The worst commercial ever

In the morning I keep ESPN 2 on in the background while I'm working. I listen to Mike&Mike until 10AM and then watch Cold Pizza from 10-12. I enjoy my morning television routine, but I'm getting sick of this shitty, shitty commercial for ESQ Swiss watches that's on all the time. I found a link to this piece of garbage on their website.

Don't think it's so bad? Try hearing that freaking guy say "I wouldn't say that I'm a work-a-holic but I'm close" and then that chick say "I love being spontaneous" with that corny music in the background EVERY SINGLE COMMERCIAL BREAK. It's stupid, it doesn't make me want to buy a watch, and it makes no freaking sense.

Just for making me suffer, I will NEVER purchase one of your over-priced watches, and I am going to tell all of my friends about your piece of crap commercial that's ruining my mornings in hopes that they too will never buy one of your watches. Congrats on a successful ad campaign.

Back to entrepreneurial posting next time :)

Email Assault

I was meeting with a fellow small business owner today at his office and everything took took twice as long as it should have because his phone kept going off every five seconds. I asked him how he dealt with it, and he said he just hired someone part time to handle his phone calls and screen his emails. I asked with particular interest because it's starting to happen to me...badly.

I get many more phone calls than I used to, but the real assault is coming from email. iPrioritize gets customer service questions and suggestions for improvement, SportsLizard gets requests for advertising and questions about customizing or purchasing collectibles, this blog yields some emails from fellow YE's, and I get several requests at a time for SEO work. I have spent hours each day answering emails this week. When you have 10-20 emails a day that all require well thought out responses, it takes a lot of time away from your work.

I only check my email every few hours to avoid distractions, and I've got a good filtering system that eliminates most of the junk mail without much effort on my end, but it still doesn't solve the problem of responding to emails. What do you guys do? I know there are a lot of other YE's who have several businesses, so how do you deal with it? I'm going to need to become more efficient, I just haven't figured out how yet.

It's better to ask for forgiveness than permission

When I first started my job as an engineer, my boss and I were trying to decide how to solve a potentially disastrous problem. I came up with an idea for a solution, but I didn't think management would go for it. I'll never forget what his reply was: "it's better to ask for forgiveness than permission." He said that if I always did what I thought was right, he'd always have my back if I made a decision that upset someone above us. We did it, it worked, and although management might not have approved what we did beforehand, they couldn't argue with results.

It gave me great freedom in my job, but more importantly it taught me an important lesson about entrepreneurship. It's inevitable that you are going to step on the toes of other people and businesses in the things you do. If you pick up the phone and ask every single one of them if your action is going to bother them, you're in for trouble. For one, as long as what you are doing is ethical and good natured, 99% of people and businesses won't object to anything. You also open the door to people saying no if you ask. It's kind of like pointing out a defect in something and then asking whether or not it's noticeable. It might not have been before, but it is now that you mentioned it.

A great example of this is the SportsLizard News Reader from my last post. Is it permissible to publish other people's RSS feeds without their permission? I've read articles that argue both ways, and as far as my research has turned up, there is no conclusive agreement. The conservative approach is to ask people if you can republish their feed. In building a site with feeds from over 400 of the best sports sites in the world, it seemed infeasible for me to ask, even though some sites specify that you need to do so.

I figure what's the worst that can happen? ESPN sends me an email telling me to take their feed down? At that point I either try to negotiate a deal with them (maybe pay a fee) or just take it down. And the odds of that happening are sooooo small that I doubt it will ever happen.

As an entrepreneur you have to make tough decisions all the time, and if you worry about the possible effects on every single person, you'll never get anywhere. Do what's best for your business. Make a decision and just go with it. If it bothers someone or some business, offer a sincere apology. It really is better to ask for forgiveness than permission.

Sports fans - would you use this?

Over the Thanksgiving holiday I spent some time adding a sports news reader to SportsLizard. Unlike my other projects, this is one that I primarily did for myself and I will enjoy regardless of whether or not anyone else finds value in it.

I wanted to be able to read sports news from several sites at once, without having to sign up for something like MyYahoo or having to download a feed reader. I also didn't want to have to go out and find all of the feeds I want to read. I wanted all of the sports feeds already picked out and organized for me.

So that's what I did. Here's a screenshot of the default homepage...

...and the description-tag when hovering over the headline (which saves some time from actually having to visit the site for every story)

...and finally you can customize the 10 feeds from over 450 unique feeds that I handpicked. I included sports sections from local newspapers, so fans in Detroit can subscribe to the Free Press or fans in NY can subscribe to the Times. It remembers your favorites with a cookie so there's no registration! It's literally a two-file site with no database.

