Joseph Robison

Feedback loops are extremely critical for us as humans to know if we’re doing the right thing, how well, and if we’re hitting goals along the way, or failing.

On the path to a $1 million – or $1 billion – business, there are huge goals in the distant future, but making the connection between the work today and hitting those goals is tough.

I definitely struggle with it, but I’m beginning to place more and more importance on the process.

Being a solo entrepreneur has a big effect on this because without a boss giving me instructions, I’m only accountable to myself.

In addition, most of the work I do – SEO and content marketing – has longer and more nuanced feedback loops than other marketing activities.

With email marketing, I know within a few hours how effective my email campaign to 10,000 people is – by looking at opens, clicks, and sales.

With Google AdWords – the actions of ad budget, bid, ad copy, offer, and landing page all work together and I can see on a daily basis how well it’s working and tweak with instant changes made.

With SEO the feedback loops are long, convoluted, and always changing. One of the richest companies in the world works to intentionally make it difficult for those who try to understand the system. Work we do now doesn’t show up for 3-6 months. Proving this to clients is difficult.

Without feedback loops in some sense, though, we can’t learn and improve. So it’s critical to build the loops as much as possible if they’re not built-in already.

For SEO and content marketing, if the feedback loops are going to take 6 months, what are the proximal goals I can use in the meantime?

This was made clear to me on this post by Peter Shallard: How to use gamification psychology to accelerate your entrepreneurial success, where he introduces proximal goals.

The idea here is to leverage a well researched principle of psychology called Proximal Goal Setting. A proximal goal is simply a bite-sized implementation step of a larger, bigger picture goal you’ve set for yourself.

They work so powerfully for entrepreneurs because instead of sitting down at your desk each day to “make a million bucks”, you get to set micro-objectives that are actually doable in a day.

Proximal goals are the video games of personal growth. They break big, long term, complex and ambiguous goals into short term winnable challenges.

What’s essential about proximal goals is the proactive decision you make when you set them:

You’re deciding to quit asking deep questions about your big far-away goals, and to focus instead on the game you’ve created for yourself in the present moment.

It’s so well said and makes so much sense to me. Large, successful organizations like Salesforce know how to map all individual company goals up to the CEO’s goals and create a connected chain. For solo entrepreneurs though, there’s so much splitting of time, tasks, and goals that we get lost in the whirlwind (4DX) of it all.

Feedback loops have a lot to do with learning a new skill as well, especially the concept of chunk and spaced repetition. This is important to understand when training team members or yourself. Without feedback, how can a team member working on a new task know if they’re doing well or not? It’s very hard for them to do so.

Another quote from the article I like:

Psychologists have shown that accomplishing proximal goals – even when they’re just a drop in the bucket of our bigger distal goal – does the same thing as the donut and the video games: It activates the brain’s reward centers.

By making yourself feel good at a chemical level, it becomes easier and easier to train your brain to build a terrific habit of executing on your proximal goal steps.

And I wholeheartedly agree. I feel the best when it’s 6 pm and I got some real, solid work done that day. I get physically energized in my body in a way that coffee or exercise doesn’t. It’s the stranges thing and shows the connection between mental and physical systems. (Need to do more research here myself.) I feel a similar sensation when meditating for at least 15 minutes. I think it has something to do with focus and being in the flow. I’m actually experiencing it right now as I write this post since I’ve been in the zone letting my thoughts flow out for the last 20 minutes and had minimal task switching distractions. That correlates with another concept of just starting any task for 5 minutes. When you sit down and just dedicate 5 minutes, you often get in the flow enough to continue for another 15 at least (thanks for that tip James Dodge!)

Connecting Daily Goals with Long Term Goals

One of my biggest questions and disconnects has been connecting 5 or 10 year goals with daily and weekly goals.

I’ve personally always been motivated by these huge goals. And yes I’ll think about them on a weekly basis and make incremental steps, but I find with many competing goals and weekly distractions in front of the distraction machine, they rarely get the attention they need.

I’ve been shying away from wanting to see myself as an ideas person or strategy person because it seems cliche and that ideas are cheap, execution is everything. I think the truth is somewhere in between, but if I’m big picture, but also a solo entrepreneur, who does the work? That’s the key thing. Balancing long term goals, with daily action and team members to help.

Peter once again exactly hits on how I operate. Too much big picture planning, not enough execution:

For many entrepreneurs, the initial thrill of an exciting distal goal is enough to get a whiteboard planning session done… and very little else.

This is because the entrepreneurial psychology that makes you so good at seeing big opportunities, crafting compelling visions – being an “ideas person” in other words – is pretty much the opposite of the mindset needed to execute on an idea.

After the initial big picture planning session, most entrepreneurs really need a hard worker – who doesn’t ask too many questions – to take over.

In the book Profit First, Mike Michalowicz also hits on an important point with one of his clients, who paid themselves very meager salaries so they could hire people to do everything in the business for them, while the client just strategized. Mike corrected him in showing that he needed to be earning a motivating salary AND work in the business. The phrase “work on the business not in the business” is important to keep in mind, but the caveat is that it depends on the business size. If you’re the CEO of a 100 person company, then you should do CEO duties 95% of the time. If you’re the owner of a 4 person company then you should be doing CEO duties 15% of the time, and sales, marketing, HR, and finance duties the other 85% of the time.

