EirePreneur

Should I get a pension?

Lots of rhetorical questions today. Bernie Goldbach pointed to a Frank Fitzgibbon article in the Sunday Times entitled "The Pensions no-brainer". Hmm.... so I've no brain then. The first two (financial) things I did when setting up in business for myself were to cash in my pension and sell my car. A few years on and I still have neither, though I do have the use of a family car. Call me stupid but not having a pension is part of the plan - it puts extra pressure on me to build a successful business and I think that's a good thing. If necessity is the mother of invention then pressure is the mother of motivation.

Should I slow down a bit?

When an entrepreneur gets totally absorbed in what's he's doing its no harm to read a short essay about the pace of life in modern Ireland to keep things in perspective. Great writing by Emmet Connolly.

On reflection.... I need a life

I must have wound down too much over the holidays or something because, well..... when I started building a new node for the Open Irish Directory yesterday, a dating node, ..... it suddenly occured to me that.... well..... there's no other way to say this...... GODDAMIT I'm 34 and I still haven't found the woman of my dreams!!! Boooohooooooo!

Now you presumably visit this blog for tech talk so I won't burden you with my sentimental outpourings (you can go here if you want to revel in the fact that somone has a sadder life than you!) but while I was perusing the current crop of dating sites it occurred to me that I'd never fit as much information into a profile as could be gleaned about me through my live online journal. Brian O'Neill is the founder of Spark, one of the more original dating sites targetting the Irish market and it would be interesting to get figures from him on what percentage of members write extended profiles.

Anyway, I've added the Dating node under the Entertainment & Shopping -> Dating & Relationships branch. Besides links to the regular dating websites there's a sub-node called By Blogging and each sub-node of that is a reading list. That means you can subscribe en masse to the group(s) you wish to track. Or you can browse them using Rowan Nairn's amazing OPML/RSS browser - OPod. You'll find EP Junior under the Males seeking Females -> 31-35 -> Limerick branch. The things I subject myself to in the name of research ;-)

Is it work if you love it?

Michele Neylon proposes a Workaholics Anonymous for Irish entrepreneurs -

"If you deal with entrepeneurs on a regular basis you can throw all those ideas of work schedules out the window.

It doesn’t really matter how big or small their organisations are as it’s more a state of mind than anything else. You could call it dedication or you could call it obsession. However it’s a characteristic of most entrepeneurs that I have come across."

Over the weekend I listened to another great Venture Voice podcast, an interview with Derek Sivers of CD Baby whose enthusiasm is so infectious you just have to believe him when he says that if you're passionate about what you do it isn't work.

If I could somehow circumvent the red tape, accounting and admin side of entrepreneurship that's the position I'd adopt too. Until then though Michele can sign me up to his new assocation ;-)

Why risk the path of an entrepreneur?

Aidan Coonan is pondering some of the same questions that I think every entrepreneur does at some stage, and answers them eloquently -

I ask the question, can you make it comfortably in this life by working for others? Maybe Maybe not, but I feel I can contribute more to society and my salary by working hard at my company and this is also a motivation to work hard. Is it more of a risk working for oneself? The same can be said for this question.

Only time will tell in my case, but I am determind to be a sucessful businessman and contribute my ideas to the world and hopefully provide something new that will positively impact peoples lives, earn me and my family a comfortable wage and enough for a Bentley from whats left over!

Well a Bentley would be much too posh for me but otherwise I'd be of a very similar mind. Best of luck in your endeavours Aidan!

Money for nothin'... just don't sleep on it

Not its not a trick headline, its for real and its simple

Time equals money, right? So if you could somehow magically find more time in your day you could generate more wealth. Right, but how the hell could you find more time? According to Glen Rhodes, just by controlling your sleep cycle.

I'd normally be as sceptical as the next person when coming across that kind of article but I read through the whole thing, comments included, because I was utterly fascinated. Yes, I knew the basic 'mechanics' of sleep before (nREM, REM, ec) but wasn't aware that we cycle though the same stages numerous times per night in rough blocks of 90 minutes.

Wow, that was amazing for me to read because I've always wondered why I seem to wake up at the same times every night, whether because of noise, an itch or a full bladder. It seems that there are some hours of darkness during which I simply never wake up and others when I'm very likely to be disturbed from my sleep. In fact, without ever looking at the clock I can usually predict what time it is, to within the nearest 5 or 10 minutes. Really. And I'm sure I'm not alone.

