m getting somewhere, I want things to be More.

Finding balance is a challenge. It feels as if there is a constant battle between width vs. depth, and to be honest, I’m not always sure I’m choosing the right one.

Do you find yourself fighting the same fight? How are you go about balancing more and More?

Filed Under: Self-Improvement

A Guess At Evernote’s End Game

Posted on May 8, 2012 by Michael Schechter • 15 Comments

Ben Brooks on Evernote Acquiring Penultimate:

Anybody else confused about Evernote’s end game?

This actually seems like a highly logical move for Evernote and a smart strategy. Evernote wants to be our external brain and our brain tends to capture a variety of media in a variety of ways. That doesn’t always lend itself to a single application. As it continues to evolve, I see a world where Evernote’s prime offering becomes less about capture more about storage and recall. The app, both on OS X and iOS has always been an impressive step towards ubiquitous capture, but it always falls short in certain areas. This left Evernote with three options:

  1. Stop expanding their offerings, continue to improve on them, but limit their potential.
  2. Continue to add features, bloating the main offering and making it far less tempting to use.
  3. Create or acquire applications that offer a focused and optimized experience that act as part of a larger ecosystem.

I believe the acquisition of Penultimate is yet another step towards the latter.

One of my biggest problems with Evernote has always been the feeling that I am crossing streams. I don’t want to blend notes, sketches, recipes, contacts and more, I’m already disorganized enough. Sure, I could create folders (or use a naming convention) that separates all of these things, but that’s not how I like to work. I tend to use my applications as filters. Different apps for different intentions, so the idea of keeping things separate, while also storing them together is a tempting one.

I enjoy the separation that comes from using Evernote Hello for contacts, Evernote Food for recipes, Skitch for taking and annotating screenshots and now Penultimate for handwritten notes (not to mention Evernote’s already impressive core functionality). It provides a focused experience in an optimized app when I want it, as well as universal access in the main Evernote application when I need it.

Related side note: anyone care to take bets that a dedicated text editor can’t be all that far behind?

Cloud offerings such as Dropbox and iCloud offer the storage, but neither focuses on capture (although both work with several applications that do). By providing integrated options that focus on all aspects of capture, Evernote sets themselves apart from these platforms.

This will sound a little lofty, but these latest steps echo things we’ve seen in Apple’s own ecosystem. Owning the end-to-end experience between hardware and software has always helped set them apart. While I don’t think Evernote is going into hardware anytime soon, I can’t help but wonder if they are looking to do something similar by not only providing the platform, but by creating or acquiring the applications that make the experience better.

Filed Under: Productivity

Why C.J. Chilvers Is Wrong

Posted on May 7, 2012 by Michael Schechter • 0 Comments

From C.J. Chilvers:

Constraints breed creativity.

Before I tear C.J.’s point a new one, I want to make a few things clear: I have nothing but respect for C.J. and admire the crap out of his worldview (regardless of how much I enjoy debating with him). He’s also far from the first person to express this idea, he’s just a champion of it. While the title is link-baity as hell, it’s only because I think there is a really important, but really subtle distinction that warrants discussion. Well, that and the fact that I really want you to listen to today’s episode of the podcast where we mercilessly duke out this topic and more. It’s easily one of my favorite episodes.

Requisite disclaimers aside, let’s get into the meat of why he is wrong and I am right. It’s not constraints that continue to breed creativity, but our choices. As you’ll hear in today’s episode, C.J. uses George Lucas and Van Halen as his proof of concept. When they lacked resources, they were creative. When faced with unlimited resources, not so much.

While these are clear examples of excess leading to excrement, their problem was neither one of abundance or restriction. Their failures are not a lack of constraints, but are the byproduct of bad choices.

Forced restrictions aren’t going to make things better or interesting (hopefully Paul Miller’s idiotic internet sabbatical will prove this once and for all). More often than not, they are just some gimmick to make less interesting work seem more important (you know, like blogging five days a week for a year or “calling C.J. out” in this post for that matter…).

Our choices, however, are important. And to be clear, this isn’t a question of having choices, it’s a matter of making better ones. While far more rare than Lucas and Van Halen, there are companies and creators like Apple and Steve Jobs that have unlimited resources, yet manage to make intentional choices that lead to better results. This results in compromises and it does create constraints, but they all stem from the choices, not external (or even self-imposed) circumstances. Apple doesn’t deny themselves the right to use a certain technology, they choose the right ones to make the best possible products.

At the core, C.J. is really right. In fact, he’s spot on. We need less crap and we need less complexity. We need more creativity and more intent in our work. He’s just wrong about where it will come from. It won’t stem from constraints or forced restrictions. You can’t ignore abundance and overload. You just need to stare them in the face and then make better choices.

For more, be sure to give today’s podcast episode, with special guest C.J. Chilvers a listen. We cover a lot, but overall it is an interesting examination of the differences between creative and analytical minds.