This one really got me:

You would never hire someone and start them on a project, then stop them a day later because you’ve had a different idea. You’d have them consistently execute and then a month later, you’d sit down and evaluate the efficacy of what they did.

Because I’ve done exactly that with a team member. Start him on one project, flip him over to another, then back to the original, not much consistency, and that can be hurting both of us. It’s not a constant thing, but it’s prevalent. It’s important to build systems, train and plug in your people, have them take ownership, and improve these systems.

Whenever I sit down and write a blog post draft for an hour, I feel so good after.

When I fully focus on one project for 4 hours, or once in a while a full day, I feel relaxed that I have nothing else on my to-do list.

But we know that in office work, we rarely get this chance. Paul Graham highlights this well in Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule.

The One Thing book recommends 4 full hours a day of focus on the most important project at hand. It’s something I’m aspiring to now, but splitting between my two most important projects at 2 hours each.

So what’s the neuroscience of why it’s so bad to task switch, context switch, and multitask?

I can’t help but quote these huge sections from Quartz:

“When we attempt to multitask, we don’t actually do more than one activity at once, but quickly switch between them. And this switching is exhausting. It uses up oxygenated glucose in the brain, running down the same fuel that’s needed to focus on a task.”

“That switching comes with a biological cost that ends up making us feel tired much more quickly than if we sustain attention on one thing,” says Daniel Levitin, professor of behavioral neuroscience at McGill University. “People eat more, they take more caffeine. Often what you really need in that moment isn’t caffeine, but just a break. If you aren’t taking regular breaks every couple of hours, your brain won’t benefit from that extra cup of coffee.”

Studies have found that people who take 15-minute breaks every couple of hours end up being more productive, says Levitin. But these breaks must allow for mind-wandering, whether you’re walking, staring out the window, listening to music or reading. “Everyone gets there a different way. But surfing Facebook is not one of them,” he says. Social networks just produce more fractured attention, as you flit from one thing to the next.

Gloria Mark, professor in the department of informatics at the University of California, Irvine, says that when people are interrupted, it typically takes 23 minutes and 15 seconds to return to their work, and most people will do two intervening tasks before going back to their original project. This switching leads to a build up of stress, she says, and so little wonder people who have high rates of neuroticism, impulsivity, and are susceptible to stress tend to switch tasks more than others.

Hal Pashler, psychology professor at UC San Diego, points out that not all attempts at multitasking are equally draining. If you’re doing something on autopilot, such as the laundry, then it makes perfect sense to read a book at the same time. But attempting to do two challenging tasks at once will lead to a drain in productivity. “You can’t do two demanding, even simple tasks, in parallel,” he adds.

One caveat is doing simple things and passive listening at once:

“Hal Pashler, psychology professor at UC San Diego, points out that not all attempts at multitasking are equally draining. If you’re doing something on autopilot, such as the laundry, then it makes perfect sense to read a book at the same time. But attempting to do two challenging tasks at once will lead to a drain in productivity. “You can’t do two demanding, even simple tasks, in parallel,” he adds.”

There’s a lot more research I want to dive into, but I must task switch to a workout right now!

https://www.apa.org/research/action/multitask

https://medium.com/helpful-human/project-fatigue-and-context-switching-bb0741e202cc

https://www.fastcompany.com/40425697/forget-focus-heres-when-task-switching-makes-you-more-productive

Taking a broad look at the SEO industry, one thing comes to mind.

The vast majority of content in the SEO industry is too small. It’s focused on the minuscule minutiae:

• sitemaps.xml
• robots.txt
• nofollow
• minuscule speed updates

Yes – at the end of the day, some of these small things above could have a massive detriment or impact

How long will SEOs hem and haw that they only get 1/10th of PPC budget.

SEOs need to grow up, expand, and focus on business metrics.

Instead of selling dubious links and on-page optimization services, think way bigger. Think on a massive scale.

One hour spent reading about optimal models for SEO projections that tie in with annual marketing budgets is better than an hour on tweaking title tags.

These extreme levels of optimization come into play at scale for large sites.

And maybe 5 extra visits from these tiny tweaks is enough to tiny businesses.

But we really need to be talking more about things that move the content much more – talk about one-year, big projects that have a big impact on the company.

Not dinky little SEO audience and maintenance retainers.

It could be I’m seeing this through my own lens, which is definitely true. But when I look at an overview of all posts on Moz.com, or Ahrefs.com, or Backlinko or Search Engine Land – what % of the posts there are about small minor little things – a micro update here, a micro update there – that they are just distracting from focusing on big, large projects that do more for the company, are more inventive, and have a larger impact and ROI.

I think, instead of pitching a small link building campaign of 5 links a month, say “you need 50 links a month to your site to see an impact in a year – this is what you’re going to do, and it will take a big investment”.

I think we need to paint a larger picture, a more creative approach to many SEO-client relationship.

