Author Archives: Lou Franco

4DX: Applying the First Discipline

In yesterday’s post about The Four Disciplines of Execution, I quickly went through the disciplines and how I am applying them. Today, I want to talk more about the first one, which is to choose one “Wildly Important” goal (WIG), and my thought process as I chose mine.

The first thing to notice is that the book asks you to choose only one WIG. I may be going off script by choosing three, but I am choosing them in very different areas of my life. I have only one work-related WIG, one health WIG, and one personal growth WIG. The book is mostly about work, but I have time carved out for health and personal growth that is separate from work. I have separation between them, so I my focus on one does not affect my focus on another (at the appropriate time).

To find a WIG. The book asks you to define (1) Where you are now (2) Where you want to be, and (3) by when. It’s the same idea as SMART goals.

For work, I am working on a startup with a partner, where I am doing the technical part.

Where am I now? We have an MVP, and we use it every day along with a few trusted users. We have a series of gates we want to get through to launch. Right now, it’s usable, but we’re still missing some core features.
Where do I want to be? Ideally launched, with users, and with some revenue. But, that depends on a lot of factors outside of my control, so it would be hard to put a deadline on it. To make it possible for me to accomplish the goal, it needs to be expressed as something I can do without dependencies.
By When? It’s not ideal for a WIG, which should be longer term, but I think this project will go through phases with different goals right now as we progress through gates. So I am doing this quarter by quarter.

So, my WIG for this is to have no launch blockers in the product by March 31, 2024. There are several features missing that make it impossible to launch today (e.g. signup, forgot password, billing). There aren’t too many of them, and it’s very doable by March. To support our experimentation and product design, there are still other things we should do, but they are not blockers. We may not launch for other reasons, but not because of basic functionality.

My health/fitness WIG is simpler because it inherently doesn’t have dependencies.

Where am I now? I am happy with my level of fitness and health. I have been vegan for a few years and I can generally stay in the weight range I want to be. However, since I was obese for many years, I still have more body fat than I would like. I use a body fat scale that says it’s about 23%, which is accurate enough for my purposes.
Where do I want to be? I have been stuck at this level for a while. Realistically, I could shoot for less than 20%.
By when? The end of 2024.

Fitness WIG: Go from 23% body fat to under 20% body fat by December 31, 2024.

My personal growth goal is related to writing, which is the main thing I have been working on for the past 3 years.

Where am I now? I write regularly in this blog, and I have a writing-themed podcast that is intentionally off-an-on. In 2013, I got a book published by Manning and I have been paid to write articles for Smashing and other places.
Where do I want to be? I want to have more longer-form published work that I sell.
By when? One by June 30 and another by December 31.

Personal Growth WIG: Write two 50-page books by the end of 2024 and put them up for sale.

Tomorrow, I’ll show you how I applied the 2nd discipline.

How I am applying The Four Disciplines of Execution

I read The Four Disciplines of Execution (4DX) a few months ago. It was recommended to me several times—I wish I had read it sooner. It’s in the genre of business productivity systems, which is not surprising since one of the authors, Sean Covey, is the son of Stephen Covey (author of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People).

Like many books in this genre, the book is part of an entire ecosystem, with courses, videos, etc. You can get a good overview there.

Here is a quick summary of the 4 disciplines (it’s more complex than this—the book is worth reading for details)

Have a single important goal that would make a meaningful difference (in your business, life, etc). This will have some lagging indicator.
Figure out a leading indicator that you can act on and track. This is something you can do every day that will build up to the important goal.
Build a compelling scoreboard that tells you if you are winning (achieving the leading indicator).
Have regular (weekly) accountability meetings where you only discuss the goal, leading indicators, and how to put points on the board

To give an example, here’s how I am applying it to my fitness:

Important goal: Reduce Body Fat %. I am doing this primarily by increasing muscle mass. My lagging indicators are goals in bench press and strict pull-ups.
Leading indicator: Days per week doing resistance training.
Scoreboard: I track the workouts on my Apple Watch. I can see the count in the fitness apps I use. My scale tells me Body Fat % to make sure I’m on track. I am also tracking hours in Zone 2 and higher as a secondary indicator.
Accountability: I review it weekly and schedule the next week’s workouts. I also go to Crossfit, which gives me access to coaches that can help.

My personal growth goal is to publish some pamphlets (short books) this year. Here’s my 4DX

Important goal: publish pamphlets. Lagging indicator is 2 books.
Leading indicator: Hours writing per week.
Scoreboard: I’m using personal productivity software that I am working on.
Accountability: I am making season four of my podcast about this where I will discuss my process and progress.

