The end!

After 296 posts, this is officially the last post of the SportsLizard Entrepreneur Blog. If you'd like to continue to follow my story (you damn better continue to follow my story) you can do so on Adam-McFarland.Net. Within the next hour I should have that site up and running with a few posts. As I said in the last post, if you're subscribed to the Feedburner feed you should have a seamless transition to the new blog.

See you on the other side :)

This blog is moving!

I apologize for the lack of posts the last week or so...I've been programming my brains out.

For a while I've been considering moving this blog to its own domain, and since I'm a step ahead of my partners on finishing off the DI site, I've got a week to kill and I'm taking care of a lot of little things that I've been putting off. Those subscribed to the Feedburner RSS feed (http://feeds.feedburner.com/SportsLizardEntrepreneurBlog) should have a seamless transition. Everyone else can find me at the new URL, which I'll announce next post.

Here's WHY I'm doing it:

• Blogger sucks ass. I started this blog in 2005 as my first blog and Blogger was a simple setup. Now I use Wordpress for everything and I can't stand Blogger. The new blog will have all of the Blogger Archives, but will use Wordpress so thankfully I don't need to worry about Bloggers' crappy FTP and commenting anymore.
• Both SportsLizard and this blog have grown considerably in the past 2 years. I want the SL domain to be 100% sports and sports collectibles, and I want the new site to be 100% young entrepreneur. It just makes sense that way (and won't confuse search engines so much about the topic/focus of the domain).
  
• I started another blog on this domain about sports collectibles earlier this year, and it's confusing having 2 blogs on one domain.
• My entrepreneurial journey has led me to do much, much more than just SL, and I don't want to have this be my primary association any more. It's just a piece of my life and Pure Adapts' overall business.
• I think I'll be more honest. I mentioned recently that I was struggling with blogging, and I think having a separate place to vent my thoughts will be good for me. I also hope to share more detailed solutions, such as specific sample code I used to solve a problem.

As soon as the new blog is ready, I'll post one last post here and then be done with it. Being the SEO that I am, I'm going to 301 redirect every post to it's counterpart on the new site (the archives will look almost exactly the same). It'll be interesting to see how my SE rankings are hurt because of the move. Hopefully my link juice will be passed successfully...it'll sure be interesting to track how the move impacts both SL and the new domain.

To my advertisers and sponsors: I checked, and nearly all of you will expire in the next month or two. I've decided to go sans links/ads on the new site, so how about this: I'll leave your ads up on the archived version of this blog indefinitely and we'll call it even? Of course, if you want a pro-rated refund I understand...just email me and I'll take care of it.

What is your PSP (no, not Sony)?

Last night I read an absolutely fascinating article in Fast Company Magazine about former YE (now 34) Adam Werbach entitled Working With The Enemy. Werbach, who was a leading environmentalist and president of the Sierra Club at the ripe old age of 23, has pulled a 180 and aligned himself with Walmart. His speech in 2004 "Is Environmentalism Dead" sent shockwaves through the community that supported him.

Werbach asked a simple question to the head of every major environmental agency: "Have you achieved your goals?" We all know that the answer is "no" and that the world today is probably in the worst shape it has ever been in.

I've never been one to call myself "green" at all - but over the past year I've been buying more and more into the philosophy that we have to do SOMETHING or else the world won't be around for our grand kids. The beauty in this disaster we've put ourselves in, is that we HAVE to rise to the occasion and that means that we're going to see great entrepreneurial efforts to try to get us there.

Back to Werbach. What has he done since being ostracized? He sided with the enemy - Walmart - and has implemented a project called PSP, or Personal Sustainability Project (read the case study).

What IS PSP? Werbach was impressed that Walmart is taking it's role in going green seriously (senior execs now have sustainability objectives built into their evaluations and bonuses). His company, Act Now, teamed with Walmart to try to get each employee to care about sustainability. Each employee is being encouraged to make one small change in their routine that supports sustainability - their own Personal Sustainability Practice. Like it or not, with 1.3 million employees spanning the country, Walmart employees have a huge influence on society. The strategy is to spread PSP practices (such as quitting smoking or walking to work) to the communities through these employees.