I also think there needs to be a division in nomenclature between micro-level SEO for tiny sites, and larger scale corporate SEO. There needs to be a difference because these are two entirely different mechanisms and engagements. I don’t see enough talk about different approaches – entirely – for totally different markets. We have too many posts on “do h1s still matter” and not enough on “here’s a 6-month SEO gameplan to scale a massive marketplace from 50 million visits a year to 100 million visits a year”.

Trying to shift up my own thinking by looking at a broader picture of a company’s business and marketing strategy, and where the concept of search plays a massive and size-able role.

It’s a constant work in progress.

Super interesting piece published by Think with Google where they took recordings of interviews with 30 board members of Fortune 1000 companies on the role of the CMO, ran it through ML, and then wrote up a paragraph (with humans) synthesizing it to this:

“The 21st century CMO is expected to be a marketing miracle worker, an alchemist who combines classic art of branding with the latest advances in data and measurement. All this while you serve as the connective tissue of the C-suite and stay a step ahead of the rapidly changing landscape of digital technology, cultural trends, and shifting consumer expectations — things becoming ever more important to the stock price. Customers matter more than ever, and since you’re responsible for them, your role should matter more than ever too. But board members don’t seem to have one cohesive definition of the role. So what are you to do? Internally, steer expectations for your role by defining growth you have some control over. And recognize that the talent of your team is half the battle to achieving that growth. Hire the best measurement people because marketing will be held to some metric that is currently beyond reach, and you’ll need them to invent it. There are many ways you can impact revenue — but be prepared to show the “I’m indispensable” math. And don’t forget the most visible CMOs also take big risks. Only 3% of board members interviewed were marketers. Likely, they don’t hear you. Listen closely and find the overlap between what the board is interested in and your responsibilities. And instead of building slides about everything you do, build one slide that puts you in a position to start a conversation around those common interests and goals.”

https://www.thinkwithgoogle.com/feature/cmo-insights

From a front-end perspective, the interactivity was pretty cool too, haven’t seen this before:

One thing that stood out to me was this quote:

“You need a marketing operating system to continually check on and identify gaps.”

That made me realize the huge need and gap for a marketing operating system. I’m not aware of the landscape entirely, but I know we have marketing automation platforms (like HubSpot), business intelligence tools (SAP, SAS, etc), and content platforms (Contentful). But I’m not aware of any “marketing operating system” that is the true brain of the operation, pulling all the data from disparate locations, and revealing true insights.

I assume we’ll see something evolve in the next few years, seems to be much needed in the market.

I was once heavy into structured data and schema while internal at my first agency – but it’s hard to know when to go full steam ahead with it and when it’s a waste.

To me it felt like a waste at the time – dozens of hours getting the itemprop just right and trying to read the brutalist-design of Schema.org.

But it was good for flexing that earning muscle.

Today I needed a refresher on the topic, and did another dive into the sources, here’s a recap and bookmark of what I found helpful today.

Best Overview Guides

This writeup by a structured data specialist, Nate Harris, is a good overview for the space – https://nateonawalk.com/

He talks about the history and gets into the weeds of JSON-LD. Probably not for beginners but a good referesher for digital marketers and web devs.

Moz has this good 2-part overview – https://moz.com/blog/structured-data-for-seo-1 – I have yet to read, but have it bookmarked.

WordPress Plugins for Structured Data, Schema, and JSON-LD

The Schema plugin has the name that checks out – https://wordpress.org/plugins/schema/– and there’s premium upgrades. But I’m not sure if it has anything more than Rankmath does.

Rankmath – https://wordpress.org/plugins/seo-by-rank-math/ – sprung up in 2019 and has been winning a lot of converts. I love the FAQ Schema feature – https://rankmath.com/blog/faq-schema/ – included free. Right now Rankmath is all free and does everything Yoast WordPress SEO does. FAQ schema seem to come and go in the SERPs, but probably a good idea to build in for semantic understanding benefits regardless.

Yoast WordPress SEO – you’ll get some basics, but expect to pay a premium for upgrades.

The SEO Framework – https://wordpress.org/plugins/autodescription/ – was recommended by Nate Harris. Have tested a bit but don’t know a ton. I’d probably lean towards Rankmath anyways.

Featured Snippets

Featured snippets are not directly tied to structured data and but they come up in the same conversation. Featured snippets can be had by simply answering the question succinctly, or including a table when the query wants it.

I found this Ahrefs article useful: Ahrefs’ Study Of 2 Million Featured Snippets: 10 Important Takeaways It’s more of a meta study of the landscape, so not super actionable in the meta study part, but helpful tips towards the end.

One cool nugget is a link to a text file with the top 100+ featured snippet grabbing URLs – https://ahrefs.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/Top100_URLs_by_featured_snippets.txt

The quick summary on how to get featured snippets?

There are three simple ways to do it:

1. Your content should be awesome and up-to-date;
2. Try to provide both the question and the answer on your page (make sure both are short enough to fit the “box”);
3. Match your content to the current format of the snippet (paragraph, list, table, image).

Here’s a great post by Richard Baxter that shows this strategy in action: Optimising for Google’s Quick Answer Box.

These two charts are helpful for high-level understanding. I’m sure most of us have seen the overly long recipe articles out there. We know those recipe bloggers are battling it out in the SERPs!

