In a recent podcast Steve Pavlina talked about kick starting your business, with advice aimed at turning a profit as soon as possible. One comment in particular made me think. He mentioned how when he started speaking about personal development as a business he didn’t bother making a fancy website, designing a business logo, nor making fancy flyers or business cards instead he concentrated on the things that would make him money as soon as possible, eg the website content needed to draw in visitors.

I have to wonder how many projects spent more time creating a flashy website than working on the game the site is promoting. In many cases the games never reached fruition making all the work on the website a waste.

How many people spent months designing their game only to realise its way too complicated when it came to implementation. Perhaps if they’d prototyped their ideas early and often they could have refined and expanded their original design over time rather than throwing it all out. As steve put it, “Ready, Fire, Aim” rather than “Ready, Aim, Aim, Aim, Aim….”

This kind of thinking applies to most things including coding. Ask yourself how many times have you become hung up on the best way to solve a problem, turning what could have been a few hours thought and implementation into a day or more of procrastination.

In some cases the extra up front thought is justified and can save you time in the long run, but in many cases I’d wager that after just a short amount of thought you’ll have a solution worth implementing. It might not be optimal, but if it works and gets the job done you can always refine and improve later. The chances are you’ll later find your solution was good enough after all and the time you’ve saved can be spent more on improving more critical areas.

Although his advice in this specific case wasn’t anything new to me, he did put it in a much more general way than I’ve usually heard. A few times this week I caught myself about to embark on a new task, then thinking do I really need to do this now, will it really help me achieve my current goals. In most of those cases I decided it wouldn’t and put the task to one side or in the case of coding solutions, I went with a working solution rather than spending time coming up with an elegant reusable solution when realistically I’ll probably never reuse the code. Besides if I need to I can always refactor it later.

One task I did consider and went ahead with was moving all my hosted websites to a new web host along with transferring my domains to a new registrar. I decided to keep my domain registrar separate from my web host to make future changes easier/quicker. The net result is that for the time it took to send a few emails and register on a website, I’ll save over £200p/a. I’ve not had my dreamhost account long enough to compare their stability to my previous host, but based on the recommendations I’ve had from friends that use dreamhost its worth a trial. I’ll come back to this is 4-6 months time and post a bit of feedback on my experience with them.

I guess I should take my own advice more often, having just spent a few hours “flashing” up my web blog. Oh well what would the world be like without hypocrisy.