So far it's worked. Some accomplishments from their site:

Some noteworthy accomplishments of the Wal-Mart and Sam’s Club Associates are:

• lost more than 60 tons of weight;


• walked/biked/swam more than 380,000 miles


• created over 16,000 “Idea Groups” to support one another around Personal Sustainability; and


• quit or reduced smoking, with more than 10,000 Associates to date making a healthier change!


• Recycled more than 5 million pounds of aluminum, plastic, and paper

Associates across the U.S. are eager to take PSP to the next level, ready to “pass it on”, to their customers and community, and feel proud to work for an organization that is committed to sustainability.

Here's why I buy in: it's impossible to completely change people. But if everyone focuses on doing a few little things, the impact will be measurable. Instead of striving for perfection (impossible anyway), try to make real and quantifiable changes that will add up over time to make a substantial difference.

So what is my PSP? I thought of a few things I've been doing or have done in the last year that help:

• I now make a conscious effort to recycle anything that can be recycled (I threw everything out previously)
  
• I've reduced my bottle water consumption by about 6 per week (I'd say I was at 1/day before and now it's 1/week) by buying purchasing a reusable bottle from Think Outside the Bottle. Bottled water wastes plastic in production and energy in transportation, and on top of that the water is sometimes bottled in areas (FIJI is a perfect example) where the citizens don't even have drinking water!
• I programmed a system to automatically PDF and archive all invoices for Detailed Image. Previously we were printing paper copies of everything.
  

Don't get me wrong, I still do a lot of wasteful things. But I'm not a hypocrite. If I was operating at 100% un-sustainability before, I'm probably operating at 90% right now. Where would we be if everyone made a 10% improvement? People who criticize the simple changes and do nothing because "it won't matter" are the ones preventing us from making progress.

No lease for Pure Adapt

Here's how our lease negotiation went:

• Her (owner of office/warehouse park): "it costs $1,200/month to rent our mediocre space and we require a 3-year lease"
• Us: "we'd like to move in in October, and there are a lot of improvements that need to be made...but we'll move in September 1 and overlook the improvements if the price is reduced to $900/month"
• Her: "I'll do $1,050/month"
• Us (knowing full well we'd be happy to do $1,050): "How about $1,000?"
• Her (apparently insulted by our $50 reduction counter-offer): "No, and now $1,050 is off the table. I'll give you $1,000, but year 2 will be $1,100 and year 3 will be $1,300"
• Us: f*ck off

Those might not have been the exact words, but you get the idea....

It's actually for the better. DI's slow time is the winter, and heating costs in an old warehouse like that would have been high for the winter. We're going to take a step back and weigh our options. My gut feeling is that we'll end up buying a place now, and that we'll be far better off by not signing the lease. If we buy we'll probably look to get extra space so we can rent some of it out to another business and help supplement the mortgage. A much, much better long term move.

Kind of a weird feeling, because we thought we might be moving today. But I have a question for you: who becomes so offended during a negotiation over $50 that they retract their previous offer? What a biatch.

How will your friends react?

There was an interesting article about young entrepreneurs in this months Entrepreneur Magazine (here's the web copy of the article entitled "A New Direction"). It essentially deals with the difficulties YEs face with their friendships, particularly after they have some success. Let's face it - those of us who dream about starting a business and then actually do it in our teens or early twenties are in the minority, and that can put a strain on relationships with other people our age.

I thought YE Alex Vaz put it best:

Stick with what you're doing, because once you do make money, there will be plenty of time to party. If your friends aren't happy about you excelling and making money, they're probably just jealous. Your real friends will always support you.

Every experience is different, and some people may get 100% support from everyone they encounter, but most of us have or will experience a divide amongst our friends. Personally, I've noticed that my family and good friends have eventually come around and it's to the point now where they know this is what I do and it's barely a topic of conversation. If I say I can't make a social event because of the business, they don't hold it against me. They know that as we grow and stabilize I'll be able to be more flexible with my time spent working.

