Warning: this post is personal in nature and relatively useless unless you like dogs. So if you’re looking for action-oriented info or something other than entertainment, this isn’t the post for you

About five weeks ago, my wife and I welcomed two new members to our family: two beagle puppies named Barkley and Bianca. They’ve been a lot of work, but we’re really enjoying them. They’re almost twelve weeks at this point, and we’re both really shocked at how good they are. They sleep in separate crates at night, they sleep through the whole night, they don’t cry when they’re left alone, they don’t really bark, they sleep a lot, and they have a pretty well-adjusted nature in general. Hopefully this isn’t just a phase, but we’re working hard with them on training and we’re taking them to puppy classes so they get plenty of early socialization with other people and dogs.

Though they’ve been great overall, it’s not all awesome. For example, it’s been pretty difficult to get into a routine with them. Before we got them, I would get up every morning at 4:15am and head to my office, but now Alexis and I trade off days getting up with them in the morning and taking care of them for the bulk of the day. As I can’t get a lot done while at home, this has impacted my productivity. However, we’re getting back into a routine and I’m hopeful that my productivity will end up close to pre-canine levels.

If you want to see more pictures, check them out here:
http://flickr.com/photos/ryanwaggoner/sets/72157606335459315/

Today is my 26th birthday. It was a low-key affair, just hanging out and spending a bit of time with my wife before grabbing some dinner. Relaxing. I can’t help but be a little depressed on my birthday…I always feel like I should have accomplished more over the previous year than I did.

I just finished reading “How to Get Rich” by Felix Dennis, a British publishing mogul worth somewhere in the neighborhood of $900 million. The book is an incredibly frank appraisal of wealth, what it takes to get it, keep it, enjoy it, and the prices you pay along the way. Best of all, it’s actually written by a guy who built incredible wealth, rather than a guy who made most of his riches off of books he’s written telling people how to get wealthy. Anyway, one of the things that stood out to me was where he said that he would give it all up and everything he would ever make just to be young again. And I think that many wealthy people would say the same. He states that if you are young, you are far, far richer than anyone much older than you can ever be, because you have a lot more time than they do, and time is the most valuable resource we have.

I completely agree, and for me, building wealth is about building the ability to own my time and do what i choose with it. Additionally, wealth buys access to better health care, which can both improve the quality and the quantity of the time that we have in our lives. And if radical life extension becomes a reality during my lifetime, the unfortunate truth is that those with wealth will have access to it sooner than others.

I guess the trick is finding an area to build wealth in that you enjoy, so that you don’t spend your entire life toiling away at something you hate just to build wealth, and thus lose the time you were trying to save in the first place.

In August of 2007, I quit my job as a product manager at CNET Networks and started freelancing full-time. I do mostly web development and social media consulting, and I’m really enjoying it. I thought I’d share a few of the lessons that I’ve learned along the way.

1. Working at home sucks

Maybe it would work if I was always working at home by myself, had a separate room that was just for work, and had everything setup just so. Maybe. But I find that being at home has too many distractions, from TV, to my wife, to our new puppies. I get 2x - 4x as much done at my office as I do at home. What that means in practical terms is that paying a few hundred bucks a month for a small office or co-working space is well worth the price. Even a coffee shop is usually an improvement for me over being at home.

2. Working from anywhere you want rocks

On the other hand, having the freedom to work from home, or a coffee shop, or the beach on a tropical island, is one of the best things about working for yourself, especially in the line of work that I do. My wife and I have travelled a lot over the last year, something we never could have done if we were holding down jobs.

3. Everything takes longer than expected

From finding new clients to signing contracts to finishing projects to getting paid, everything seems to take longer than you expect. I guess this is because I’m an optimist by nature, but it’s something I’ve definitely had to adjust to. My advice: make sure you always have a decent reserve of time, money, and goodwill. You’ll probably need them.

4. Process is important

I guess this isn’t limited to freelancers, but I’ve just realized how important it is. When you do development work, you find yourself doing the same types of things over and over. I find it hard to force myself to take longer the first or second or third time around to setup shortcuts and process enhancements that will enable me to do it faster in the future, but it’s definitely worth it. If you find yourself cutting and pasting the same piece of code, then making a bunch of adjustments to change minor details, consider making it a class or a library that’s more flexible. Organize, optimize, and review your processes regularly. It takes more time now, but it saves a lot of time in the long run.

5. Small gigs > large gigs

All else being equal, smaller jobs are far better than large ones, in my opinion. It’s the same reason that small entrepreneurial projects are better than large ones: they tend to get finished on time and under budget much more often. Large projects have more room for error, ambiguity, scope creep, and miscommunication. Additionally, I find that I get fatigued when working on projects that stretch on for weeks or months. It becomes more of a struggle to get excited about working on the same thing yet again, whereas for a small project, you can maintain your interest and excitement through most or all of the project. The best project is one that you can knock out in a day or two.