I'll talk more about ideas I have to market this in the future, but I do think there is some potential here. Most programmers will say "big deal" because it's just an RSS reader, but the reality is that most people still don't know what RSS is, and many who do still don't see advantages over just bookmarking a site. Hopefully the simplicity of this application will impress "average joe sportsfan". Nowhere does it actually try to "push" RSS...or even mention that RSS is where the news is coming from.

For you sports fans out there, I'm curious if you see value in this or not. An email or a comment would be greatly appreciated.

As for me - I set it up with feeds from my favorite sites and favorite teams and I'm loving it...although I'm a bit biased :)

Happy 1 Year Blogging Birthday to Me!

It's hard to believe that it's only been a year since I started this blog, but the calendar doesn't lie. A lot has happened in my life in the past 365 days - I quit my job, moved back to NY, developed and launched iPrioritize, and a whole lot more. When I wrote that first post, I had no idea that anyone would ever really want to read something that I wrote (despite what I said).

I find it fitting that this falls on Thanksgiving week because I am at a loss for words when I try to express my appreciation for everyone that has ever taken the time to read one of my posts. I've gotten to know many other young entrepreneurs that have helped me immensely both personally and professionally, many of which initially contacted me after reading my blog.

So THANK YOU for reading. THANK YOU for commenting. I'll do my best to put out quality posts for the months and years to come, and if there's ever anything I can do to help you out as a YE, let me know and I'll do the best I can.

I went back and read all 171 of my posts from the past year and picked out my favorites. I think a lot of my best stuff is from when I first started blogging and was trying to balance a job and a business. It really is amazing to see how my life has changed, and I can't wait to see what the next year has to bring!

• Patience is a virtue I don't have (11/29/05)- reading those reminds me of the 9-5 and how happy I am to be out of it.
• The challenge of motivation (12/2/05) - this post reminds me of how much the 9-5'ers fueled my fire to be an entrepreneur. No one believed I would leave my career, that I could give it all up. I did, and I'm happier and better off for it. Reading this post still gets me all fired up at those who doubted me. I suppose I should thank them for the motivation :)
• Don't become a workaholic, it's not worth it (12/6/05) - I remember this day and this guy like it was yesterday. I can't imagine working for days straight like that, for ANYTHING, yet alone for what he was working for.
  
• Business travel kills my productivity (12/10/05) - I didn't mention it in the post, but that trip to Mississippi that I talk about was when I decided to quit. Being snowed in at an airport all day gives a man a lot of time to think about life.
• If you think you will fail, you will (12/24/05) - "what you think, you are" is one of my favorite phrases of all time.
• I quit my job today !!!! (1/11/06) - ah yes, there it is baby. I still get a smile on my face when reading it.
• SportsLizard featured in Tuff Stuff Magazine (1/12/06) - the day after putting in my two weeks I got to walk around work and show this magazine to everyone....damn that felt good :)
• 6 day's left until I'm a full time entrepreneur (1/19/06) - gotta love "do-as-much-work-for-me-as-you-can-before-you-leave
  -so-I-don't-get-screwed-over-by-you-quitting mode" lol. I remember how crazy that was.
• Motivation slump (2/13/06) - just skip to the last two paragraphs and read. Every once in a while you should take time to marvel in your accomplishments.
• YE business ethics, part 1 and part 2 (4/13/06) - two of my best posts in my mind. "If you have a chance to make life better for others and fail to do so, you are wasting your time on earth" is another of my favorite quotes.
• Balance (5/28/06) - I was dangerously close to burning out when I wrote that post. Those beers and quiet time helped more than you can imagine :)
• How far are you willing to go? (6/27/06) - I love thinking about how far I can push myself, although there's probably something wrong with that.
• The coolest thing about being a YE (7/1/06) - there's nothing cooler than seeing your idea turned into reality.
  
• The sport of business (8/13/06) - nothing motivates me more than reading those quotes from Mark Cuban.
• "Please fire me" blog (8/15/06) - one of my better ideas...and more humorous posts.
  
• Writers block or something like that (8/24/06) - my most enjoyable post to write. I had no idea what to write about, so I just started writing. I should do that more often.
• Mediocre publicity better than no publicity? (9/22/06) - man, I'd kill for some of that mediocre publicity for iPrioritize right now! It seems like things have stalled a bit since the peak of the weeks following that pub.
• Why do I blog? (10/12/06) - a turning point in how I approach blogging.
• My biggest fear (10/25/06) - hands down my best post in my mind. If you really want to get to know me, read this post...it's 100% from the heart.
  