The shock factor is gone for me. However, it wasn't like that initially, and anyone doing something as ballsy as starting a company has to be strong enough to use the questions and criticism as motivation and not let it crush them.

The only problems I still have with people I was friends with in my engineering career. Good friends from college or my first job seem to have a bit of that jealousy. Maybe they feel like I bailed on them because we went through so much...or maybe they are unhappy with their jobs and wish they took the leap that I did. I really don't know, but that's the only spot in my life that 2 years later that I feel there's been a strain because of the business. I'd like to keep those friendships, but at some point you stop calling and emailing and just focus on the people who want to spend time with you.

Kudos to Entrepreneur Mag for talking about such a pertinent topic.

Letter of intent

With all of my ramblings about outages, I failed to mention that we put in a letter of intent for warehouse space in Albany. The space is huge for the price, in an OK area, and the company that owns the business park is very easy to work with. They're asking for $1,200/month and we were planning on moving in October 1. We offered $900/month and said we'd move in September 1. We also said we'd take it as-is - there are a few minor improvements we want done but we'll do them ourselves if we can save 25%/month.

We'll see. If not, we might pay a little more or we might put out offers for some other spaces we've looked at. We like this place because it gives us sufficient space to grow in to (2,500+ sq ft), but we know it's a renters market and the spaces available outnumber the tenants out there. For that reason, we're not taking anything less than what we consider to be a great deal. If need be, we can wait a few more months.

Power Outage

Last night I went to go see the 6:40 PM show of Superbad. Absolutely hilarious movie, put me in a great mood despite no Skype and no PayPal Sandbox. Afterwards I went home and was contemplating either a) playing about 3 hours of Madden '08 or b) going out for a few beers. After deciding to stay in and play Madden, the power went out. I ended up grabbing a few beers and had a decent time.

Was there a tornado? Hurricane? Bad snow storm in the middle of August? No to all of the above. There was a 5 minute "wind storm" where it barely even rained. And BAM - 10,000 houses are without power. WTF! What would happen if there was actually a legit natural disaster? Glad to know our power grid is incapable of sustaining some wind.

This whole week has been one of those weeks where stupid things keep getting in the way. Despite all of my WTF's, I'm not really that mad and I'm not really that annoyed. Sometimes it's nice to NOT have every little thing get in your way, but in reality these things are really not that big of a deal...and amazingly I've gotten a crapload of work done despite them.

I'm sitting in a wi-fi cafe right now doing some email and a few other things. I've probably got 3 hours of work to do and then I'm going to relax the rest of the day (although I wish that relaxing could include a few hours of Madden...eh).

Damn you eBay for making me wait

When today started a few hours ago, it was looking as if I was about 5 solid hours of programming away from wrapping up the majority of the Detailed Image site. Sure there are some minor things, but the largest and most important functions - shipping integration and credit card processing - are nearing completion.

After spending last week painfully integrating the FedEx and USPS API's (waaaaaay harder than they should be to work with), I was excited to wrap up the boring-but-important stuff with the credit card processing. Yesterday I handled all of the cards (AMEX, Visa, Mastercard, etc) and got them working in a test environment, so the last piece of the large puzzle today is to enable customers to pay with their PayPal balance.

Well, the day started off with Skype's outage (still down as of this writing). Skype is our main form of communication as a company, so it definitely puts a damper on things. "No worries" I said to myself, because I'll just wrap up my programming. Of course it couldn't be that easy. Freaking PayPal's Sandbox testing environment is down too. What are the odds! Then I remembered eBay owns them both. Wtf is going on? Two major services like this should never be down for this long...particularly when I need them!

I suppose I'll go work on something else for a little while. It's so frustrating though - I've been programming this site since the beginning of July and today I thought I'd wrap up the big stuff. Guess not.