I’d say that the one thing I have learned is that if you’re doing a large project, break it into phases and try to think of them as discrete mini-projects in themselves. But small projects are still better.

6. This is a stepping stone for me

I never intended to stick with contract work long-term, and the last year has just reinforced that in my mind. The hard part about freelance work for me, a born entrepreneur, is that it vacillates between two extremes: either I’m working on projects that I’m not particularly passionate about or interested in, usually because they’re not going to go anywhere and I know it (and I tell the client), or I’m working on really interesting projects that I know in my heart will succeed or continue to be a success. That sounds awesome, I know, and I’m fortunate to work on more projects like that than those in the first category, but the problem I have is that I’m helping another entrepreneur achieve his or her dream, rather than achieving my own. I love helping people, and I especially love helping people accomplish their goals and dreams, but I hate the feeling of being a hired hand when I should be whipping up my own success. Does that make sense?

As a result, I’ve started aggressively pursuing more entrepreneurial projects of my own, some of which you’ll be hearing about in the coming days and weeks. I’m enjoying freelance work and I’m very grateful to all my clients for the opportunity to work with them, but I’ll be really glad to eventually be done with freelance work. It’s just not as free as I’d like

If you’re a freelancer, let me know how this lines up with your experiences. I would love to hear from anyone considering making the plunge who has questions or comments.

I’m a big fan of the “release early, release often” philosophy, where you break your software into small chunks and release it to market as soon as you can, let people play with it and give you feedback, and iterate from there. The other common option is to build a huge release and push it all out there at once, and then only release changes every so often, and usually very large groups of changes.

I’ve been working on an idea with some friends for a few months now, which I’ll talk more about in a future post. Anyway, one of the constant challenges we face is where exactly to draw the line for our first release. We want to build something simple, but something that’s still useful. It can’t be too simple. As part of the process of deciding where to draw that line, I’ve been doing a lot of research and thinking a lot about other apps and sites and how they’ve dealt with the challenge of where to draw the line of simplicity. I wanted to give what I think is a good example of simple / too simple:

CheckYesOrNo

CheckYesOrNo is a small one-day project that was done by Ben Rasmusen and Gordon Brander, both friends of mine. It started out as a spur of the moment project that they quickly knocked out and put out there, which is awesome. It allows anyone to create a yes or no poll and solicit feedback from others via a URL. That’s it. There’s no registration, login, profiles, etc. Just a very simple concept and a beautiful design. However, once I used the app for a little while, I started to notice a small frustration: a lot of my questions didn’t fit into the “Yes or No” mold. Sometimes I had three alternatives that I wanted to ask people to choose between. Also, sometimes when I answered a poll, I wanted to provide more detail about my answer. And there was no way for me to keep track of the questions I had asked and the results other than keeping a list of URLs somewhere. In short, I felt like the app was just a little too simple for me.

FriendFeedback

Today, Ben released FriendFeedback.com, which is still a very simple poll creator, with three main differences from CheckYesOrNo:

• It allows you to define multiple answers (including yes or no, if you choose)
• It allows those responding to the poll to leave short comments
• It has a dashboard where you can track responses to all your polls

It still features a great design, clear functionality, and a solid user experience, but the usefulness is so much higher to me, just because it’s now just a bit more flexible, but virtually no usability has been sacrificed for the added functionality. It’s a great product and has drawn the line of simplicity quite skillfully.

In fact, I’ve been racking my brain for the last day or two and the only real enhancement I can think of at this point is to allow people to create polls without registering if they so desire. I’m sure other suggestions and improvements will emerge from people’s usage patterns and feedback, but that’s the whole point. When you throw it out there at the right point, it’s useful enough that people will actually use it and tell you what needs to be changed and improved. Any more simplistic and people won’t bother.

How simple is too simple to you?

My wife and I were out walking our puppies today, which is always an interesting experience because probably 50% of the people we pass want to stop and pet them and ask where we got them, etc. It’s generally an interesting experience, and a good opportunity for the dogs to get out and socialize with new people and other dogs.

Anyway, we were walking down the street and we happened upon a dapper-looking elderly gentleman standing on the steps of his Victorian home. He was sharply dressed in a yellow cardigan and appeared ready to enjoy an evening out. He remarked on the puppies and we struck up a conversation. Turns out, it was his 80th birthday today and he was off to a birthday celebration. I was a little surprised, as I would have pegged his age at something like 65 - 70. I wished him a happy birthday, to which he responded with a thank-you and a “perhaps you’ll get there someday, old boy.” Classic. He also urged me to ensure that I drank plenty of gin. We wished him farewell and continued down the street. Farther down the block, I turned around to watch him and he was just standing on the step, enjoying the cool breeze and the fading sunlight of the evening. He had about him the air of a man who has lived a full life and who is still enjoying every bit of it.

