Tom Krieglstein

Hindsight - 09/20/10 - 43rd Floor

Today we moved the Red Rover team to the 43rd floor at MMC (our corporate client). It's the second highest floor at MMC and a far cry from the 23rd floor with the interns and other randoms that sat in our area. The game and vision are bigger on the 43rd. The view is also amazing (see pictures below).

I've always known that the best thing I can do for myself is to keep revolving closer to people who are higher up than I am because I know I will keep playing to the level of the game that is presented to me.  What I'm learning is how big the game can get. I don't want Red Rover, or my individual success to be stifled by a limited vision of the world, so here's to expanding my view both literally and figuratively.

The Entrepreneur's Chip

 

Entrepreneurs try to solve problems. Some hope to turn a profit in the process and others are content to leave money making out of the equation. Either way, they are still just trying to solve problems. But I've noticed that beyond the problem solving lies another, deeper, motivation. A motivation that drives entrepreneurs to want to successfully solve problems in the first place and put up with the daily stress and bipolar emotions of starting a business. 

The reasons seem to vary and I'm not going to claim to know even a small fraction of them. For some it's to prove something to someone, or overcoming a mental/physical handicap, or a traumatic life experience. Whatever the chip is, it's real and it drives them to keep going day to day. 

I've thought long about what my chip is, because it's not as clearly defined as others. While still evolving my thoughts on the subject, I think my chip is related to my family's blue collar farm life upbringing and thus far not being able to succeed past a blue collar lifestyle despite a plethora of great ideas. Proving I can be someone who can take an idea and make an impact on the world as big as the idea itself. 

 

Hindsight - 09/16/10 - Buffering Time

Today I was working on an excel doc that I should have just given to Megan, but I didn't. Afterwards I felt like I do when I eat a greasy pizza or candy bar. I know I shouldn't do it, but I did it anyways and I get a 'blah' feeling in my stomach. I used to not get this feeling with such tasks, but rather would get a sense of accomplishment, so I see it as actually a good thing.

I'm learning that working at the executive level is about buffering your time as much as possible to focus on only the work that is in either the entrepreneurial level of "High Urgency, High Importance" or  "Low Urgency, High Importance" boxes. The kind of tasks that have you working on your business verses in your business. Working on the excel doc is an example of working in the business, building out a marketing strategy is an example of working on the business.

The game then is to protect your boundaries for as long as you can throughout the day because various tasks, often found in the "High Urgency, Low Importance" box, will try and squeeze time out of you that isn't in either of the boxes listed above. Even though a task may only take a moment or so to do, it still forces your mind to shift away from the really important work just long enough for you to loose focus, and that costs you.

Hindsight - 09/13/10 - Head First

While speaking at UMSL, I got the chance to hear another speaking go after me. He spoke on Ethics, Character, and Integrity. He did a wonderful job at weaving stories throughout his speech to make each point and keep the audience engaged the full 90 minutes. (Side Note - I want to keep getting better at story telling as it's such an amazing tool to be good at.)

One story he shared was about how Lacrosse players will dive head first when a ball goes out of bounds because the rule is the stick closest to the ball gets to bring it back in. He then asked the room to think about when was the last time you dove head first for something you wanted? Most people had to think pretty far back in life, even all the way back to childhood. It got me thinking about my answer to the question and I would say my two times were falling in love with Annie (literally saying "I Love You" on New Years in Berlin, Germany with fireworks falling all around us), and giving my all to Red Rover (while speaking under Swift Kick was a surefire income).

I tend to be a level headed person, so the idea of diving head first into something goes against my logic, but so far in life, when I've given my all to something, I've come away happier than before. 

Home Office vs Office Office

For six years I worked from home and thought it was perfect to be able to stroll from the kitchen to "work" with my oatmeal in hand. For the past ten months I've been working, for the first time in my life, out of an office and now I know I'll never go back to working from home.

It's not that working from home doesn't have its positives, it's just that I didn't realize how much the negatives actually out weigh the positives until I wasn't working from home.

The biggest advantage I've discovered in "office life" is the separation of work and life. While working at home, I was never good at setting boundaries between when I was working and when I wasn't. The computer was always just an arms length away.

Now I've physically forced myself to have boundaries, and mentally I get excited for both. While eating my oatmeal in the morning, I mentally get excited for work. Like a basketball player prepping for a game. Then as my day winds down, usually around six, I mentally get excited to head home and not be working. In both situations, I'm more present than I've ever been before.

Another advantage of "office life" is in valuing my work. When I worked from home, work time was always a bit flexible. If something came up (family call, store run, mail, tv show, etc) I would easily be able to pause my work and go do it. Even more so than Annie, who also worked from home, because she had a boss she contracted for. I am my boss. Now my work hours are more defined and everyone around me treats them as such. It allows me to be more focused and present while at work.