According to Mr. Rhodes you should aim to sleep exact multiples of your sleep cycle, which appears to be also 90 minutes in my case. I confirmed that last night by trying a little experiment. I drank enough before going to bed to ensure that I'd be requiring a run to the bathroom at some stage. Then I noted that it was 12:45am when I last looked at the clock and I'm pretty sure that it was about 1am when I nodded off. Sure enough, I woke at 4:05, two full sleep cycles later. Really!

I fell back to sleep almost immediately on my return from the bathroom and guess what time I first woke this morning? Yup, two further sleep cycles later at 7:25am. I could have easily got up at that time but of course I did my usual lazy 180degree pivot and got a further half hour of frantic REM filled snoozing. With the result that I stumbled from bed at 8am like a zombified, blind carcass! As usual.

Ok, it wasn't a terribly scientific study perhaps but there's no doubt, in my case at least, that its accurate. So, what I intend to do is to reduce my night's sleep to 4 cycles, or roughly 6 hours. If that goes well I may try reducing it by another cycle to 4.5 hours per night and start taking a single 90 minute nap during the day. I never used to do that but now that I'm enjoying the flexibility of working for myself, why not?

The major motivation for me is not to gain time but to be able to get up bright-eyed and ready to go at 6am. That's about the same time as my business partner is calling it a day in the USA and we really need to close the gap on 24 hour coverage of our international online forum. I tried a 6am rising time previously but used to feel useless at that hour. But I didn't understand the 90 minute multiple back then, and that I was usually half though a sleep cycle (I used to go to bed about 11pm) when the clock went off. Duh! It seems so obvious now. Why the hell don't they teach us useful things like this at school?

Technology isn't an enemy of the work-life balance

Brian O'Neill writes about a real problem facing entrepreneurs and the self employed - the tendency for new communications technology to interfere with our personal lives -

"The problem with today’s connected world is that sometimes we are all too accessible. With computers at home, blackberry’s, PDA’s, smartphones etc there is that addiction of just ‘checking my messages’."

I think it's all about discipline really. I've got the Profimail email client, the Netfront browser and Agile's Instant Messenger all on my Nokia mobile phone so I could easily face an endless stream of interruptions if I kept these, otherwise wonderful, software services loaded at all times. But I don't. Not at meal time, not when driving, not when socialising, not when relaxing.

Mind you, neither do I adhere to an evening cut off time like Brian advises. That's because our customers are evenly dispersed throughout the world's time zones. Therefore it doesn't make sense in my case to create an artificial 'work day' or 9 to 5. I'll happily process customer orders and answers emails at 11pm because I'll just as easily head off to a beach in Kerry on a whim on a fine summer's morning during the middle of the week. As indeed I have done throughout the summer. I'll usually answer my mobile until bed time but on the other hand I'm currently inaccessible Thurday nights while The Mentor and Entrepreneur of the Year are on RTE1.

So, my work day isn't set by the clock. In fact, since I left my last job I haven't worn a watch! That's why I so enjoy my nomadic digital lifestyle which allows me to work where and when I want. It means I'm more productive in my work life while having the flexibility to better enjoy my social life. The work/life balance isn't a zero-sum game. And communiations technology needn't enhance one at the expense of the other.

Accomodating the nomadic digital lifestyle

After another Bank Holiday weekend when I comfortably managed to keep running my business while 'on the road' it was very interesting to listen to Dave Winer in the latest Morning Coffee Notes podcast and hear him put out a request for 'internet resorts/hotels' which are specially setup to accomodate his nomadic digital lifestyle.

"Its nice to be able to check into a cool interesting comfortable place with new scenery and do the work that you can do anywhere in the world.

I have a lifestyle that let's me be wherever I want to and still be able to do my work.

So I'm on vacation in your sense of the word, 7 days a week 52 weeks a year. A new lifestyle."

At the same time Russ Beattie is starting to appreciate the web tablet form factor and expressing new found optimism for the Nokia 770. While my Dell Inspiron laptop fitted the bill for most of my holiday weekend work there were definitely times and places where a web tablet would have been more convenient and appropriate.

Fit your business model to your lifestyle

Torsten Jacobi posts part 2 in his series of rules for entrepreneurs. My favourite this time? Number 10 -

- Watch out for business models that fit your lifestyle - this will help you going through the hard times much easier.

That's my favourite because its the same advice I gave myself 5 years ago when I left a very comfortable Unix Sys Admin job with a big multinational, sold my car, moved home and basically appeared to 'give it all up' as far as my friends were concerned. But I swapped my yuppiedom membership card for a totally flexible digital lifestyle and I'm lovin' it :)

A scarcity of Irish tech start-ups?

Fergus Burns laments the lack of Irish tech start-ups, points to where the problems might lie and defiantly vows to overcome them!