We can also see the types of phrases that trigger featured snippets most:

I find structured data fascinating for the fact that it’s a way of understanding language and the world, standardized for many different search engines, platforms, and likely ML, AI, voice search, etc.

I find the implementation very boring when there’s not a clear benefit at stake. I don’t want to go itemproping or hand writing JSON-LD for an about us page when there’s no clear benefit.

But if you can apply structured data to a ton of your product pages at scale and instantly surface new features in the SERPs, it an be one of the highest ROI things you can do in SEO! Maybe…it always depends.

Reading my new favorite book, The Next Big Thing, opened the door to the world of market research and trend forecasting to me. I was of course aware that market research existed, but from my experience so far I only came across government reports that were overwhelming, or small reports fit for a blog post. The large, meaty, market research reports seemed too out of reach and behind $1,000 paywalls for enterprise companies.

Paraphrasing from The Next Big Thing, you WANT to pay for high quality, expensive market research reports from companies like Mintel, if you can justify the ROI for your new product launch of course. The author also advocates testing new market research providers that are cheaper, but only on an experimental basis. Some will be good, some will be bad.

For those not at the level of purchasing reports from Mintel, or need faster, on-demand market research, what are the options? In addition, it seems like these staid market research firms may be ripe for disruption.

Market Research for Startups and Small Businesses?

My unsolved question is: How do we use the freely available data and create our own market research on the fly, and is it possible?

Some of the most accessible tools to assist with this are:

• Facebook Audiences – get an approximate number of people who make up audience segments
• Google Trends – it’s not super detailed, but gives you a high level view
• SEO keyword tools like Ahrefs, SEMrush, and Moz – these will show growing keyword volume demand and trends
• Google Surveys – create a survey of 1,000 people for $100
• Checker Software – I don’t know much about this, but looks interesting

This is not a complete list, but a start. The big idea is that combining multiple free data streams and bringing it together in a data analysis and or visualization tool, you can get quick and dirty market research, although it won’t be perfect.

I came across this smart take on Reddit about the future of market research in 2020 and beyond:

Yeah, good trends. I’d like to add that the best in PR knows that customers expect campaigns to be supported by research, but in the past, it was expensive and time-consuming. In 2020, the most effective and valuable will be studies that can be carried out effectively using AI. The main task is to determine how to apply technology for use in research, how to make at least part of the research process more automated and alienated from a specialist.

The future of research lies at the intersection of technology and the study of public opinion.

Personalization of customer experiences (CX) and marketing messages is impossible without automation technologies, big data, and AI analysis. Technology takes the bulk of the marketing effort, so brands can focus on strategy and create fantastic experiences for customers with enhanced software solutions.

Big data, neural networks, analysis of social networks – these features are often voiced by the reviewers but are not yet actively used in research. There are single cases, but there are no replicated solutions/methods that use these approaches. At this moment:

Large and medium-sized agencies have their own developers, panels, platforms, chatbots, etc. The readiness to undertake analysis of networks and big data is announced, trial projects are being made.

Small companies actively use tech developments, tools available on the network, but they require implementation in the industry. These companies are sometimes ready to undertake projects for free, for the sake of gaining experience/case for demonstration and subsequent sale.

Research agencies see their work in solving the client’s business problems. It is important to help the client improve business processes and increase profits. Research is no longer an end in itself, but a step towards solving business problems. Many agencies do not sell methods or tools, but offer their expertise in resolving certain business issues.

The Intersection of Market Research, Media, PR, Content Marketing, and SEO

Quite the mouthful of an intersection, but I believe that there is a new, cutting edge way to do content marketing for link building and SEO purposes.

It involves using a combination of lean market research, media monitoring, and trends forecasting to understand and predict what journalists are writing about now, and what they’ll likely be writing about in the next 2-26 weeks.

Of course, the short-term 2-week focus is for taking advantage of immediate news trends – aka newsjacking. While the 6-12 week range is topics that are new and likely to stick around, and may also be seasonal. The next 26 weeks are more oncoming trends that will also stick around.

When pitching content to land placements on outlets, you want the perfect alchemy of story, design, content, timing, and uniqueness to have a successful campaign. Even better if you can catch an upcoming trend early that will remain evergreen for a longer period of time. When you do this, you can be an innovator or early adopter of the trend discussion, and then ideally rank for that topic with your (client’s) content, and continue to acquire links to this piece. The perfect compounding interest content piece.

Market research needs to be lean market research because it needs to be fast, cheap, and on-demand when using it for a content marketing campaign. This type of market research is mainly to connect with what publishers want to see now, not what a new billion dollar product line will be, so the focus is much different.

Other pieces of this include media and reporter monitoring, competition monitoring, industry trend monitoring, and more. But that’s for another time.

More food for thought in this article on the top 5 trends for 2020.

Also, just came across the concept of a “Research Ops” role – never heard of it before, seems cutting edge: Are you ready for a Research Ops function? – “Like Design Ops, Research Ops is all about creating repeatable systems and processes to support design.”

After a disastrous spill of a few ounces of water in my backpack on a flight bricked my beloved 2017 MacBook Pro 15″, I’ve been painfully reviewing my next purchase.

