Bootstrap’d The Misadventures of Starting a Company

The Daily Commute02:57:54

I realize I have not made a substantial post in a while. Nothing substantial has really happened except that I have been working a ton of hours and have been making great progress toward launching my first product. There should be several interesting announcements to make in the next couple of weeks, but tonight I would like to write about a realization I made recently.

I like to drive my car. A lot. In fact, I have wanted to take a “driving vacation” to drive the whole length of the Blue Ridge Parkway and back again over the course of several days. It would be really cool to somehow sync up GPS data of my car and make a Google Maps mashup to track me as I drive. I could add pictures I take of overlooks and other points of interest and upload them to appear on the map in real-time (though cell coverage may be spotty along the parkway). Anyway, the time required and the price of gas have been prohibitive to this little adventure. I would also like to take my car on a racetrack, but that’s another story.

I like to drive my car for two reasons:

1. It’s fun to drive a stick (yes, I am an unabashed snob about manual transmissions).
2. I am able to clear my mind and let it wander to think about things without the constant distractions encountered elsewhere.

This second point is important. Being isolated in a car (without the interruptions from email, television, breaking news, twitter, other people, and a myriad of other such things that are now constantly demanding our attention) is a great time to just think. An added bonus of driving is that it forces you to focus on doing exactly one thing – driving. For instance, I cannot write any code or compose an email while I am driving. For safety’s sake, I do not text message on the road, and I try not to talk on the phone either, but I will when necessary.

The great outcome of this situation is that I can use this time to think about different ideas, projects, or problems without being able to take any immediate action against them. For example, I may have a problem I need to solve in my code somewhere. If I were sitting in front of my computer, I would think about it until I thought I had a solution and would then proceed to write the code. In the car I can think, “Well, that’s one way to solve it. Are there others? How do they compare?” I can refactor the ideas in my head until I have a much better solution than my initial idea. Then, when I finally arrive at a computer, I can put the idea into action.

The daily commute to and from work each day would provide me the requisite amount of time in my car to untangle the knots in my brain. On the way to work I would concentrate on tasks I was doing at my job. On the way home I would concentrate on my own personal projects. I had a job one summer in Atlanta which was about a 20 mile commute each way in and out of downtown. I did a lot of thinking that summer.

Well, seven weeks ago I ceased to have a daily commute when I resigned from my job and started this whole self-employment adventure. In fact, I hardly drive my car anymore. When I wake up in the morning, I have a 20 foot commute to my home office and the day starts. When I am done with the day, I have a 20 foot commute to bed. In between waking and sleeping I am constantly distracted by a hundred things.

Now, keep in mind that when I started working at home I did not appreciate the significance of having this driving-thinking time on a regular basis. After a few weeks my mind felt like a mess. There were too many things all jumbling around inside and nothing seemed to be getting sorted out the way I liked.

I am in a funk rock band with (now former) co-workers. We rehearse on Wednesday nights at the drummer’s house which is about a 30 mile drive each way for me. One particular Wednesday I was having a rough time figuring out how to implement my product so that it would scale once it begins to grow. I thought about it all morning and all afternoon, coding one solution after another with no real success. Frustrated, I left for band rehearsal. I got into my car and just drove. About half way there my mind started to wander freely and explore new thoughts about my scaling issues. This time I could not just simply throw code at it and see if it stuck. It was at this moment that it dawned on me what was happening. On the drive home that night I spent more time thinking about the problem and arrived at an idea that I thought would actually hold water. The next morning I woke up and put the idea into action. By the end of the day I had a fully scalable solution in place, and since then I haven’t been able to think of a better one. I may still, but for now it works exactly like I need it to work.

I know this sounds crazy, but I miss my daily commute. I could just get in my car and drive in a big loop for an hour each day, but somehow I don’t see that going over well with my budget or the tree-huggers. At this point (seven weeks in) I am using rehearsals as my “weekly commute” to do the really hard thinking. I know I need to find a more regular substitute, something on a daily basis that will isolate me from distractions where I can just think. Perhaps sitting on the couch for 30 minutes in the morning and night with nothing but a pad of paper and a pen will do the trick. When I find a viable solution I will let you know. Maybe I should do some driving to figure it out.

What do you do to just let yourself think?

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