Flipping the switch

The past few months I've really worked on my efficiency. I channeled the inner industrial engineer inside of me and really focused on improving the processes associated with our business. In doing so, I've probably got more done in less time this summer (and therefore spent more time doing fun stuff). But you can only make such improvements once the system is set up and in place, and doing that takes a crap load of time. Such is the case with this new Detailed Image site we're developing.

Once done, the entire company will be operating close to 100% efficiency and we can all work a few less hours each week while still getting more done. For now, however, I've "flipped the switch" and gone back into crazy programming mode. Our artist and designers have finished, so the majority of the work lies on my programming shoulders to get this thing up. Every day that we don't have this site, Greg or George wastes hours doing tasks that will be automated. That's costing us money, and for the short term I'm busting ass to get it done.

I wouldn't want it to always be like this, but right now I'm loving the time crunch. I love forcing myself to complete a 1-year project in 2 months without sacrificing quality. The pressure makes me step up my work and really eliminate everything from my life that I don't have to do. In a weird way, it's kind of relaxing to just forget about everything and focus your entire mind, body, and soul on accomplishing one task.

DI currently uses osCommerce (a pretty massive open source ecommerce solution), and our new cart is going to blow the doors off of the current set up. Automated accounting, shipping, web metrics, and inventory on the backend...and on the front end an upsell system that we feel is exceptionally unique and should help increase the average sale, coupled with an amazing design by artist Sam Li that makes you feel like you're sitting in the front seat of a car. We're pushing to launch 9/1/07 and I'm going balls to the wall everyday until that happens.

I think most people would say we're crazy for pushing so hard. Although I think the sentiment among entrepreneurs is probably "that's awesome"....one of the many differences between average joe and a business owner that I've observed.

Traffic is less important than you think

Every morning in my inbox I get a handful of quasi-spam (you know, spam messages from "partners" of a list you actually want to be on) telling me that they can get me "more traffic within 48 hours" or "#1 search engine rankings in 24 hours guaranteed". It's all bullshit, but on top of that it plays into our overall misconception about traffic. Pssst, more traffic not nearly as important as you think.

What IS important is the right traffic. Between the sites I own and the sites I've worked with, I've seen every end of the spectrum. The best example is the old SportsLizard (pre Price Guide, which converts 15%+ of visitors into users) vs. the current Detailed Image (before our SEO-friendly redesign). SportsLizard was getting 10 times the traffic but the site was set up poorly to convert the traffic and in turn it didn't make much money. Detailed Image got very little traffic, but all of it came from forums that George and Greg sponsored and spent hours each day describing detailing in depth and "selling" members on what products would work best for them.

How would you feel if your site was getting 50 visitors/day? Not very good unless 15 of them were placing $100+ orders! That's what DI has perfected and it's one of the things I think people miss with web business - the ultimate goal is to make money. Usually that requires the user to take action....either buy something or sign up for something or click a bunch of ads. Getting the "right" user is SO much more efficient than getting 1,000 of the wrong users and hoping he or she is the right user.

It really starts with your marketing plan. If your goal, like many site owners, is simply to get more traffic, than don't be surprised if that's all you get. If your goal is to make money than you'll approach it with the techniques that will create sales, which are usually different than what just drives the most traffic. Maybe it's pure SEO, maybe it's PPC or other paid marketing, maybe it's forum sponsorship like DI, or more likely it's a blend of all of the above and then some. The key is to focus on getting people in your target market to your site, and then focus on converting them to a sale once you get them there. If you become good at that, you'll be profitable regardless of raw traffic numbers.

Trust me on this one. Want to know how to get a bunch of traffic quick so that you can show mommy that 1,000 people came to your site today? Go to Stumble Upon and get some of their cheap traffic, or better yet post an ad on Craigslist. I guarantee you'll get a ton of people in either instance. You'll also get a ton of people that look at your site for 4.3 seconds and then click away to never come back.

On second thought...

