2007 was definitely one of the best years I’ve had. I’m a huge believer in setting goals, and in August 2006 I made the goal to sell my business by the end of 2007. Not only that, but I spent a lot of time visualizing what I wanted to happen after I sold the business — to the business, its employees, its customers, and, of course, me.

I wanted to sell to a business that would keep my employees, especially Sohrab, who deserves huge credit for sticking it out with Simpli even when times were rough. I also wanted to sell to a business who dealt with similar customers — that wasn’t sidetracked with shared hosting, and that wasn’t focused on only very high-end customers. This is actually quite a tough niche to find a buyer in, because most businesses in Simpli’s area are cash-poor.

I started talking with Silicon Valley Web Hosting in March 2007. Initially, I was just interested in getting more colo space at Market Post Tower for lower rates than MPT was charging for new cages. But within a couple months, I realized SVWH and its owner, Bruce, were an ideal fit for Simpli. (more…)

I’ve taken quite a hiatus from Simpli recently, going from working 8-10 hours a day to working 1 or 2. I did this for several reasons, but mainly because my identity was wrapped up in my business. I was having a difficult time discerning what I wanted in life because my life was my business. After 6 years of running Simpli, and 4+ years of running it full-time, I decided I needed a break to figure out who I really was.

That break has been everything I hoped for, but at the same time has presented a host of new challenges that I wasn’t expecting. (more…)

For the past week, I’ve been exploring some new techniques to rearrange my time so that it is used most effectively. This follows my realization in What’s Most Important? (my previous entry) that time will become my most valuable resource.

I have several goals:
1) Make my time at the office of maximum effectiveness, as I want to be in the office no more than 8-9 hours a day. (No more 12-hour days every day, please.) Putting the same amount of work into an 8-hour day as I had in a 12-hour day seemed hard, but I’ll tell you how I successfully managed to do it.
2) Free up some time to exercise for 1/2 hour or more at least 3 times a week.
3) Get rid of side projects that were taking up my weekends so I could have weekends free to read, brainstorm, hang out with friends, go shopping, and catch up on TV and movies.

I started reading The 4-Hour Workweek, which is an interesting book that I’ve seen mentioned on several blogs lately. I expected a bit of an ego trip from the author, Timothy Ferriss, and there was a bit of ego there, but what I found most interesting were the radical changes he made in his life that simply weren’t obvious to most people (including me). For instance, he sets aside 1 hour every day to read and respond to email, and keeps his email client shut off the rest of the time.

I implemented a variant of this, deciding to keep my email client off during the day except for predefined times that I would have it on. I was moderately successful: I immediately noticed my productivity spiked, but since I didn’t set aside a time to respond to email, some emails did not get responded to. I’m going through this weekend and responding to them, but that is obviously sub-optimal. Next week, I intend to set aside a time every day to respond to emails and ensure that all emails from that day are responded to on the same day, as well as just reading them and sorting my inbox.

The biggest change I made was inspired by Timothy’s book, however, and this improved productivity dramatically: I stopped reading blogs at work. That was a huge difference. I didn’t realize how much time reading blogs took. Timothy points out in his book that “batching” saves an incredible amount of time. That is, instead of taking 5 minutes 20 times a day to read email, you can “batch” and do the same amount of email reading and responding for 1 hour. 5×20=100 minutes; 1 hour=60 minutes.

Reading blogs, for me, turned out to be the same way. I typically now read them at night when I get home — I can read them more effectively once a day instead of 10 times a day. Plus, most blog posts aren’t that time-sensitive. I sorted my RSS reader into two categories: Daily and Occasional. I put all the blogs I wanted to read on a regular basis under Daily. I put everything else (mostly news aggregators like TechCrunch) under Occasional. I stopped reading blogs at all when I was in the office, and also asked my friends to email non-work-related blog entries to me on my Gmail account instead of IM’ing them to me. I read the Occasional blogs only when I have plenty of extra time.

Those 2 changes allowed me to squeeze about 2 extra hours out of my day. I’ll continue to work on other time-saving changes. But 2 hours was enough for me to move on to the next phase of my plan…

Today I signed up for a gym membership at a local gym. I’ve listened to lots of friends who talk about gym memberships and the most common reason the memberships fail is that the people sign up for a gym membership with no set plan of action. I didn’t want me to be a gym membership failure, so by the time I walked in to the local gym today, I knew what I wanted: a reasonable monthly rate; to do Pilates; and to have a personal trainer do several sessions with me to get me up to speed on all the machines and design a workout plan that I could do effectively. I also committed to myself to pay for additional personal training if at any point I felt like I was falling off my goal of exercising at least 3 times a week. Finally, I know that gyms are fairly negotiable up front, but once you sign, you’re in — so I went in knowing I wanted to negotiate.

The gym I went to offered a free month of Pilates training (cool!) and 4 free personal trainer sessions if I signed up for a 1-year commitment and paid $65 monthly and a $75 signup fee. They also offered free daycare, and I didn’t need free daycare, so I negotiated another 4 free personal trainer sessions instead (that’s about $265 according to their list prices, by the way.) Included in the monthly fee is unlimited use of the gym and nice pool, plus free group workouts every day. I looked at the group workout calendar and immediately determined that I would be best served by signing up for the “core strengthening” session twice a week. I figure the 3rd time every week will be what the personal trainer wants me to work on solo; if that doesn’t work, I’ll reassess later.

