How Not To Launch A Product - 10 Things I Wish I Had Done Differently

“Why do I keep doing this?”, I thought. I would like to think I’ve matured in 15 years, but I’ve been repeating the same all-nighter-before-a-deadline pattern since college.

It worked fine then when the stakes weren’t as high. But now I have a family to support and bills to pay and every time I pull an all-nighter to meet a deadline, it wreaks havoc on my schedule, not to mention my health (it takes a lot longer to recover at 35 than it did at 20).

Sure, it’s my first product and I vastly underestimated how much time it would take to make, but you would think I would have learned this lesson by now.

I’ve plowed through half-a-dozen different careers since I was 20, but this whole deadline thing is the common element that connects them all together.

Procrastination is something I’ve never been able to shake. But this time, as I look back over the last 90 days, I see a lot of things I wish I had done differently and hope I can do differently the next time.

Here are 10 of them:

1. Spend less time planning.

What? Surely you mean spend more time planning, Adam. Nope. Planning, for me, is the thing I do to convince myself I’m not procrastinating, that I’m actually getting shit done. I’m great at planning and organizing. But if I’m honest, I only do that to avoid actually doing the Work. It’s a form of Resistance, as Steven Pressfield would say. It masquerades as progress, but in reality it’s just another thing that keeps me from doing the real work. Which brings me to number 2.

2. Work on the Work. Every day.

I look at all the hours I’ve spent during the last 90 days. If I had just forced myself to do the real work of creating every day, I would have been finished way ahead of deadline. Instead, I let myself get sidetracked and distracted by all the urgent things that pop up, instead of doing the important things.

Freedom can be a double-edged sword. I like not having a set schedule, but if the Work is going to get done, it must be scheduled and given priority.

3. Don’t get distracted by what’s loudest.

Every time I sat down to focus, something would happen. My server would go down. A client would email with an urgent need. I would get stuck on a call. I’d have a fight with my wife. And before I knew it, the whole day was gone.

The truth is, I let this happen. Looking back, there were so many things that seemed huge and loud (and out of my control) at the time, but could have waited until the Work was done.

4. Miniaturize my schedule.

Urgent things tended to overrun my schedule because my schedule wasn’t small enough. I gave myself way too much room to “be comfortable”. It’s not enough to say, “Tuesday I will get the Work done.” It will never happen. Because at 3p.m. my mind will tell me there’s still more “Tuesday” left.

My schedule needs to be as close to hourly as it can be. It would have been much harder to wrangle out of “Tuesday from 8a.m. - 10a.m.”.

5. Go to bed and get up at the same time every day.

This sounds like a preference, right? It’s not, if you want to get the Work done. My irregular sleeping patterns were a huge part of why I couldn’t make or stick to a tighter schedule. If I’m going to create from 8a.m. - 10 a.m. or whatever the schedule is, the non-working parts of my life have to be scheduled as well.

I know all this scheduling sounds depressing. We became entrepreneurs because we wanted freedom from the 9-5, right? That’s what I told myself for five years. And I’m still exactly where I started. That’s depressing.

6. Do the har