Filed Under: Personal

The One Thing | The Productivityist Manifesto

Posted on May 4, 2012 by Michael Schechter • 0 Comments

The One Thing, simply put, features one thing on the internet that captured my attention and that I believe is worthy of yours.

When someone coins a term, there’s temptation to poke fun. When my podcast co-host Mike Vardy does it, temptation is an understatement.

When Mike first started using the term “Productivityist“, I would crack or joke or ten. When he first sent me his manifesto, The Way Of The Productivityist, I shut up and started nodding.

If you’ve been looking for a realistic, yet still idealistic way to be more productive, The Productivityist Manifesto was made for you. Do yourself a favor and go read it now.

Be sure to subscribe for free by Email or RSS to automatically receive future additions to The One Thing series and more from A Better Mess.

Filed Under: Productivity

A Year Of Blogging By The Numbers

Posted on May 3, 2012 by Michael Schechter • 15 Comments

While lessons are all well and good, the numbers matter. Like it or not, the results of our actions are equally as important as the insights we gleam from them. My success is meager at best, but I’m proud of it. I want to share the results with those who may be considering stepping up their frequency and wonder what the impact might be. There are many who will be far more successful in the same timeframe, there are those who obsess about the numbers far more than I ever will (and plenty who care far less as well). But for those who are interested, here’s a look at how things shifted after a year of blogging.

Blogging By The Numbers

Visitors Overview LTD

May 2010-2011

Better Mess May 2010-2011 Traffic

To say things really didn’t go all that well while I was blogging inconsistently is an understatement. To say that things are gangbusters now would be an overstatement. Still, a year of consistent blogging has yielded a substantial increase in traffic. It’s hard to tell if my 2010-2011 numbers are right, but even my best day during that time pales in comparison to current readership.. There’s a dip in the middle of the year when I was on Posterous where it seemed that almost no-one visited the site1. Most likely this was a byproduct of not installing my analytics code correctly when I moved sites, but as you can see, the data I lost was not going to be all that substantial.

May 2011-2012

Better Mess May 2011-2012 Stats

While several things are up significantly, you’ll also notice that others are down. My bounce rate (read: people showing up at the site, throwing up and leaving) is up, my page views are down and time on the site had dropped by nearly 25%. Much of this is byproduct of site design, as I’ve opted to keep the past seven posts up on the home page and don’t like to use things like “read more” buttons to boost page views. I also don’t have a consistent Call-to-Action for the site, so it makes sense that many would read their post and go. Time on site is the most disconcerting and I will likely work on helping bring some of the better content to the surface to encourage people to stick around going forward.

Note: That nearly flat orange line in the image above, that’s last year’s traffic vs. this years traffic in blue.

39 Subscribers to 1006 in 365

Better Mess Feed Total

It started with a declaration in April2. I wanted to take the site seriously and see what happened. When I made that shift, I saw my first uptick. Afterwards, I came up with the plan to post five days a week for a year to see what would happen when I leaned in.

I set a goal for myself… it was actually the one and only thing I decided to try for in addition to meeting my posting schedule. I wanted to see if I could get to 1000 subscribers in a year. I also wanted to see if I could do it without going overboard and feeling as if I was constantly begging for people to stick around. It came down to the wire, but I’ve been having an on-again/off-again relationship with success for the past few days.

Better Mess LTD Feedburner Stats

While there lots and lots of little things that contributed to, there are three that really contributed to the change.

  1. I committed to it – The instant I started taking the site seriously, was the instant a few readers showed it the same respect. The more I focused on the idea, the more I found people who wanted to continue coming back to it. Some move on, some show up, throw up and leave, but more and more the ideas seem to connect with the right audience.
  2. I asked for it – While it’s still an awkward thing for me, I ask people to stick around. I don’t do it every time, I don’t shove a subscribe box in people’s faces, but occasionally making the “ask” makes a big difference in getting people to subscribe. There are several things I should and probably will continue to do to improve here (like an easier way to subscribe by email for one), but just asking people if they’d like to read more has proven to be an effective tactic (or at least it is when the posts are useful).
  3. I improved at it – I’m far from good, but I’m farther away from the bad I was when I started. Regardless of anything you might read on improving your audience, I’d put this above all: write better crap. The better the crap you write, the more likely people are to read it.

So, there you have it, the 30,000-foot view of a year’s worth of blogging. I’m happy to answer any questions you might have. Thanks to everyone who contributed even a single page view or second of their time to these stats (especially all of you subscribers) and since we’re talking numbers and all, I encourage those of you who haven’t to subscribe for free by email or RSS.

So, there you have it. The lessons and numbers from a year’s worth of blogging. And now, back to your regular messy programming…

  1. A decrease from the nearly no-one who visited it when the analytics appeared to be working correctly. [↩]
  2. You’ll notice the one tiny jump in 2010-11 numbers, that was due to this post. [↩]
Filed Under: Self-Improvement