Thankfully the MacBook Pro 2020 13″ was just released a few weeks ago with upgraded specs, and so I’m leaning towards this configuration:

Why a MacBook Pro 13″ 2020 is the Perfect Balance

Of course I did hours of research with 20+ tabs open, and here are some of my favorite highlights.

VentureBeat has a pretty clear writeup that I like:

After many years of using Mac laptops, I see two sweet spots in this lineup, and they’re both 13-inch MacBook Pros: the $1,299 entry-level model and the $1,799 midrange version. Sure, you can buy the ever-so-slightly thinner MacBook Air, but the cheaper model is as slow as a four-year-old MacBook Pro, and the more expensive one has a Pro price with sub-Pro performance.

https://venturebeat.com/2020/05/08/for-work-from-home-apples-2020-macbook-pro-slays-the-latest-ipad-pro/

I was considering if a quad-core MacBook Air would be just as good as a 13″ MacBook Pro, but in the end it doesn’t seem to make sense, as the entry-level Pro is very similar in price and more powerful still.

The same article shows that you shouldn’t buy the Air over Pro for weight, as it’s barely noticeable:

At 3.1 pounds, the 13-inch Pro is barely heavier than the 2.8-pound “Air,” fits in the same backpacks and bags, and offers a handful of screen and processor performance benefits that justify its price. 

And the 16″ is overkill because of weight, unless you’re a video pro:

You could also pay more for the 16-inch Pro if you need desktop-class horsepower and are willing to haul around a 4.3-pound laptop everywhere you go; unless you’re a video professional or need a high-end GPU, though, you’ll almost certainly find the 16-inch Pro to be overkill.

I would agree. I’ve been trialing a 13″ Pro from early 2020 and it’s much more portable than my 15″ that got bricked. The 15″, and now 16″, was pretty heavy and unmanageable for flights. It added considerable weight to the backpack and was way too big for a plane.

And given my 15″ got shredded by water on a plane, I’m going to be extra careful with future machines, so the clumsiness of a 16″ on a plane is not something I really want.

Would an iMac 27″ and Macbook Air Combo Be Best?

But that really got me wondering if it would make sense to get a MacBook Air for flights and traveling and an iMac 27″ for home.

The benefits: a cheap Air would mean I wouldn’t be as fearful carrying around a $2,500 laptop on planes in hotels. If it gets damaged or lost or stolen it still hurts, but it hurts only 40% as much.

In addition, the 27″ 5k retina display of the iMac would be beautiful, and even better than my 32″ 4k LG display where I can definitely notice the lack of retina. This matters for designs, typography, and generally building for the web.

I couldn’t find much on it in recent years, more so from 2011 and 2012. This 2019 article lays it out well:

I think the intention was for me to use the iMac in the studio and the laptop everywhere else, but I kind of got tired of reinstalling whatever latest package I’m using on my iMac once I come back from an evening’s hack session. 

The question I asked myself upon being given these to work with was – where’s the famed Apple interoperability? Surely requiring something mobile and something powerful is a classic mix? Actually, there’s very little to reward someone for regularly using two different Macs. I dream of the day of MacOS roaming profiles – not just your desktop being mirrored between devices (which kind of works with iCloud), but all your applications and your application settings and all your files, sites, themes…

https://dev.to/bhison/two-ways-to-get-synergy-out-of-an-imac–macbook-combo-1f02

Which brings up a good point. While I don’t have a ton of desktop applications, I do have about 10 that I use on a weekly basis – from SEO crawlers like Screaming Frog and SiteBulb, to PowerPoint, Photoshop, and Excel. So it would be a pain to double the updates for those products.

In addition – it seems there’s no great solution from Apple for cross-device syncing when you have two separate machines. There’s Sidecar for the iPad which is great, but not really syncing between desktops that I’m aware of at the moment.

The author of the above article recommends “Use your iMac as an external monitor with Target Display Mode” or “Use your iMac as a Time Machine server” – both of which don’t sound like a great reason for buying two devices.

Current 2019 13″ MacBook Pro 8 GB RAM + 128 GB SSD

I’m currently on a loaned entry-level MacBook Pro – and this thing is very underpowered.

The only thing I have open is Chrome with 15 tabs, and I’m running out of application memory. Interestingly the other 13″ Pro I had on loan a few weeks ago didn’t have these issues. It was also on 8 GB ram but maybe the processor was more powerful. Will have to look that up and compare.

This is strange since I had a 13″ MacBook Air 2013 that could output to an external display and it didn’t run out of memory at this rate.

Takeaway here – don’t buy the entry-level 2019 13″ MacBook Pro with 8 GB and also have a 4k display and depend on Chrome.

I’m at the stage of my consultancy where I’m looking to hire a full-time team instead of a collection of part-time/subcontracted freelancers.

It’s very challenging to go from one full-timer to 2-3. I’ll learn at some point if other stages are harder, but the first hire seems scary, and I don’t want to mess it up.

I also think hiring two full-timers at a time may be better, to create more of a team, rather than just boss and employee 1. But that may be my overly optimistic and ambitious thinking, which sometimes lands me in over my head.

