Chapter 5: Keep the Fire Burning

Photo by Andrey Andreyev on Unsplash

In the past couple weeks, I’ve had precious little time to work on my side project and that’s ok. The metric for success on something like this is progress not perfection.

I’m married. I have a job. I love my wife. I love my job. I have higher priorities than starting a business right now. But I don’t want to put it on the back burner either. The back burner is where dreams and projects go to die.

My solution is to check off one TODO each week. If I make my TODOs small enough, this is a very reasonable goal. Even if this only gives nominal progress on my low weeks, it keeps the ideas fresh in my mind.

It’s like building a camp fire. If you start from scratch, you have to

1. Chop the wood

2. Cut the kindling

3. Crumple the newspaper

And once the fire is started, you may have to fan the flames for a long time before it catches properly.

This is like your idea when you haven’t worked on it in a month. The cognitive energy to raise it from the dead is really high which makes it really easy to procrastinate.

But if you still have hot coals from your previous fire, you can often just throw the logs straight on and get a roaring fire in seconds. The goal isn’t to make meaningful progress each week, but to keep your idea fresh in your brain, so you can stir it to life at a moments notice.

 In each chapter I give one concrete step that I’ve taken so you can follow along.

Concrete Step #5: Make a TODO list and do one thing each week

Tools:

• ChatGPT: AI is great at helping with TODO lists.

• Apple Reminders: for all its issues, this is the best TODO list app ever created. You can trust me because Apple users are never biased…

• Paper and pencil: might be a bit too high tech for some of you but it can be a great way to clarify your thoughts.

DISCLAIMER:

I've never done this before and I'm learning as I go. Be cautious because I will make mistakes, but also be inspired because if I can start a business, so can you.