I'm going to keep blogging and I'm going to keep it as candid and raw as I can. It's what I believe in, and (based on what you've told me) I know it can be an enjoyable and informative read. It's funny, after I wrote that last post earlier this morning I had a handful of great ideas for posts that I really, really wanted to do. And then I checked the comments and my email and realized that I've got something good going and I'm not going to change the way I do things. Sure, I'll be careful about the stuff coming down the pipeline, but to be honest I think businesses and people are FAR too worried about someone stealing ideas, and that the whole world could be improved by opening our lines of communication and learning from each other.

On a side note - we looked at a freaking sweet warehouse today that has more than enough room for all of Detailed Image's products, office space for us all to work, an area to meet with clients, and an area for a kitchen/lounge. The location is OK (not the nicest part of Albany), but for $1,200/month the price is right. We had a lease at a nicer office park all but signed, but now we might end up going with this new one because the price per square foot is significantly cheaper. We really were just hoping to have something to bargain with, but now I'm confident that we'd be fine in either place which means we can hopefully barter for price and other perks. We really do need our team to have a common place to work so the sooner we can get into a place the better.

Struggling with blogging

For the last four or five months I've been mulling over closing down this blog, and it's not for the reasons you'd probably think. If you take a look at that mission statement I wrote almost 2 years ago, I said "I plan on giving a candid look at the ups and downs of running a business" and I think for the most part I feel I've done that. However, as we grow, I find myself asking the question "does this need to be kept confidential or can I blog about it....and if I do blog about it are their any possible repercussions?"

To be honest, I don't want to give people an overly-filtered perspective of what it's like to run a business. I want to give a raw, emotion filled, and very "real" look at what it's like to be a 24 year old who runs a company. I'm in a unique situation and I think people who are considering the same path can find value in it. And since this blog ranks so high for terms like entrepreneur blogger in Google, I understand the impact that I can have if I do it right (probably more so than the rankings are the wonderful emails and comments I get all the time, many of which are pinned up to my bulletin board because they mean that much to me).

For instance, right now we have two large "happenings" in our company that I haven't even hinted about on this blog. How can I possibly give you a candid read if I hide that stuff? Of course, how can those things succeed properly if I make them "public" before they should be? My partners have been great about never criticizing a post, but my guess is that they'd rather I be more censored than I am.

Here are the options I see:

• Give up blogging completely
  
• Run a more censored YE blog, where I talk more about general topics (like finding partners, and getting funding, and motivating yourself) and be careful about how I tie them back into our business.
• Turn the blog into my personal blog. This sort of is my personal blog, but the focus has to be on business and YE's most of the time. On this personal blog, I could be more rogue and pretty much do whatever the hell I wanted - post whenever I wanted and talk about whatever I wanted - sports, religion, politics, pop culture, business, etc. This would still give me a voice, and would hopefully still entertain and be helpful, but gone would be the candid look inside the life of a business owner.
  

Right now I'm leaning towards continuing to blog in some fashion, I just don't know exactly how yet. Thoughts?

The goal of our business

I believe that in life and in business you should be in a state of constant improvement. The second that you're content is the second that you've let your guard down and you've already begun to slip. So what's the goal of Pure Adapt? What are we working towards?

If you were to take a snapshot of our day-to-day operations in a vacuum and not talk to us, we'd look horribly inefficient. Detailed Image accounts for 60%+ of our revenue, yet we probably spend 10% of our collective time increasing sales an another 25% packing/shipping/accounting, etc...and the rest of our time is spent on an array of projects that on the surface don't tie together and aren't generating a ton of revenue. When I explain our company to people right now, I get the reaction "you guys are all over the place."

Well we're not. We have a few simple goals: 1)Remove ourselves from the day-to-day operations of the business by ~2009 through a combination of automation and smart hiring, and 2)Create 3-5 large sites that generate substantial revenue, and methodically add to that number over the course of several years.

Here's how we get there: my day right now is spent primarily programming a new DI site from scratch. Why isn't osCommerce good enough? It's not bad, but our new custom cart will 100% automate shipping, accounting, inventory, product upsells, and more, saving George and Greg about 3 hours/day each. Once the site is done (about a month away), we'll be moving into a warehouse where we can streamline our packing and shipping processes, and hire an employee to do those on a daily basis.