I generally don’t particularly enjoy being around the elderly, partly because I feel like I have little in common with them, but mostly because their lives just seem so depressing to me. But this gentleman seemed different. Even though I only met him for a brief moment, he made an impression on me. I hope that when I’m 80 years old, I’ll be as content and happy enjoying my life as he seemed to be.

Happy birthday, sir. Now I’m off to see about that gin.

If I can do it, anyone can. As most people who know me will attest, I’ve always had trouble getting up in the morning. I blame my family, which is packed with night owls.

In high school, I got suspended on more than one occasion for missing my first class of the day. You’d think that the Navy would have changed me, and it did, for awhile. I only got in trouble once or twice in the Navy for being late as a result of oversleeping. And in spite of my lack of discipline in this area, after I got out of the Navy, I managed to crank through three years of school in 18 months and maintain a 3.9 GPA. But I remember sitting in class on numerous occasions having been in bed sound asleep less than 20 minutes before that. After college, I managed to hold down a job in San Francisco for a year before I quit to start consulting and pursuing my own entrepreneurial pursuits.

You’d think that the unstructured life of a freelancer would be bad for someone who already has trouble getting up in the morning. Well, you’d be right. For a long time, I would work late, late into the night (like 2 - 4am) and then drag myself out of bed around noon. Super lame. The thing was, I hated doing it, but I always felt like I had more to do than I could afford to put off until the next day, so I had to do it before I went to bed.

For awhile, I was afraid I had some kind of sleeping disorder. But over the last four or five months, I’ve had a real breakthrough. The last few weeks notwithstanding (more on that later), I now get up regularly around 4:30am, and am often at my office by 5am. What’s more, I *love* this and don’t consider it to be much of a struggle. If you’re looking to make a similar change, here’s what I would recommend:

1. Practice getting up

Yes, you will feel stupid. But give Steve Pavlina’s awesome technique a try. It really helped me, especially in the beginning.

2. Consider your productivity curve

One of the biggest things I discovered is that I get 3-4x as much done between 5am and 9am as I do between 9pm and 1am. They’re both four hours, but my productivity is drastically different. For some people, it may make more sense to stay up late, as they’ll get more done. In that case, my recommendation would be to just embrace it. Michael Arrington of TechCrunch reportedly sleeps from like 4am to 10am and he’s gotten quite a bit done over the last few years. Figure out what works for you.

3. Go to bed

You’d think this would be basic, right? Took me 25 years to figure it out, though. The thing is, when I started going to bed at 9pm or 10pm, I had to really force myself, because I had *so much* that needed to get done. But I knew that I would get more done the next morning than I would if I stayed up late working. And I did. And over time, I gradually managed to catch up, until I wasn’t so far behind and going to bed was a lot easier.

4. Have something to do with your time in the morning

Exercise, read, write, work, email, whatever. But don’t get up and sit around wondering why you’re up. It’ll just be harder to get up next time.

5. Stick with it

That first week or two was kind of rough, but as I kept getting up, it got easier and easier. Once you get into the routine and your body adjusts, you’ll find getting up much easier to do. Just don’t give up.

Where I am today

My wife and I got two puppies about a month ago, and they’ve completely ruined my routine I can only imagine what an infant would be like…kudos to you parents out there. Anyway, we’ve started to get back into a routine, and we’re trading off days so that I can get up early a few days a week and head into the office. It’s not quite the same level of productivity that I had before, but it’ll continue to get better.

For more on this topic, here’s a few posts from other blogs:

Steve Pavlina - How to Become an Early Riser

Steve Pavlina - How to Become an Early Riser - Part II

Zen Habits - How I Became an Early Riser

Over the last couple years, I’ve watched a number of friends have kids and I’ve come to the conclusion that I’m so glad that I’m a guy and don’t have to go through that. Pregnancy and childbirth seem awful, so I’ve been wondering what the alternatives are. Turns out there’s some research that’s been done in the area of artificial uteruses. Of course, such technology is years, maybe even decades away, but imagine if you could have something like this in your living room:

I can see four main reasons that this would be a hugely positive thing:

• Pregnancy is hard on a mother’s body. Childbirth is worse. Skip them both.
• Safer environment for the fetus
• Allows women unable to carry their own child to still have kids
• It’s a lot more convenient and less painful

I think one of the biggest benefits is the last one. Who says that having kids should be a miserable experience? And I’m sure that many women would choose to give birth the “natural” way, just as many women currently choose to forgo the benefits and advances of modern science and medical technology. That doesn’t mean the rest of us should.

To be clear, I wouldn’t be in favor of this if it wasn’t as safe (roughly) or safer than natural gestation. And I think that pod-babies should have the same rights as natural babies, meaning that you shouldn’t be allowed to unplug the thing if you change your mind after a few months. But if the method can be made safe and we can enact the proper ethical and legal policies, then bring on the pod-babies.

