Fundamentally every business needs to understand their market in order to be successful. There also to be a sufficient quantity people in this market with problems. The problems need to be of sufficient pain and scarcity that your solution (product or service) to that problem rises to the level of profitability.

In the past I have created what I thought were great products, only to find out that, in the end, I did not understand the market all that well. I have found out that in fact I don’t understand a lot of markets well or re-phrased, I don’t understand people that well. I don’t know why they choose one thing or another. But I do know this: Understanding the market is the key to business, or re-phrased, understanding people is the key to business.

Night 1 – Gatlinburg, Tennessee

This was an interesting place. I actually had no idea that it was such an active little place, kind of like a cross between Boulder Colorado and Orlando. I would not mind spending a week-end here at some point in the future.

Night 2 – Savannah, Georgia

The drive in was a real POA. From Tennessee to South Carolina on I-40, we encountered a detour because of a rock slide. We did not realize this but thanks to my Verizon Air Card I was able to Google the detour and we managed to take the Dixie Highway down to I26 and onward to South Carolina.

While traveling through this state we now found ourselves outrunning a freak snow storm, yes a snow storm. This was exactly the reason we did not want to drive on Wednesday.

So when we finally made it to Savannah, the hotel was very understaffed and I waited about 30 minutes to check-in. I was in a terrible mood, but we made it to the room in time for the Opening Ceremonies of the 2010 Winter Olympics.

Days 3-5 – Casey Key, Florida

The drive down was great. It was in the 50’s and sunny. I was thinking to myself, wouldn’t it be nice if we had weather like this all the time.

The beach house is nice and the ocean is great. It’s been a little cool, but it’s sunny and not 12+ inches of snow like it is back home in Columbus.

We have just been relaxing and enjoying ourselves.

The one thing that’s often overlooked by the people preaching this non-sense is Pareto’s Law (80-20 Rule). Which states that 80% of the results, comes from 20% of the effort. The numbers are often skued even higher 90-10, 95-5, but the general rule is that in no matter what system you have, the vast majority of the results come from a VITAL FEW.

Maybe the people preaching this are there to make others feel good, or they are selling something, because after-all, 80% of the people that contribute the least to things want to feel important.

The reason is that I wanted to do too many things with the site and was forced to look for so many so-so plug-ins. So rather than do that I just coded what I needed and so far so good, it actually give’s me some practice with my PHP skills, which I enjoy.

The resistance is that little voice in the back of your head, the one that tells you that it will never work, the one that insists you check your email one last time, the one that worries that people will laugh at you.

What I’ve found very interesting about this article is that I’ve heard this voice. I don’t listen to it much, but it becomes louder when I talk to some people about starting a business or louder still when a business venture does not end up like I had hoped.

There are lots of ideas about this and I have a few of my own. I have read some interesting articles and books on Pareto’s Law (The 80/20 Rule) and am finding that most productivity comes from just a few things.

3 Most Effective

1. The Language – The language you choose to do most of your coding is directly proportional to the efficiency of your programming (lines and quality).
2. The Libraries/Frameworks/Resources Available – Depending on what you are programming, re-inventing the wheel is wasted effort.
3. The Programming Environment – Text Editors, PC/Mac/Linux, Number of Monitors, Other Tools, Fast Internet Connection.

3 Least Effective

1. Development Methodology – This only matters when projects are not well thought out and people don’t know what they want programmed. But for the programmer that knows what he wants to code, it does not matter.
2. Unit Testing – I have friends that will roll their eyes at this statement, but I’ve written so many lines of code with no to little defects and I’ve not written one unit test or test case. In fact writing unit testing and doing testing on obvious stuff was the most wasted weeks I’ve ever spent.
3. Anything that makes code more maintainable – Often you will hear about rules that are good for creating maintainable code, some pattern, avoiding some anti-pattern, lines of code in a method, or size of a class file, etc. These all sound good, but the fact is only a small percentage of code is ever re-used, so stop trying to make 100% of it reusable.

It seems that the NVIDIA driver for my Dell E6400 is slowly leaking RAM until eventually Windows just runs of of free memory. To fix this, I just re-installed the existing driver. When the computer screen flashes and the driver reloads, my memory is now down to a manageable 1+GB.

The current driver I am using in my DELL is NVIDIA Quadro NVS 160M is 8.17.11.9562, (NVIDIA195.62) with a date of 11/20/2009.

1. Listed your passions.
2. Listed the things your good at.
3. Consolidated the list and started to test.
4. Then you found out all the stuff you like or are good at doesn’t have the best performing indicators. (Via Google Trends, Google Keyword Tool, or Google Traffic Estimator)

What do you do? If your lucky you don’t get to #4, if that’s the case you can stop reading this post, but if not continue…

Broaden Your Niche (Selling Around)

1. Take your niche and go to Amazon.Com search, pick the first item.
2. Go to the categories section, this will tell you where this item is ranked in sales for specific categories.
3. Go to the category then select the first couple of books in the category.
4. Review Amazon Sales Rank. Make sure it’s less than 10k.
5. Combine your search keyword/niche with something that’s popular and selling.
6. Use this as a sell-around technique, so while not directly selling use this to drive traffic and allow your niche to get noticed.

CodeMash is a unique event that will educate developers on current practices, methodologies, and technology trends in a variety of platforms and development languages such as Java, .Net, Ruby, Python and PHP.

More to come…

• Do not multi-task, I find that when I do this I end up doing all items half-a$$ed.
• Do not check email and Google reader all the time. I’ve found this tough to do, I think it’s because I’m so conditioned to doing these things so I “feel” productive, but they actually don’t make me productive, they just fill time.
• Do not speed through life/the day. Once again to “feel” productive I want to rush home, rush to work, drive to place X the most efficient way possible. All of this optimizing has made me completely loose sight of enjoying the day.
• Do not spend time on the 80% of things that contribute the least to my life.

So if you’re thinking and wondering about being productive and more efficient, consider creating a “DO NOT LIST” as way to keep yourself in check.