If I don't post again before Thanksgiving - have a great holiday everyone.

Here we go again...

My sleep schedule is all f*cked up again. One of the most challenging things about not having a set time that you have to do your work is that you don't have a heck of a lot of motivation to get out of bed. I've also been doing better with balancing my schedule this month, so I'm working less hours and being more efficient with my time. As great as that is, that makes me feel like I can sleep as late as I feel like.

I tend to get in bed around 12, fall asleep around 12:30, and get up any time between 8:30 and 10:30. After 8 I'm usually awake, but I kind of lay there and fade in and out of sleep because there is no urgency to get up. I still get everything I need done in the day and I've been spending more time doing things that aren't work related that I enjoy.

But in reality, a healthy young man like myself needs 6-8 hours of sleep (or so the studies say), and I'm getting too much. I think part of it is that I don't have anything in particular that I want to do with my extra time. So I've decided to start sleeping until 7:30, which will give me 7 hours and give me a quick start to my day. Believe it or not, I might actually be able to spend my nights and weekends doing some of the things I've put on the backburner these past few years.

I'm always trying to be more efficient, in business and in life. I feel like my work is pretty damn efficient, but my life isn't. I don't place a high enough of a priority on doing stuff outside of work because the past few years of working my ass off has gotten me used to feeling like I'm working 24/7, and I'm almost "lost" if I don't have that feeling. I think that as entrepreneurs we get stuck in that "work mode" and get used to being in it all day long. I've grown to require very little non work time compared to most people.

As life goes on though, I'm going to miss out on things that I don't want to miss out on if I don't start making my non-work time a priority, and it starts with sleeping less and spending my extra time doing volunteer work, reading fiction books, hanging out with friends, playing bball, playing video games, and all of the other stuff I don't do enough of right now. Those extra few hours a day can be used for all of the above, making me a better person and in turn a better entrepreneur. Funny how a new sleep schedule can help change your life, but I really think it can for me.

Now, the big test - the alarm is set. Will I actually get up? Can I hang on for a week? I know that after a week or two my body will be used to 7:30, so the toughest day will the first one. Isn't it ironic that I'm disciplined and focused enough to quit my job and start my own business, but not enough to get up when the alarm sounds?

My 24 Hour Rule

I'm a pretty emotional guy and usually that works pretty well for me. I wear my emotions on my sleeve - if something pisses me off I'll let you know, and if something excites me you can see it on my face. My passion for my work (and life in general) tends to lead to good things. I'd like to think that it's played a large part in all of the amazing opportunities I've had in my life and the great relationships I've developed.

BUT, sometimes my emotions can get the best of me. Usually, it happens like this - I get a little TOO excited about an opportunity and commit myself to something that I realistically will struggle to do. Occasionally it's worse - my brutal honesty leads to me saying things I probably shouldn't say to people, and I end up having to apologize for not thinking before I open my mouth.

One time in college I sent an ill-advised email to an ex-girlfriend, which she promptly printed out and forwarded to all of her friends and made me look like the biggest ass ever. Long after her and I reconciled, I never felt comfortable around all of those people that had read the note and rushed to judgement about me. I certainly didn't blame them, I blamed myself for not checking myself before acting.

What was my solution: a 24 hour rule that I now use all the time. If I'm excited about a business opportunity, I wait 24 hours before committing to anything. If I want to make an impulse purchase, I wait a day and see if I feel the same way. If someone pisses me off and I want to go bat-shit crazy on them, I wait 24 hours before acting. More often than not I feel differently the next day than I did initially, and I save myself a whole lot of trouble.

Being the emotional guy I am, I don't know how I could get by without this rule. If I didn't have it I'd probably have a laundry list of occasions that I regretted like that instance back in college. Bottom line - learning to think, really think, before I act has been a large part of my maturation process, and I wonder what the world would be like if everyone played by my 24 hour rule. How many divorces would be avoided? How many crimes wouldn't be committed? How many people would live an overall higher quality of life? Just food for thought...

Case Study: iPrioritize MySpace Marketing

One of the things that I want to share more with you guys is some of the specific successes and failures that I incur, because I think you can learn more from specifics than when I generalize. I also think that many of you can offer a different perspective on things and probably leave some great feedback that will help me in the future. So every once in a while I'm going to try to break down the good and the bad of something I did with one of my businesses.