My work goal is to launch the productivity tool I am working on

Important goal: Launch
Leading indicator: Hours coding
Scoreboard: Also tracking in this tool
Accountability: I have weekly meeting with my partner where we discuss progress.

All of my leading indicators are in SMART goal format: Specific, Measurable, Achievable, Relevant, and Time-bound. The main difference is that they are very short-term and more about process.

Obviously, it doesn’t matter if I achieve the leading indicators, but not the lagging ones—the lagging ones are the real goal. The idea (from 4DX) is that leading indicators are something you can act on and track each day. You trust yourself to pick things that are likely to result in the bigger goal. You adjust if they aren’t.

Announcing Season Four of Write While True

I have been planning out season four of the Write While True podcast. Here is a recap of the first three seasons

Season One (Episodes 1- 15): Theme: The basics of a writing practice. Topics include first drafts, editing sweeps, keeping a schedule, and note taking.
Season Two (Episodes 16 – 27): Theme: Not quitting. Topics include Stopping vs. Quitting, using your imperfections to generate work, and planning a break.
Season Three (Episodes 28 – 39): Theme: The tools and materials of writing. Topics include complex sentences, words of the day, content-free sentences, and zombie nouns.

The theme of Season Four is writing a pamphlet (i.e. a short book). It will be 13 episodes to coincide with the first 13 weeks of the year. At the end I hope to have actually written a pamphlet and also to have explained the process I am using to do it. All episodes of Write While True end with a writing exercise. If you follow along with this season, I hope that you will also have a pamphlet to publish.

The first episode will be available this Sunday, January 7.

My Current (2024) Blog Stack

This blog is 20 years old. I started with static files generated from CityDesk and hosted on a simple server. Then, I went to static files generated from RapidWeaver on Mac. In 2012, I realized that I needed it to be easier to post, so I migrated to WordPress.

I very rarely updated this site in 2012. I finally decided to bite the bullet and get everything into WordPress so that I could update from any machine, not just the one I had RapidWeaver installed on. I immediately got a bunch of benefits (1) the site has a mobile theme (2) I can update from my phone or iPad using WordPress apps (3) dealing with images and other media is a lot easier and (4) publishing is automatic and fast. Since the migration, I have maintained about a weekly update schedule.

I have been on WordPress since then and can’t see any reason to change. A few years ago, I migrated to DreamHost, which I recommend for WordPress hosting. They can do more than WordPress—I also host App-o-Mat there (which is a custom Django site).

My theme is WordPress’s Twenty Twelve. Each year they make a new theme (named for the year). It was the default when I migrated, and I didn’t look for anything else because I wanted something plain, which it is.

I really try to limit my plugins. There are three that I recommend if you need the features they implement.

I use the Blubrry plugin to help me self-host my podcast. It generates the podcast feed automatically from blog posts.

I use the Contextual Related Posts plugin to put related links at the bottom of each post and the Exclude Pages from Navigation plugin to let me control which pages show up in the navigation.

Aside from those, I just picked the most popular ones for generating a sitemap and to make it easier to embed videos hosted on YouTube and Vimeo.

I use Hover as my domain name registrar.

I have no plans to change anything. I do keep an eye on the CMS sites that offer some distribution (Medium, Substack, etc), but I care too much about owning my URLs and keeping content in something I could easily migrate away from.

Time in the Zone

I read The Four Disciplines of Execution last year and my main takeaway was that I should build a scoreboard to track a leading indicator of whether I’m “winning” at my important goals.

For tracking my fitness, I’m using the Zones for Training app, which has a nice widget that compares the current cumulative week to the previous one. The number is just the minutes my heart rate was in an exercise zone. I have a goal, but I can also compete with how I did last week.

A dashboard of cumulative time spent in heart rate zones

Leading indicators can be more complex, but just tracking the time that I spend on the important things is enough to get started. I trust that I’ll use that time wisely.

The Last 13 Weeks

This is the fourth post in the series that covered my journalling in 2023. Here are the other three: The First 13 Weeks, The Second 13 Weeks, The Third 13 Weeks.