I have just allocated $855 for fitness over the next year (plus any workshops I decide to do, like continuing Pilates, tennis, or dancing lessons), so I need to be committed to this. I am open and flexible to design a fitness plan that works for me, but I also know I’ve spent some money now, so I must follow through and work diligently on achieving my fitness goals for the next 12 months. I plan to go in at 9 or 9:30AM 3x a week (this means getting up earlier than I am used to.) I’m pretty sure this will work. I’ll keep you all posted. 🙂

I talked about goal #3, eliminating side projects, at length in my previous blog entry, so I don’t have anything new to report there. I’ll keep posting more time-saving tips as I find them.

Steve Pavlina writes, on his blog, “At the start of each new year, in lieu of creating a New Year’s resolution, my tradition is to select an area of primary focus for the coming year.” Following his excellent example, I’m setting my foci for 2007 and then describing more detailed areas of those foci.

When I think about what I want to accomplish in 2007, the word that comes to mind is “New.” There are a lot of “new” goals and opportunities for me in 2007 — too many for me to post in a single blog entry, but I’ll encompass a few here.

New Stuff. I’ve lived extremely frugally in the past several years. My only major (I consider “major” $1000+) non-work-related purchase since 2000 has been a hot tub, which I bought in 2005 to help me relax. Other than that, I haven’t spent major money on anything not directly related to Simpli in seven years. I’m going to quickly recount what I plan to upgrade or buy new in 2007:

Home stuff:

• A new couch. Now that I have a housemate, I can relax some on the stinginess. This is the top item on the list and will probably happen first. I currently have a futon I bought in 2000 as my couch. It’s time for it to move upstairs to the home office and for me to get a real couch that doesn’t hurt my back…and that everyone else is comfortable sitting on, too.
• A new TV (probably two new TVs; one for the bedroom and one for the living room) is the most expensive item on the list. Last TV purchase: 1999. Now that plasmas have come down in price, I feel that 2007 is the year to buy. This will most likely be later in the year.
• A new bookcase. I need something better to hold the many books I now own. My current bookcase (purchased in 2000) is overwhelmed with a pile of books that just keeps getting bigger. I need a bookcase (probably to complement the one I have now, not to replace.)

Other new stuff: The biggest purchase I’ve needed to make in a while is coming up for me…a new car! I’ve had leetle zoom since 2000, and he’s a 1999 model. He’s starting to get a bit long in the tooth at nearly 130,000 miles. 2007 will probably be the year I replace him with a new zoom (but I’ll keep my LIL ZOOM license plate!)

I may potentially purchase an RV for Burning Man this year, too. Older but still serviceable ones run $10K-$12K used and aren’t a bad investment, considering that renting one for 1 week last year ran $2000+. (I split the rental cost with a friend with whom I shared the RV.) This may also wait. It really depends on whom I go to Burning Man with this year, and what sort of accoutrements he/she/they have.

Wow, that’s a lot of new stuff (and believe me, I think most of my friends would agree that all of those are pretty past-due on my part.) How am I going to afford all of them? That’s where my goals for 2007 come in!

Goals for 2007 (aka Points of Focus; Areas of Growth and Opportunity)

• Raise my salary at Simpli. Frankly, I’m being paid far too little for the CEO position. First-level support techs get paid more than I do. I’m going to raise my salary by 50% this year. That’s long overdue, too. I’ll probably bump it in smaller amounts, and pay some out in dividends if we have a good quarter, but yep, that’s where money for most of this stuff is going to come from.
• Grow SlashChick.com. This, in and of itself, is not really a revenue generator. But it’s important to write about things people are interested in and grow the readership on this blog so I can have better visibility as a whole. Setting aside some time to write at least once a week will be a good growth experience for me.
• Start a new blog. Ruh-roh! What’s that, you say? She’s committing to writing another blog? Yep, and this one has a specific goal (I’ve already decided what that is and registered the domain name, but I’m not ready to introduce it yet.) I’m a writer by nature and I really love writing — it’s a release for me. This will be a very special project that is dear to my heart, and I will likely continue it for years. I’ve already been planning it for a couple months and hashing out details as I go. I’ve got the site structure down, but now I need to write my first entry. I’m not quite there yet, but expect to see it in the next couple of months.

There you go…three big goals for 2007! I have a couple others, but those won’t be public yet. I have to have some surprises…I wouldn’t want you to get bored!

Gosh, I’m really excited about 2007. Simpli is about ready to move into a new office (we’ll post that on the Simpli blog soon; as soon as we finalize the new lease!), we’re getting even more datacenter space, and I feel like the company has really turned a corner. It’s not crazy hectic any more. We’re still growing like mad, but we’re also taking our time and making sure things are done right. We’ve built a fantastic foundation for even more growth in 2007. It’s going to be a great year.

And now a big goal for you in 2007, if I may be so presumptuous: Take advantage of the economy while you still can!