Pull the red flag – Part 1

With too much workload in the last months and my goal of being a good father to my now nearly 9 months old daughter, I pulled the red flag on my digital life a few weeks ago. Most of my loyal readers know this already as there have been no more blog posts since August. Some ramblings by myself could be found on twitter, but – blogging? – I was fed up with. Why? It took some time to realize why I could’t get myself up to write some new blog articles. I found it somehow strange as I had always fun blogging in previous times. Furthermore blogging did often lead to more revenues for my business as an attorney at law. Nevertheless I could not get myself to blog. At first I thought I was just part of this blogging-depression with all folks moving on to microblogging with twitter etc. And this might even be partly the case…but there was something deeper going on.

In September I went on vacation with my family to Crete. And even though holidays with a baby are much less relaxing than before, some things regarding my digital life became much clearer while laying on the beach. Thanks to Merlin Mann (43Folders) who perfectly made my day (and months) with his groundbreaking post “Better“. In this post he just speaks from my heart, but I didn’t realize this as first. Even in my holidays I fired up this post in my phone-browser to read it over and over again. The things Merlin says in his “Better” posting were just a plain fit to my situation. And his follow-up posting on 43folders (Four Years & 43 Folders: Time, Attention, and Creative Work) were quite impressive to me too. 

Thinking about my blogging situation led to thinking about the whole SAY-HO! Project. Is it going the right direction? What is the vision and perspective?

SAY-HO! is kind of a fun project by me. I do legal consulting for start-up companies in the area of information technology law. I offer fixed prices for creating fitting terms of service and other copywriting stuff to young IT-/Tech-Companies. What people have to remember is that this is just a small little side project for me. I’m generating most of my revenues with legal consulting of medium-size and large companies in the field of information technology law and especially legal consulting in the areas of data protection & privacy. Of course I made some money with SAY-HO! but the fixed prices are so “competitive” that I had to reduce advertising them. The reason for this is that I had to much workload and could not always keep my self-imposed deadlines which led to stress and a little bit of frustration. A few weeks ago I was still planning to expand SAY-HO! and wanted to enable users to order my services online through via SSL etc. But with my heavy workload I could not manage to get these things done. And it would have not been worthwhile to hire a developer for doing this job as this is just a small side project and – what’s more important – the experiences from the last months has shown that no one ordered a “consulting-pack” without getting in touch with me by email or phone before. As a result I have decided to embrace constraints and just cancel my plans. To get things right – I’m not planning to cancel my SAY-HO!-Project and I will keep up the fixed-price-packages and add at least even one more. But if you want to hire just get in touch with me before (preferably by email) and we’ll talk things through and see if things fit. Legal consulting is no mass-business like selling tomatoes, so embracing constraints in this regard just meant to let my plans of further automatization go. Why? Because it just doesn’t matter to clients or – better said – to clients I want to work with respectfully. For now I concentrate on doing my work as a legal consultant and will strive to do my work still better and will not bother about learning some Ruby on Rails skills or read instructions for implementing paymentsystems to my website etc. For the sake of my clients and for my sake. Don’t get me wrong – I learned a lot about technology and refreshed my programming skills for my future plans with SAY-HO! But I realized by now that this is just not a relevant focus and that I want to embrace constraints even in this regard. As a result you may see a little refresh on the SAY-HO!-website in the near future (or even not), but in the meantime I concentrate on doing quality work. So if you’re a fresh and friendly IT-/Tech-Company or a StartUp doing stuff on the web, feel free to contact me for getting quality legal consulting with a human touch.

But back to blogging: in the past I wrote a lot about startups and legal mistakes they make or even can prevent. But I’m just fed up writing about that stuff. The reason for this is among other things that most of the startups launching their services can just be considered bad regarding their legal stuff (Terms of Service, Privacy Policy). When I look at the startups featured on deutsche-startups.de I feel that at least 70% of them are having critical legal issues. Well…I don’t expect that a startup is doing legal stuff without errors. But my feeling is that they just don’t care. And even without taking legal issues into account – my feeling is that a large amount of startups don’t even have a plan how to survive on the market, because they don’t share passion about their service or forget how to monetize it or whatever. This is not a german problem IMHO. But the fact of the matter is that I just don’t care anymore. I want to feature exceptional startups in the future. Teams with a passion or just an awesome idea or beautiful execution. There are not many out there. Some of them are about to disappear (fabidoo for example – a service I wanted to write about in the past, because they’ve done so many things right on legal stuff), some are getting ready to launch in the next months and some are already here. Soundcloud e.g. has an exceptional execution and monetizing built in. And timetracking service “mite” by the lovely folks from Yolk (Julia & Sebastian) is another example for excellent execution, built-in monetizing and – most important – a passionate team. Instead of beefing about bad startups you’ll read about positive examples of startups or other businesses that are doing things right in my own personal opinion. 

But what else? I want to write about other stuff that interests me and maybe even broaden my audience. This is one of the reasons that you’ll see more english articles here. Besides startup stuff I’ll write about productivity every now and then. Why that?

After coming back from Crete I went on a information diet, and I am still on it somehow. I unsubscribed more than 50% of my feeds in my newsreader. And guess what? I don’t miss them at all. I don’t want anybody to take it personal, but I just don’t care anymore what’s going on at the Basic Thinking Blog or some average businessblog of an average company. I don’t care. By now I try to reduce my workload from previous 60 hours a week to about 35 hours a week. And I have the strong feeling by now that I don’t get less done in this time. I just try to focus more and keep non-important stuff away. I still care for blogs with a voice (like Spreeblick, Seth Godin, Signal vs. Noise etc.) and I read local blogs. But for the rest a memetracker like Rivva is sufficient for me. Important stuff and news I had in my newsreader before are now completely on twitter. twitter has become a perfect tool to filter information that is important or interesting for me. I’m still learning to focus more and I will try to use this blog to pass some of my experiences in this shift of work & methodology on to the readers out there. Readers of this blog know that I’m interested in the GTD-Methodology for some years now. So don’t wonder if you’ll read more productivity-stuff here in the future. 

So why don’t you go on some sort of information diet too and do something that is really important to you. Spend some time with your family or friend. If you don’t care about my blog – just go away. I don’t care. You don’t like me writing english posts? Go away – I just don’t care. Feel free to unsubscribe. But if you don’t mind that this blog will be less updated and care for post with more quality, please come back and/or drop a comment. Thanks! I’ll appreciate it. Otherwise see you on twitter.

Part 2 of this explanation of shift will follow – sometime.