At that point, we'll have our day-to-day for Detailed Image covered, and we can focus on an expansion for them: new product lines and new marketing ventures. The four of us can also spend time expanding our smaller web properties, and starting a handful more that we think have the chance of exploding. In the end of the day, we're going to need to throw a lot of shit against the wall to have a few pieces stick. To have 3-5 revenue generating monsters (and hopefully a few smaller ones) we're going to need to have the time and resources to launch a lot of quality sites quickly...at least 4/year in my opinion.

Believe me, we know where we're going and we're excited as hell about it. How many businesses have such a focused goal? Probably more than you think - sometimes chaos on the outside doesn't mean chaos on the inside.

**on a side note, Mike's t-shirt rating site Hotteeez has taken off, largely due to his Simpsons Spider Pig shirt that he designed weeks before the movie came out. He's got a good formula - design shirts for things that will be searched a ton in the coming months - and we're really happy to see that the site has monster potential.

//EDIT - no sooner than 15 minutes after that post did Mike inform me that Hotteeez was penalized by Google (if they still had supplemental results, which they got rid of last week, we'd be in them). Steady drops from top 5 rankings to rankings in the 500 range are not too good. I see a slew of reasons why it probably happened, but it does suck for Mike and for us - that was turning into a nice little revenue stream and now we're back at square one building it back up. So goes the world of SEO - just one more reason not to rely on organic search for your primary source of sales...even if you've got a strong domain.

I'm at a weird age...

I'm 24 years old, and will turn 25 later this month. Last week when we met with our new accountant the first thing he said was "sorry I'm late, my kids we're driving me nuts. Do you guys have kids?" My first instinct is "hell no buddy, I'm only twenty..." and then I realize that a lot of people my age are married and do have kids.

Today, while there was construction going on by my house, I spent the majority of the morning at an internet cafe. My partner Mike and I got asked to take a survey for a college student who had a summer research grant and was doing research for her psych department. In the normal conversation that goes on when doing those things, I learned that she was going into her senior year and was still a good four years younger than me. Damn I'm getting old.

Whenever we go out to bars, I feel like we're either surrounded by the 30+ crowd and we feel young, or we're in with the college crowd and we're five years older than everyone else. When I hear a girl say she's 25 I think "wow, an older girl" and then I realize I AM 25 (or will be in 30 days)!

It's a weird, weird spot to be. Some of my friends are married, some have steady girlfriends, and some are single. Some still are in school and working part-time as waiters, some have professional careers, and some like us run our own company. Neither way is "right", it's just interesting to have such a split amongst people of the same age group.

None of us know quite which way to lean. We're not really full-fledged adults (whatever that means anyway) but we aren't really college kids either. Most of the time I just focus on enjoying life and having a good time, but every once in a while I start wondering if I'm "behind" others because my free time looks a lot like it did 5 years ago. Then again, I also run a corporation and I'm 24 years old so in that sense I'm significantly ahead of where most people are (again, if there really is such a thing as being "ahead").

I honestly have no clue where I'm going with this rant, other than the fact that being in that "quarter-life crisis" age group puts a unique pressure on a young entrepreneur. Being 22-30 is tough on most people, but the YE has so much to focus on that I think there is an added pressure put on you by friends and family, and by yourself. You are choosing a unique lifestyle at an age when most people are starting to settle into jobs and a family.

I have to wonder though: if you do the wife/kids thing first, there has to come a point in the next ten years where the lack of career focus early on catches up with you and you want to change jobs, but have the pressure of a family biasing your decisions. Conversely, if you settle the career stuff first you can focus on the family later on sans distractions. Of course life rarely is very cut and dry like that, and if the right person comes into your life I doubt anyone would say "I'm not getting married until I'm 35 because I need to stabilize my career first". I've sort of fell into the career-stability-first thing, so I'll let you know how that works out for me :)

Limiting wear and tear

After four and a half grueling years of college, a tumultuous few years in the working world, and now a few years running a business, I've seen what stress and everything associated with it can do to someone and it isn't pretty. It seems as if there's an innate pressure put on us that we must sacrifice our health and well being to be successful. While hard work and sacrifice are certainly necessary ingredients for success, I just don't buy the fact that you need to ruin your physical and mental well being to get there.