When I launched iPrioritize, I knew right away that I needed to go after a different market than the "web2.0/AJAX" crowd. You can spend your entire life in the techsphere (discussed more here) and never really go after the customers that will appreciate their product the most.

One of the target markets for iPrioritize is students - they have a lot of things that they need organized, they are the future business leaders, and if they really like something it can virally spread like wildfire. And where do students hang out? MySpace. So I decided to create a profile for the i-Guy, the letter "i" in the iPrioritize logo (which took about a day to make, messing around with MySpace's horrible, horrible code).



Knowing that if I put too much effort into promoting iPrioritize, people would see the i-Guy profile as an advertisement and ignore it, I set out to appeal to the college crowd. I took some photos of my friends and I and photoshopped the i-Guy into them. I started a blog where people can ask the i-Guy questions about anything. Most importantly, I started putting up a "Video of the week" that I get from YouTube.

Here's some vital info:

• To rapidly add friends, I bought a copy of Badder Adder for $47.
  
• I only send friend requests to college students (MySpace limits you to around 500/day).
  
• Each week I send an automated "Happy Birthday" message to anyone whose birthday is in the coming week. The birthday message is an image that links to iPrioritize (free advertising) and also has the "i" in birthday as the i-Guy.
  
• The only other mass-contact that I have with my friends is a weekly bulletin announcing the new video.
• I only mention iPrioritize with one big link on the profile page (and some mentions at the end of blog posts).
  

Here are the vital numbers as of yesterday:

• Date started: 8/7/2006
• MySpace profile views: 24,553
• MySpace buddies: 6,262
• Direct visits to iPrioritize: 822
• Direct iPrioritize sign ups (free accounts): 123

At first glance, one would be disappointed because of the only 123 sign ups. But I am REALLY encouraged by the fact that I have over 6,000 buddies. That means that people like my pictures, my profile, and the videos I post. That is HUGE. I am building a massive community that I can leverage for other things (more in a moment). I also don't mean to neglect the positive branding. A LOT of people have at least seen the i-Guy, and that's a good thing for iPrioritize long term.

Another great thing (not reflected in those stats) are the two press mentions that this got me in college newspapers (Bowling Green and Elon). I've estimated around 100 more sign ups directly from those articles.

Where do I go from here? This is where I'm hoping for some help from you guys, but here's what I've come up with:

• Keep doing what I'm doing. It's resulting in sign ups (although less than I'd like for the traffic) and more importantly resulting in building a massive network of buddies.
• Tweak SOMETHING on the page to try to increase traffic to iPrioritize (without turning people off). My first thought is an iPrioritize screenshot of the application, although that very well might turn people off so I'm going to have to consider it some more.
  
• Start leveraging my big group of buddies. The first thing I want to do is start selling i-Guy shirts (through CafePress), with half of the proceeds going to charity. The shirts (I'm thinking about a new one each month) would have slogans like "i am smart" and "i am sexy" and "i am wasted" using the i-Guy as the letter "i"...and I'll try to sneak the iPrioritize URL on there if I can. Hopefully this will help brand the i-Guy and iPrioritize, and hopefully I can get some positive PR for helping out a charity I believe in (a win-win).
  

Overall, I'm glad I ventured into MySpace. It's a tough crowd to appeal to, but if you manage to do so you can build a powerful network to market to.

The guy I don't ever want to become

One of the things that motivates me the most to pursue my dreams is that I don't want to become "that guy." We all know him - he's got a good job, nice family, nice house, and nice kids, and he seems like overall he should be a pretty grateful and happy dude. But he's not. He sleepwalks through life and seems half miserable and half bitter all the time - even when doing the things that he enjoys.

I've met a lot of these people over the course of my life. Part of me feels bad for them - to a large extent they've lost their hope. Their most enjoyable day is one where they can stare at the TV for a few hours while the wife and kids leave them alone. Part of me also feels that they could dig out of it if they wanted to and that a large part of life is how you look at it. Many people would be thrilled to have a roof over their heads and dinner on the table every night. It almost pisses me off that these people aren't grateful for what they have.

But all this guy can think about is how much his wife is nagging him for a new house or his boss is on his ass or how he can't get ahead because there is a corporate conspiracy against him. He would never consider leaving the "comfort" of his job to find something better because he's afraid - so he'd rather be miserable.

He really becomes a problem when he starts infecting everyone else with his bitterness towards life. If he can't get ahead, he might as well have company in his misery. He claims to be telling the young professional "how it really is", but what he's really doing is subconsciously crushing your dreams. He's telling you that the real world isn't fair, and that good guys don't win.