Based on my experience this year, here’s what worked:

Journalling in a book with a place for each day: I rarely missed more than a day in a row of journalling, so nearly every day was filled. In the past, I could go weeks without journaling, usually in the late summer. Having a space to fill was an incentive to do it.
Journalling in color: I wrote in Black and Red and it did what it was supposed to do in drawing my attention to the more important stuff when I was reviewing it.
Journalling my theme: My theme lasted the whole year. In 2023, I concentrated on Making Art with Friends. I did that by joining groups of likeminded people and starting a tech meetup. In my journal, whenever I did something on-theme, I made sure it was in red and circled.
Journalling my meals: I kept a log of what I ate each day in the right margin. I keep it simple so it’s as easy as Taking a Picture of What You Eat, which is enough to keep me mindful of what I’m eating.
Journalling on paper even if I also use software: In these last 13 weeks I’ve also started working on personal task management software. I have been using it in addition to my journal. It’s redundant, but so far I’ve used both as they give me different benefits.

It was 20 years ago today…

I started this blog on December 23, 2003 with this post about automating software processes. I had just decided to leave my job in the new year and start consulting, so I thought it would be a good idea to have a website with a blog, so I made a simple one. I don’t even remember what software I used. Soon after, I ported it to Fogcreek’s CityDesk.

At some point I decided to use a Mac full-time, so I ported the site to RapidWeaver. And then like many others, I ended up on WordPress, which I still use. I have a giant redirect file that keeps the URLs from CityDesk and RapidWeaver working.

I’ve written about the impact that this blog has had on my life and career before, so I’ll just leave some links and not repeat myself

Running Through the New Year

One lesson I learned from Ramit Sethi was to just start your New Years resolutions in December. That way you get a jump start. You get to start the new year with having already made some progress.

I do themes, not resolutions, but the same concept applies. My theme last year was to Make Art with Friends and that went pretty well. I set out to collaborate with others and try to meet more likeminded people who liked to make things. As 2023 is coming to a close, I think I can maintain my gains here without it being my main focus.

This year, I am going to refocus on my fitness, specifically strength training. As I age, I am more concerned with muscle and bone health and I’m convinced that lifting heavy things is the way to go. I’m not waiting until January 1st—I started yesterday.

With that goal and my other plans, I decided to make 2024 The Year of Heavy Lifting. It’s a year where I plan to do some hard things that I’ve been putting off.

If you usually do something for the new year (a resolution, a theme, whatever) don’t wait—start now.

2024 Page-o-Mat Journal

Last year, I released Page-o-Mat, a YAML-based language for defining journal PDFs so that I could make my own Recurring Journal. I used this journal all throughout 2023 and gave some updates along the way: The First 13 Weeks, The Second 13 Weeks, and The Third 13 Weeks. I split the year into 13 week quarters because I do all of my planning by weeks and months and quarters aren’t regular enough.

I just finished making the 2024 version and got a nice surprise. Because January 1st is a Monday, and 2024 is a leap year, the first three quarters line up on 13-week boundaries. Jan 1, April 1, and July 1 are all 13-weeks apart and on Mondays. It’s unnecessary for the way I like to journal, but I do appreciate this. It won’t happen again until 2052.

I pushed the new yaml to the Page-o-Mat repo. There are instructions for building the PDF in the README. I will also be putting a book based on this PDF on LuLu.

Gaming ChatBot Recommendations

I just had conversation with ChatGPT that ended with it making product recommendations. I was asking about documentation, so it suggested Confluence and Notion.

Those are good options and do match what I was asking about. But, if ChatGPT is going to make product recommendations, then companies will try to game this like they do for search engines.

Before Google, search engines ranked pages on the count of keywords in the document. That was easy to game by just stuffing the keywords. Google solved this by ranking the search results by backlinks. They reasoned that pages with the most incoming links must be better because a backlink was like a vote of confidence. Unfortunately, that was also easy to game. The last 20+ years has been a struggle between Google trying to rank results correctly and SEO experts trying to rank higher than they deserve. There is an enormous amount of money fueling both sides.

We are just starting with chatbots. I don’t know why it specifically chose Confluence and Notion, but since it’s a probability engine, more text in the training set would be a factor. It understands sentiment, so it can discern good reviews from bad reviews and knows that recommendations should offer good options.

But does it understand authority, bias, expertise, etc. If I stuff the internet with 1000’s of good reviews of my product (even if they would never be read by a human), would ChatGPT then start recommending me? The ChatBot equivalents of SEO experts will be trying to figure this out.

Since ChatGPT is currently stuck in January 2022 (about a year ago), you might not be able influence its suggestions for a year or so. The learning cycle is currently very long. But, that also means that it probably can’t recover from being gamed quickly either. Hopefully, models can be developed that resist gaming.