On travel days, I tend to stay home before heading off to the airport, but I find it really hard to get into the work zone while there because I've trained myself so well over the past ten months to disassociate my home from my work.

I know some people work from home with great success, I realized I'm not one of them. All I want to do at home is spend quality time with family and friends.

Entrepreneurial Confidence [Self Insight]

Confidence as an entrepreneur is a funny thing. In a conversation with an executive coach, I mentioned how, at times, I just don't know if what I'm doing is the right way to do it or not. I didn't get an MBA, I've never worked for anyone else beyond waitering/bartending in school, and business owners just don't get the same type of daily feedback that employees get. So I've had to make up many of my own processes to accomplish goals.

For example, after I establish a goal, my process to completion works like this...

1. Run through my past experiences to see if anything helps. 
2. Research the topic on the web. 
3. Have a go at it.
4. Either report it to the team or go live with it.
5. Celebrate in success or assess the feedback and re-adjust.

Sounds like a nice process right? It might be, but that's the point. No one ever told me to do it this way or that way. It works for me, so that is a good thing, but maybe there is another way that is 10x better that I don't know about. 

I'd like a mentor who's "been there, done that," but the problem is, the higher up in the success pyramid I go, the harder it is to find and lock in time with mentors who are ahead of me...without paying for one.

Most of the work I do on a daily basis is without someone saying it's correct, or incorrect. The entrepreneurial gut comes into play here. I'll try to reach the best "minimum viable product" within the given time frame so I can market test to peers or customers. In watching successful people around me who are in a similar role, I realize they also don't know if what they are doing is right or wrong, but the difference is, they are confident in making the decision.

It's draining though, to keep hiking in the dark producing my own light. Often I wonder what it would be like to just run a parking lot business. What do you do? We rent space for cars to park. Duh.

My Twitter List Tag Cloud [IMAGE]

You don't get to decide the Twitter Lists that people put you on, but they will publicly show up on your profile whether you like it or not. That's what makes Twitter Lists so fascinating, it's a chance to have the world your followers tell you who they think you are based on the content you project to the world. With a little hackery, here's a tag cloud of my Twitter Lists and one of the ever-so-funny ShitMyDadSays account for comparison. Based on the keywords in my tag cloud, I'm happily smiling at the image I'm projecting to the world and how they are perceiving it, however I clearly need to up my funnies.

My Twitter List Tag Cloud

ShitMyDadSays' Twitter List Tag Cloud

Improved Effectiveness Through Simplified Task Prioritization

I used to divide tasks into high, medium, and low urgency. High meaning I'd take care of it within the week, low meaning sometime in the future, and medium meaning sometime in-between. I've since simplified my prioritization to only high and low urgency, and ditched medium.

Why? Every time I have to decide how to label a task it costs money both in time and opportunity costs (other work I could be doing). With the addition of a medium label, my time to prioritize took too long because I didn't have a clearly defined set of rules as to what constituted a medium level task. Where as high and low were clearly defined.

With only high and low prioritization levels, my organization time has significantly dropped and I'm much more effective at responding to the most important tasks first.

Try it out yourself by ditching medium level prioritization and clearly defining what it means to prioritize something as high or low.

Hindsight 09/08/10 - Consciously Being Through Blogging

For the past two weeks, I've been experimenting with publicly writing a daily "journal" entry on my blog. For four years in college, I kept a basic Word Doc journal because I felt like so much was happening every day and I wanted a record of the events and my emotions around the events. I've tried daily journaling on and off since then without much commitment, but so much is still happening every day. I want a record for me but I'm also sharing publicly this time as a record for others to see my ups and downs as a way to demystify what I'm doing and what I've done. An unexpected side effect of daily journaling, that I didn't notice in college, is I'm more consciously aware throughout the day. I don't want any moment to go by without processing it as it might lead to my daily journal of the day.

Side note - I do plan to crack open my college journal and start reposting the entries here, though I'm scared to know what my grammar was like back then :-/.

Hindsight 09/07/10 - Tone of Voice

Everyday we hold a morning check in (The Daily) with the whole team at 10:15. Each person gets 3-4 minutes to outline what their day looks like as well as share a quick story (Tangent) about something, outside of work, that happened to them over the past 24 hours.

Today I noticed when I'm less confident about my tasks for the day, my voice becomes much duller and monotonous. When I'm more confidence about the work I'm doing, I'm more alive. In noticing this about me first, I listened to the rest of the team and noticed we all have similar voice inflections based on the confidence of our task list.

Maybe the dull voice gives us a scape goat so in case someone calls us out as to why we are doing X over Z, then we can say we weren't really interested in it in the first place.

Side Note - another bugs free night last night.!.