I don't ever want the comfort of that guy because with his comfort comes his bitterness. He has no passion for life. He doesn't love what he does. He doesn't see the good in the world and in people in general. He doesn't even see the glass as half empty, he sees a broken glass.

Funny thing is, no one wakes up one day and becomes this guy. It happens over time, and I am at the age where I can start to see it happening to some people I know. I wonder what they'll be like five or ten years from now? I have a pretty good idea that they will become "that guy".

I've known quite a few people like this in my young career (ages ranging anywhere from thirty to sixty). Many of them have reached out to "help" me, and while I certainly listen to what they have to say, I'm secretly telling myself that what they are telling me is bullshit and that they are really trying to mold me to become the next "them", the guy that I don't ever want to become.

Seeing them helps motivate me to never, ever become what they are. It's funny - every decision I've made over the last year or two has been the exact opposite of what these people have told me to do. I suppose that's how I know that I'll be that 80 year old dude that runs a business, or volunteers at the local shelter, or plays competitive sports, or travels around the world, and not the 80 year old that sits in his rocking chair bitching about how life screwed him over and how he would have reached his dreams if it wasn't for that baseball coach in high school or that boss at his first job.

I want to be more like a cornerback

What's the most mentally difficult position in sports to play? I think most people would say quarterback or offensive line, and baseball apologists might say pitcher or catcher. Here's a different thought for you: cornerback. The corner is out there on their proverbial island with the receiver. It's just them and the receiver, who is usually equally as fast and several inches taller...and oh yeah, the receiver actually knows where he's going. The cornerback has to be completely reactive.



All of the challenges of the cornerback position lead to one thing: a lot of failure. Even the best of the best - Champ Bailey, DeAngelo Hall, and Chris McAlister - are constantly beaten. Several times each game they fail, and each time they usually are completely alone in that failure. There's no one else to blame but themselves. Being a great corner has a lot to do with being freakishly fast and very intelligent, but it has a lot more to do with being able to rapidly learn from failure and then forget about it.

If Champ Bailey gets burned for a touchdown by Randy Moss on the opening drive, he's got to figure out what went wrong and then forget about it FAST, because he's likely going to get thrown at again 5 minutes later, and if he lets his previous failure creep into his mind he's going to fail again.

As an entrepreneur, I want to get better at that - failing, learning, and recovering. We all know that if you're not failing, you're not trying. But the more frequently you fail, the more frequently you learn. Problem is, if you don't know how to handle failure like an NFL corner, you'll focus more on the depression of failing and less on how the lesson learned is going to help you succeed in the future.

Life is good

I was having lunch with a fellow young entrepreneur yesterday and we spent quite a bit of time discussing our choice to work for ourselves. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that I am happier and less stressed than at any time in my life. In college, I was stressed out (although I shouldn't have been) about getting good grades and doing a bunch of internships and getting a great job when I graduated. I also was miserable at times because many of the classes that I "needed" to get A's in were completely pointless in my mind.

In the working world, everyone seems more stressed about keeping their job than they do about helping the company. Everyone wants to position themselves for a raise, or a good performance review, or a promotion two years down the road. It's an insanely stressful environment that includes a ton of backstabbing, people forming alliances with each other, and people completely becoming a facade to get what they want. It sucks, and it's hard not to get caught up in. I tried to stay out of that crap, but you tend to get sucked in whether you want to or not...and needless to say it made work suck.

Working for myself - my customers write my performance reviews, I control my raises, and if I don't get where I want to, the only one I can blame is myself. There's no boss to blame and no corporate conspiracy. I might be busier than ever, but I'm ultimately so much happier because I don't have to deal with all of that junk. Sometimes I don't take enough time to think about how good things really are. Overall, life is pretty damn good.

What I've learned in the last month

A lot has changed in the past month or so - not in my overall goals but in how I spend my time in the day. As I've mentioned before, the response to SEO Playbook was a bit overwhelming. Now I'm at the point where I can breathe for a few seconds and I'm trying to reflect on what I've learned so that I can proceed to meet the goals of SportsLizard and iPrioritize while doing freelance work on the side.

• There is more work out there than I can do - at first I thought it would be tough to find freelance jobs because there are so many great people out there doing them. I learned that there are WAY more jobs out there than I can take, mostly because 1) EVERY business in the world wants their site to get more traffic and create more sales, and 2) Many web design/SEO firms out there do inadequate jobs and people are constantly looking for someone new to work with. I got a months worth of jobs off of 1 article, that I barely did any work to promote!