I have a bunch of YouTube videos saved and have many books I’m reading on the subject.

But this one from Kauffman has been helpful and to the point right now. It’s hosted by Matt Blumberg, co-founder and CEO of Return Path.

Recruiting & Top Challenges

1) Defining the job properly

Take the time to define it properly, what do you really need?

Do you have on paper what their role is? Take the time to define what you need to fill the gaps of your current skillset.

2) Putting enough time into recruiting process

Think of it as seriously as marrying someone. You’re going to spend a lot of time with them.

3) Ending the process too early

He also says that recruiting doesn’t end until 90 days after the employee has started.

The onboarding piece is particularly important to make sure the new hire sticks.

Not Every Employee Can Scale with the Company

This is a super important takeaway – you can’t expect every employee to be a fit for your company at all stages of the organization.

Why I’m Looking at Startup Advice Now

I run a consultancy, trying to become an agency, so why am I looking at startup advice?

Before I would search for “agency advice” like “agency hiring tips” and while that can bring up some information, you get a lot of non-experts writing listicles, or conversely, you get former agency owners with their own new consulting practice trying to sell you on their agency training package or $1,000/hr consulting (not saying it’s not worth it).

Now I’ve learned that searching for “startup hiring tips” is better to find higher quality content produced because there’s a lot more money backing startups to succeed. (Seed funds, angels, VCs put out a lot of advice).

Since I’m the only full-timer at my consultancy, it’s comparable to a one or two-man startup that might currently be in Y Combinator and trying to nail down product-market fit.

So the advice for “how to hire your first employee for a startup” is extremely relevant.

It’s also my opinion that agencies need to think like a startup product company and not just be a staffing agency that can only ever dream of a 30% net margin one day.

All Companies are the Same, All Companies are Different

I’m sure Peter Drucker has some great quotes for this somewhere, but one realization I had in this process is the fact that all companies have core sameness in some areas like: hiring, taxes, leadership, HR, ops, and management. These are core business components that have universal principles – mainly because they deal with humans and the government, which is universal across any company. There are small nuanced differences, but a one-person startup should follow hiring principles for their first entry-level digital marketer that a multi-national corporation should for their entry-level digital marketer.

On the flipside, every business is different for other elements such as their business model, industry, narrow target market, specific product or service, the collective hive mind of the team, and more. So the process here are very different across companies. A startup hiring a marketer can write up the draft for their needs in 2 hours and post it on RemoteOK.io, while a multi-national will have many goals, meetings and signoffs before they can put up a job post.

I think it’s important to understand when the universal principles apply and when they don’t – it’s hard to know the difference all the time, which takes experience and learning from others to figure out.

Next, I need to dig into the Startup CEO video.

I have noticed that alcohol drastically affects my focus during the workweek.

If I have two beers the night before, I can’t focus nearly as well the next day. I would say I get a 50% handicap on productivity the day after a night of just a few drinks.

Of course, my age of early 30s likely impacts this, since everyone complains of the hangovers getting worse as they get older. Although there is a counter to that theory, where people say we notice it more because we have real jobs and real responsibility and can’t sleep in until 11 AM like a college student might.

Here’s a bit of anecdotal data and research on the subject.

Alcohol Greatly Affects Deep Sleep

After cutting out alcohol during the workweek, and even on weekends, my deep sleep has skyrocketed. According the the Autosleep app, connected to my Apple Watch and iPhone, it’s often over 2 hours on no-alcohol nights where I go to bed on time.

I wake much more refreshed, and have felt like my brain has literally been cleansed – a weird sensation. I don’t get the cleansing feeling all the time, but definitely more often after deep sleep.

Deep sleep is a brain state. It’s different from REM. Deep sleep happens during stage 3 and 4 of non-REM sleep, while REM is stage 5.

From ASA, American Sleep Association:

“Stage 3 and Stage 4 sleep of the sleep cycle are progressively deeper stages of sleep. These stages of sleep are also called ‘Slow Wave Sleep’ (SWS), or delta sleep.”

“Slow-wave sleep is generally referred to as deep sleep, and is comprised of the deepest stage of NREM. In stage three we see the greatest arousal thresholds, such as difficulty in awakening, and so on. After being awoken, the person will generally feel quite groggy, and cognitive tests that have been administered after being awoken from the third stage show that for up to half an hour or so, and when compared to awakenings from the other stages, mental performance is moderately impaired. This is a phenomenon known as sleep inertia. When sleep deprivation has occurred there’s generally a sharp rebound of slow-wave sleep, which suggests that there’s a need for slow-wave sleep. It now appears that slow-wave sleep is a highly active state, and not a brain quiescence as previously believed. In fact, brain imaging data shows that regional brain activity during non-REM sleep is influenced by the most recent waking experience”

Alcohol Affects Sleep in General

This paper, a meta-analysis of alcohol studies, Sleep, Sleepiness, and Alcohol Use by researchers at Henry Ford Hospital, shows that alcohol affects sleep fragmentation which then affects next day focus:

“As mentioned earlier, the identification and recognition of sleep disorders have sensitized clinical researchers to the importance of sleep quantity and continuity for optimal daytime alertness and performance. In healthy people, even relatively minimal (i.e., 1 to 3 hours) reductions in nocturnal sleep time for a single night can reduce alertness and performance efficiency during the following day. Moreover, these effects can accumulate across nights (Roehrs et al. 2000a). Similarly, a disruption of sleep continuity by auditory stimuli, without reductions in overall sleep time, results in reduced alertness and performance efficiency in healthy people (Roehrs et al. 2000a). This fragmentation of sleep continuity is characterized by increased amounts of stage 1 sleep and brief awakenings.”

