Jonathan Stark

And they should because you've demonstrated that you are poor at estimating how long it's going to take you to do something. They are now spending more money than they agreed to. If it goes really long, they're going to spend more money than it was worth to them. And they will only continue paying you due to sunk cost fallacy. If they still have to keep paying you, I've seen people get fired.

I've seen lawsuits. It can get really messy. But when the project I'm talking about went long... The client was totally fine. They didn't care. They would have been happier if it was done earlier, but 80% of the application was working. They were using it in production.

There were just some sort of senior level executive reporting features that were really tricky and I was having a real hard time with in terms of getting the performance and the features balanced so that the features that they wanted were there, but it didn't crush the performance of the entire system. It was very tricky.

But the client wasn't freaking out and I wasn't really freaking out because it wasn't full-time work. I was only working a few hours a week. And ultimately the amount of money I got divided by the hours I worked, I was still getting paid probably a hundred bucks an hour. It wasn't like a disaster. It wasn't like I was going to go out of business or anything close.

And I was still taking on other clients to do other things. I think at that point I was selling advisory retainers. So it was still, I was bringing in 10 or $20,000 a month just to answer the phone. And then it was almost like a hobby. In my other hours, I would work on these reports for this client, and it was fine. And it sounds really bad, but it wasn't bad at all. But it wasn't great.

It would have been better if I'd finished it in the year or even earlier.

I am on a mission to rid the world of hourly billing, and I can't do that one person at a time with one on one coaching. I used to do one on one coaching, but I don't take on new private coaching students. I need to do it in more of a leveraged way so that more people get the message faster.

Maybe they don't benefit from my specific assistance in an ongoing way or accountability calls every other week. But writing books and giving workshops and having a community of people who have drunk the Kool-Aid and are practicing and some are more advanced, some are less advanced, they're more new. So they can help each other in a way where the more senior people can help the more junior people.

And it doesn't have to be me all the time answering every question or solving every problem. And to me, that is the way to actually make progress toward that mission, toward that vision. More of that, more books, more workshops. Of course, you talk about the future, you got to talk about AI. I've experimented with training in AI on my Q&A sessions.

So inside the community, ever since 2017, I've been doing live Q&A sessions that are recorded. I've trained in AI on seven years worth of, it's like a thousand hours of people asking me questions and me answering questions. I've got this sort of AI librarian or this AI bot thing that can do a really good job answering pretty much the way I would answer almost everything.

It's not perfect, of course, but it's the kind of thing that people can get access to. If I died tomorrow, like people would have access to it and would still give them pretty good answers.

Wherever it got the answer from, it points you to, you know, it might be a free thing, it might be a paid thing, but I'd say, oh, you know, this answer came from that book or this answer came from that video call or this answer came from that podcast episode or whatever it was. More like that.

More like trying to scale the reach of the expertise, even if that means not going as deep with any individual person. I think spreading the idea is really the most important piece.

So I have a really novel way of managing my time or like being productive, which a student referred to as ruthless simplicity, which I liked. Pretty much every year, basically every year in January, I set a theme for the year. Like what is going to be my theme for this year? Because as a soloist, I can't do everything.

Since I'm a software developer, I can automate a lot of things, but that takes time, too. So at the beginning of the year, I think this sort of theme and then I rough out what some experiments might be to explore that territory and see if I can, with the ultimate goal being to spread the mission to more people. My ultimate goal is to spread the hourly billing as notes mission to more people.

What am I going to do in 2025 to make that a reality? And that'll be my focus for the year. And then I just keep it really simple. I have a to-do list with recurring to-dos on it and I put daily to-dos. So like every day, like 15 or 20 to-dos that come back every single day. Got to do all these things. And it's a mix of personal and business.

100 pushups, practice my forms, send my daily email, check the Teardowns channel in the community, stuff like that. These little tiny tasks, like very much atomic level tasks that I do every day and almost like a, it's like a gardening metaphor. Plant this garden and you just tend to it and produce it. After a while, it produces a whole bit more tomatoes than you can eat.

So that's my overall, I guess my overall philosophy is to have a gardening metaphor instead of a hunting metaphor where you go out in the morning with a spear and try and come back with a buffalo. So I keep the gardening model of marketing, sales, delivery.

It requires a lot of little touches every day or every weekday to keep the ball rolling, keep the momentum going, to keep that flywheel spinning and increasingly spin faster. I don't really do time blocking. If you looked at my calendar, you'd see I maybe have one or two appointments a week and the rest of it's just open time for me to do my to-dos. So that's pretty unusual.

The ruthless part, it's very simple. I keep it very simple. It's get off a phone call. Let's say I'm going to get off this phone call with you. I'm going to look at my phone and see if there are any emergencies with my kids or anything. There's not going to be. And then I'm going to go to my calendar. I'm going to say, do I have another appointment? The answer is no.