• I need to manage my projects better - since I don't think I'll have any trouble finding freelance jobs, I could consume myself with doing every job as fast as possible. I need to calm down and give more realistic deadlines so I don't stress myself out. If I think the work will take 3 weeks, I'll tell the client 4 to give myself a cushion. That way I don't stress myself out trying to meet some self imposed deadline. Overall, I am pretty damn quick in the work I do, so being a little quicker isn't necessary. Seriously, who the hell do I think I am? No client in their right mind would demand I work on a weekend on their project...so maybe I should STOP working so much on weekends.


• iPrioritize and SportsLizard will suffer if I don't watch it - again, since there is a steady flow of projects coming in, I need to remember that the ultimate goal for me is to have my sites generate most of my revenue and have consulting jobs be a "once in a while" kind of thing. To get there, I still need to give the proper time to my sites and not treat them like second class citizens compared to my clients sites. My first month of taking on side jobs I spent nearly no time on either site, and it showed in the fact that both grew less than they usually do. It was acceptable and understandable for a month, I just can't make negligence a habit.


• Overall, I enjoy working with clients - in past jobs I've had varied experiences working with clients of all different sizes, so I was a bit skeptical going into this. The difference in this case has been that I am usually working directly with the owner of a small to mid-size business who has the same passion for their business that I have for mine and we connect on that level.


• People have no problem pre-paying for my work - I thought this could be a problem, but with my 100% money back guarantee no one has had any sort of a problem with it at all.


• People like talking to me before buying - no surprise here. I make an effort to make sure that I get on the phone with anyone before I do any work for them, and it seems to help them to trust me...they realize that I'm actually a real person :)


• Just do it - this is more general, but I'm glad I put up the SEO Playbook site a month ago and just took a chance. I didn't know what to expect, but a month later I'm soooo much more knowledgeable and I've been able to tweak the site and my collective business plans accordingly. Rather than plan something elaborate, I put up a one-page site in a matter of a few days and saw what happened. Definitely the way to go. I'm going to try to do even more of this in the future. By nature I like to plan, but sometimes I overplan and I think it hurts me


• My sites/businesses balance each other real well - I like having two of my sites and also working with others on their sites. The balance in terms of where my income is coming from and how is nice - the sites tend to fluctuate quite a bit and overall they grow, but I only have so much control over their growth...whereas I have much more control over how many SEO jobs I take and how much $ I make from each. I guess, in the end, the more varied streams of income you have the better - less likely for one bad thing to hurt you.

On a total side note - I never know how much to tip in certain scenarios (like when the movers moved me back to NY). Thanks to a post on Kineda, I now know.

Have a good weekend everyone, I'm off to go play some Xbox and then go see Borat.

Hard work: perception vs. reality

Back when I was in college, my schedule varied drastically. Some semesters I would have 4 or 5 hours between classes, and other semesters I would have 1 or 2. I've always tried to be as efficient as possible, so I used that time to homework so I didn't have to be one of those people that pulled all nighters.

After a few years, I noticed something - I got the same amount of work done when I had 2 hour breaks as I did when I had 4. When I had shorter breaks, there was more a sense of urgency about getting as much as I could out of my time, whereas when I had more time I was more lax and spent more time boning around on ESPN.com and on IM.

When I went into the working world, everyone told me to "put in at least 50 hours a week" to make it "look like I was working hard." Never one to not voice my opinion, I always told them that was stupid. I've got X amount of work. If I bust my balls and finish X amount of work in 30 hours, why should I stay 50? Why can't I kick out at noon Friday? Instead, corporate America seems to reward the person who spends hours a day at the water cooler socializing and "paces" themselves through the week. They come in early, leave late, but spend a lot of their time at work jerking off.

Yet they look better than the person that comes in focused at 9 AM and kicks out at 4 PM? That guy accomplished a shit ton more work, but the "perception" is that he doesn't "put in the time" like the guy who comes in early and leaves late. It's a bunch of crap, and maybe we should realize that the quality of life in our country is so much lower (and rates of depression, disease and obesity are so much higher) than societies that don't look at you as a pathetic human being if you don't put in crazy hours (see Europe).

One of my early New Year's Resolutions - be working only 40 hours/week next year. It'll be a hell of a 40 hours, but then I'll turn myself off and focus on the other important things that I've placed on the backburner right now. Call me crazy, but I'll probably be a lot more efficient and a lot more happy.