Am I crazy? Is this treating humans as commodities? Tell me in the comments.

Note: that’s a picture of the WinePod, in case you’re wondering.

So I’ve got this new idea for a little social web app, and I’m really excited about it because it’s in an area that I’m passionate about, it’s got lots of viral expansion possibilities, and it’s a pretty simple idea, at least in v1.0. Really simple. Like, knock it out in a weekend simple. So I’m going to try and move forward with it over the next few weeks, but I’m having trouble deciding whether I should launch a standalone site or a Facebook application first. My eventual goal would be to have the app as both a Facebook application and a standalone site, as well as iPhone, Android, OpenSocial, and wherever else it fits. But the question remains: which do I launch first?

Arguments in favor of a standalone site first:

• More straightforward development process, whereas developing for Facebook is a pain
• Platform isn’t changing while I’m working, unlike Facebook
• I own my users
• Integration with 3rd-party services feels more natural for some reason?
• May be a better fit than the Facebook audience

Arguments in favor of a Facebook application first:

• Faster development time
• More social integration points, like News Feed, Notifications, etc
• No competition at all on Facebook right now, unlike the web, which has one with a similar idea
• Faster viral growth
• Joyent’s free Facebook application hosting

I’m leaning towards Facebook at this point, but I would love to hear everyone’s thoughts on which approach I should take, and what other questions I should be asking. I’ll be sure and post my decision in the next couple weeks and I’ll be excited to hear what you all think of my little project. Thanks for your feedback below! (hint, hint

I saw this great story today about how a North Texas school district may start allowing teachers and staff to carry concealed weapons in the school when classes start later this month. The policy was devised to help prevent school shootings, and those who wish to carry will need to meet the following requirements:

• have a Texas license to carry a concealed handgun,
• be authorized to carry by the district,
• receive training in crisis management and hostile situations, and
• use ammunition designed to minimize the risk of ricochet.

I think this is a fantastic idea, and it sounds as if the school district is giving it the careful thought and consideration that it deserves. Logically, anytime you tell law-abiding citizens that they can’t carry guns in a certain area, you increase the risk of an unchecked shooting spree in that area by someone who obviously has no regard for the law. As David Thweatt, the school district superintendent says:

“When the federal government started making schools gun-free zones, that’s when all of these shootings started. Why would you put it out there that a group of people can’t defend themselves? That’s like saying ’sic ‘em’ to a dog,”

I wish that more schools would allow law-abiding, well-trained, responsible teachers and staff to carry concealed weapons if they choose to. And on college campuses, those same rights should extend to students who meet the same criteria. I grew up in a family that uses firearms for hunting, self-defense, and recreational shooting. I also carried a gun daily while I was in the US Navy. If I could carry a concealed weapon legally here in San Francisco, I would. I’m 99% sure that I would never have to use it, but if I did, it would be because I was protecting my life or someone else’s. Alas, I am prevented by law from doing so, which makes no sense to me. Now the only people carrying concealed weapons in San Francisco are criminals. Excellent.

Am I crazy? Should we find another solution to mass shootings at schools and elsewhere? Post your thoughts in the comments.

Everywhere I look, companies are introducing green this and eco-friendly that. Just today, I got a bill from Comcast and they were highlighting their new “Eco-bill”, which is simply signing up for online statements. Really? We’ve had online statements for years, but now they’re selling them to us as “eco-friendly”? The problem with all this stuff is that almost all of it is more about marketing and playing to the green hype than it is true efforts at change or sustainability.

Now don’t get me wrong. I think climate change is an issue. I think that we should take care of the earth. I think that sustainability, clean energy, and minimizing our ecological footprint are all important goals. But I get annoyed when people jump into the green thing just because it’s trendy, and especially when they buy into the hype that they’re on the forefront of a movement that will change the world. For example, I have this friend here in San Francisco who thinks that the green movement has changed the world so much over the last few decades, and will change the world so much over the next few. I think he’s crazy and wrapped up in the San Francisco bubble…the world is definitely much worse off today environmentally than it was thirty or forty years ago. And whether green is here to stay depends on one thing: economics.

People are selfish. They’re not going to really change unless there’s something in it for them. Sure, there are some noisy people in the green movement who will go out of their way to save the Earth, but most people won’t unless there’s a clear advantage to them. The only thing that can get people to change in the aggregate is economics. Most people won’t stop driving gas-guzzlers because of their individual impact on the environment by doing so, but they will if gas costs $10 / gallon. Especially with the current downturn in the economy, I think we’re going to see a backlash of consumer sentiment towards companies that charge a premium for green junk when it’s clearly just a marketing ploy. I think the long-term prospects for green are good, but only because technology will eventually make sustainability advantageous from an economic standpoint.

What do you think?