In college I saw people pull all nighters, cram for days without sleep, pump themselves full of caffeine, all because "it was what they needed to do". I was ranked at the top of my class and never sacrificed a night's sleep. I never once pulled an all nighter and did better than most of my classmates on every single test.

In the working world I saw people drink 10 cups of coffee every single day. They took what they did in college to the next level - they crammed to finish projects and in doing so sacrificed their health, happiness, and well being. I never fell into the trap, and always got everything done that I needed to get done.

However once I started working for myself I lost control a bit. No longer was a teacher or boss giving me projects. I was giving myself projects, ones that were harder and had shorter deadlines and greater rewards. I started doing the "all-out all the time" thing and worked every waking second. It was a mistake, and I'm glad I caught it when I did.

You don't need to look in the mirror at age 30 and look like you're age 50 from years of sleep deprivation, fast food, lack of exercise, and caffeine overload. There's a reason why people are so unhealthy and why diabetes is so prevalent in the US, and I'm telling you it doesn't have to happen to you...even if you want to be successful.

Business - and life - are marathons, not sprints, and should be treated as such. Among the things I do to ensure I minimize the stress and keep myself happy:

• Eat healthy, and eat regularly - it's simple, fill the kitchen with only good foods and you'll always eat healthy. Eat at least every 3-4 hours and you'll give your body the energy balance it needs to work at it's peak.
• Sleep as much as you need - I've always had problems getting into a sleep schedule. For me, my body varies in needs based on a variety of factors, and I just sleep until I feel rested. Some nights that's more than others. Some days I have to get up early so I make it up the next night. Conversely, some nights I want to stay out late so I sleep a little later. The important thing is that I don't walk around sleep deprived like I did at times in the past when I forced myself up at the same time each day.
• Exercise - it helps the body and mind so much. Whether you like to run or lift or play bball or whatever, just get out and exercise at least 3 times/week...no excuses. I would be much less healthy and much less happy if I didn't exercise.
• Plan - the reason I didn't pull an all nighter. If a test was a week out, I studied a little each night as opposed to cramming. You learn better that way, and you accomplish a lot more in a lot less time if you plan out whatever project you are working on and break it up into small sub-projects that can be accomplished leading up to the one big goal.
• Set goals each day - this ties into planning. Each day, I set my goals for the day. They tie into the bigger plan for the week and month, and if I hit my goals each day I know I'll hit the big goal. You'd be surprised - often times my goals take only 3-4 hours, and I end up spending the rest of the day not working. When I wake up the next day, I focus on those goals and try to do the same. Some days take longer than others, but the important thing is I'm moving forward each day and reaching for something attainable in the short term.
• Limit distractions - I'm the king of this, it's my best trait. When I'm focused, nothing can bother me. The TV is off, my email is closed, my phone goes un-answered, and I'm just "doing". I think in our generation (particularly with IM, text messages, and cell phones) it's almost impossible to just DO something without a distraction. This is SO easy to do in my mind, and it helps SO much. There's a time and place for emails and IM and phone calls, but when you're focused on a task just do it. Then spend the rest of your time having fun.
• Limit caffeine - caffeine is not necessarily unhealthy, and it can really help on those days when you need a pick-me-up, but if you *need* it you're in trouble. It messes with sleep patterns and does more bad than good. I monitor myself and make sure I don't drink a caffeinated drink more than two days in a row - never before 11 AM and never after 5 PM if I can help it. I don't want to need it to wake up, and I certainly don't want it inhibiting my sleep.
  

Nothing really ground breaking there. All obvious stuff, but if you make the effort to get all of it working in unison you become far more healthy and productive, and in turn you'll probably be a lot happier and live a lot longer.