The paper also refers to another study with pilots:

“Several studies have evaluated next-day performance and alertness in healthy people who consumed alcohol before bedtime. In one study, young pilots drank alcohol between 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. in quantities sufficient to result in blood alcohol concentrations (BACs) of 0.10 and 0.12 percent right before bedtime. The following morning, more than 14 hours after consuming alcohol and with BACs at 0, the performance of pilots in a flight simulator was impaired relative to their performance after consuming a placebo (Yesavage and Leirer 1986).”

Which shows a strong connection between alcohol and performance vs placebo.

Acetaldehyde Affects Focus

From Buzzfeed News:

“One possible reason for this is the way our body metabolizes booze, Adams says, which involves enzymes breaking down the alcohol into toxic byproducts. “One of these metabolites is called acetaldehyde, and some neurological studies have shown early indications that acetaldehyde might mimic the effects of alcohol on the brain and subsequent cognition,” Adams said.”

https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/carolinekee/your-brain-hungover

I’m not too privvy on the science of the above, but it’s interesting as an additional layer of impact on focus, aside from poor sleep quality.

Alcohol Affects Sleep Hormones Like Growth Hormone

This study is super interesting, as it shows a link in alcohol affecting SWS and growth hormones:

“Various hormones secreted by the pituitary gland in the brain also show circadian variations, with secretory peaks occurring during the usual sleep period. Some of these hormones are linked to sleep–if sleep is delayed, their secretory peaks also are delayed. Conversely, the levels of other hormones peak at the same time every night, even if sleep is delayed. One of the pituitary hormones linked to sleep is growth hormone, whose secretion typically peaks with the onset of SWS (Takahashi et al. 1969). In an early study, administration of 0.8 g/kg alcohol before bedtime suppressed growth-hormone secretion, despite increasing the percentage of SWS (Prinz et al. 1980). A later study using two different alcohol doses–0.5 and 1.0 g/kg–similarly found that alcohol suppressed growth-hormone secretion at a dose-related rate (Ekman et al. 1996). Thus, alcohol appears to affect growth-hormone secretion and SWS levels independently (i.e., to dissociate growth hormone from SWS).”

I never knew this until now. Super interesting that growth hormone starts at the beginning of SWS and can be delayed if sleep is delayed.

So if I’m making the connection correctly, alcohol can severely impact growth hormones during sleep – thus if you’re training or trying to gain muscle, it’s a bad idea!

Alcohol Affects the Neurotransmitters GABA and Glutamate

The same study by Timothy Roehrs at Henry Ford Hospital shows the impact of alcohol on neurotransmitters.

” Alcohol’s effects on central nervous system (CNS) function are mediated by its effects on various brain chemicals (i.e., neurotransmitters and neuromodulators) that are responsible for the transmission of nerve signals from one nerve cell (i.e., neuron) to the next. These neurotransmitters are released by the signal-emitting neuron and generally exert their actions by interacting with certain molecules (i.e., receptors) located on the surface of the signal-receiving neuron. Particularly at low doses, alcohol affects CNS function primarily by interfering with the normal actions of the neurotransmitters gammaaminobutyric acid (GABA) and glutamate, both of which also play critical roles in wake-sleep states (Koob 1996).”

Looks like alcohol directly impacts REM, but the reason is unclear, at least in this study:

“The neurobiological mechanism underlying alcohol’s suppression of REM sleep is unclear. One neurotransmitter considered to play an important role in REM sleep is acetylcholine (Bennington and Heller 1995). Like other neurotransmitters, this molecule acts through several types of receptors, including nicotinic receptors and muscarinic receptors. To date, only minimal evidence suggests a substantive alcohol effect on acetylcholine. Furthermore, the evidence that does exist indicates that alcohol’s effects occur through the nicotinic acetylcholine receptor (Collins 1996); however, acetylcholine-mediated induction of REM sleep occurs through muscarinic receptors (Bennington and Heller 1995). Thus, it appears unlikely that the alcohol-related suppression of REM sleep is mediated by alcohol’s effects on the acetylcholine system.”

Conclusion

Alcohol definitely impacts sleep, for me.

I’ve noticed if I have just one glass of wine, not close to bedtime, the effects are zero to minimal.

But if I have two beers, for instance, I definitely feel the effect. Could be other factors at play such as toxic adjuncts in beer that are unlabeled.

For now, no alcohol is the way to go for focus during the workweek!

Updated July 8, 2020

Nobody cares but I’m putting it out on the internet anyways! So after 4th of July weekend I feel the depletion again.

