Get up and go!

I've talked about not wanting to have investors in List Here in the past, and laid out the reasons behind it in semi-deep detail. One big negative about not having an awesome bank roll behind you, aside from a slower growth trajectory, is getting things done in a timely fashion. When you work a 9-5 job and then go home to work on the side business, you're not exactly working at 100%. How great would it be to get paid a salary to do List Here 9-5 as the CEO with a nice fat salary? To not have to worry about bankrolling the project, getting the full time job done, and also making the site a success? Yeah, that would be sweet.

It would also mean that I'd have to give up a lot of control over my "baby" as it were. I'm much more apt to having complete control over the success or failure of the project, and also being culpable for how quickly that happens. It's easy to say that life would be nice in a 9-5 job, but in this case the choice is to work hard and make it happen in order to keep my vision alive.

The big downside is that I'm much more apt to feel really lazy when little things don't get done. There's always something to be done to make the site better, to grow traffic, to get new advertisers, and so on. There will always be opportunities to blog, to guest blog, to get on Twitter and Facebook and promote, to design a new mailer. Being realistic though, there are only so many hours in a day, and since I've made the decision to self fund and see where it takes me, that means figuring out a work-life balance that doesn't burn me out and throw everything off the tracks.

Probably the best way I've come to terms with this is by using lists. I'm a lazy person by nature - I'd much rather sit around reading Reddit or playing video games than doing something productive. Without a list, without something goading me into action, I end up doing just that 99% of the time - nothing. That said, the lists have to be realistic, so I usually end up splitting them into pieces:

• Monthly Goals: These are the larger projects that I can't just bust out during a given day. Things like planning a new paid search campaign that will go to a microsite to sign up new advertisers. There are a lot of moving pieces that need to be taken into account, so for these I give myself a deadline based on months, e.g., 'By the end of November, I damn well better have all of this done.'
• Weekly Goals: Sometimes these fit into the monthly category as a larger piece, but I usually try to make these smaller bits in addition to the big monthly items. Things like building links for natural search, or writing X amount of blog posts fall into this category.
• Daily Goals: These are the little victories that make me feel not so much like a piece of @#$%. Sure, they may take up only 1-2 hours in a day, but it's enough time to make something happen, even if it's only a minor incremental gain.

I do sometimes wish I could be more productive, be like those people that are able to somehow not go insane after working 80 hours a week, but it's just not going to happen. Instead I've figured out what I think is at least a passable way of getting things done, while also getting to indulge in things like video games, vacations, etc.