I find it fascinating to get this depletion after a few days of consecutive drinking, since I don’t drink that much anymore. In 2020 I’ve cut back a ton, dropping down to just a few drinks a week and some weeks with no drinking at all.

A quick chronicling of events:

1. Thursday – small happy hour at home – had a few mixed drinks and beer – probably 4 drinks total.
2. Friday – went to sister’s house – a farmstead – and had a glass of wine or two. Didn’t sleep super well because of the new environment and heat in room in morning.
3. Saturday – spent about 2 hrs out on the pond mid-day, cleaning it. Wore sunscreen but had sun exposure there. Then from about 3-6pm was on the pond for 3 hrs with more sun exposure and probably 5 drinks of alcohol. Then around dinner had another 2-3 drinks of alcohol. Sleep that night was ok, but also probably just 6-7 hrs and impacted by alcohol.
4. Sunday – big error today. I helped out on the farm for 2 hours in 85-90 degree heat, clearing brush. Made multiple runs up a hill with a wheelbarrow and by the 2nd run I was sweating big time. I drank plenty of water but this type of outdoor work is rare, and so I wasn’t acclimated to this environment. I learned on a triathlon training podcast that you should spend at least 10 days training up for a new, hotter environment such as this.

Result: starting Sunday afternoon and evening, felt very tired and depleted on the way home. This has continued on through today, Wednesday. Have been going to bed earlier but have also been waking up early, so I’ve been getting mixed sleep. Sunday I got ~6 hrs of sleep, with a 1.5 hr period of awakeness from 3:30 – 5:30 am, weirdly. Monday night got a full 9 hrs but still didn’t feel 100%. Last night, Tuesday, I got 7 hrs – just couldn’t sleep past 7:30 am.

So overall I think it’s a combination of: the alcohol itself over 3 consecutive days, the impact of alcohol on sleep for 3 nights, general sun exposure on Saturday which accelerates dehydration, over-exertion in heat on Sunday which leads to slight heat injury/heat exhaustion.

To recover from this I’m going to do a few things:

1. Know that I’ve been here before and just work through it
2. Take it easier the 2nd half of every day and try to get deep relaxation
3. I can use coffee to help, but don’t go overboard and fry nerves. Today, Wednesday, July 8, I had 2 cups of coffee. Let’s see how that shakes out, I prefer to stick to 1.
4. Continue hydration protocol with a homemade electrolyte drink (orange juice, lemon juice, agave, salt, water).
5. Vitamin routine – add more B vitamins, greens like spirulina, and whatever else is recommended like a multivitamin.

I want to write all this down to remember for the future. I haven’t felt this depleted 3 days after the last event day (Sunday was the heat exhaustion day) in about 6 months, since a bachelor party in New Orleans. It’s a real nutritional and scientific combination of impacts on the body that create the reaction I have now which is tiredness, a feeling of strong fatigue, and a generally depleted mood.

I still find it very interesting that there’s not a ton of talk out there about alcohol and its impacts on nutrition, energy, and work focus. I mean we hear our parents saying “don’t drink too much”. And we hear general guidelines of “no more than 1 drink a night for women and 2 drinks a night for men on average, with a max of 7-14 drinks a week” which is helpful but still disconnected from outcomes. When we hear these things we think of the abstract idea of health, and besides hangovers, there’s not as much of an instant connection to immediate focus, health, nutrition, and energy on a daily basis, or the next few days after drinking.

But I’ve found one resource that’s extremely compelling and synthesizes a good amount of facts and science on this particular subject: https://wellness.ucsd.edu/studenthealth/resources/health-topics/alcohol-drugs/Pages/alcohol-nutrition-endurance.aspx

Some of my favorite highlights:

Alcohol use depletes your source of energy.

Once alcohol is absorbed through your stomach and small intestine and finally into your cells, it can disrupt the water balance in muscle cells, thus altering their ability to produce adenosine triphosphate (ATP), which is your muscles’ source of energy. ATP provides the furl necessary for your muscles to contract.

Alcohol also reduces energy sources by inhibiting a process known as gluconeogenesis in which glucose is formed from substances other than glucose. When alcohol is oxidized by alcohol dehydrogenase (an enzyme), it produces an elevation of NADH, which ultimately reduces the amount of a coenzyme that is essential in the production of ATP. This loss of ATP results in a lack of energy and loss of endurance.

This above is fascinating because I rarely see a direct link made between alcohol and ATP production.

Alcohol use inhibits ability to learn new information.

Any athlete knows that preparation, such as learning pays and sound strategies, is essential to peak performance. However, alcohol can have a devastating effect on this process. When there is alcohol in your system, your brain’s ability to learn and store new information is inhibited due to compromising of the hippocampus, a structure deep in the brain vital to the formation of memories. If you cannot form new memories, you cannot learn.

This is also fascinating – we’ve heard that alcohol kills brain cells (which isn’t exactly true) but this connection to preventing learning new info is very true for those who have felt stupid the day after drinking.

Such a minimalist beautiful theme.

Back to what WordPress started as.

Minimalism is more attractive the more you face complexity.

I’m inspired by Pat Walls daily blogging – https://daily.patwalls.co/

Perhaps I’ll do it once a month or so.

xx Peace.