#10: New Format, Founding Members, Parkinson’s Law & The Instant Pot

Okay, I’ve got a couple things that I’d like to talk about this week. 

New Content Format 

The first thing I’d like to discuss is that I’m trying a new format for these newsletters. What I’m doing is using Speech Notes at the moment (an online dictation software) so that I can speak and reflect on the week in real time, rather than typing it down. 

It’s a lot faster for me to speak, so it’s much more time efficient. If you’re someone who takes a lot of notes, try using dictation. It’s much faster.

That being said, what I’m doing with these newsletters is speaking my mind and then putting it into ChatGPT to organize my thoughts, remove filler words, and correct grammatical errors. Besides that, I only do some light editing while reading over it afterwards. 

This is a raw and unfiltered version of what I’m thinking at the moment. I think it’s more authentic and useful this way because I can look back on it and see where my head was at in the past. 

I’ve been journaling for years, and this is like a public journal or documentation for myself as I build my company and do other things. Hopefully you enjoy this format too. 

If you’d like the actual voiceover of the newsletter, let me know and I’ll see what I can do. I don’t know if this software stores the recording, but I’ll find out after I’m done. So that was the first thing: this new format.

This Week’s Updates

The second thing I’d like to talk about are some updates on what I’ve been up to the past week. 

Last week I mentioned that I was applying lessons from building software MVPs to launching a community MVP, and I did that. The day I launched, I got my first member, which was pretty cool. 

I called it a founding members deal and gave them a very exclusive discount/free trial type of thing. I told the two people I reached out to that they could get 90 days for free and then pay whatever they wanted month-to-month. 

Of course, I told them the planned launch price too, which acted as an anchor to increase the perceived value of this community.

The reason I was okay with giving them this deal is because I’ll get more out of them joining the community and helping me build it. Their feedback will be invaluable, and they’re both a great culture fit. 

Everyone else up until the official launch can join at a discounted rate, and I’m calling them “pre-launch” members. I’m creating different designations for people based on when they join, and they’ll get different benefits depending on their categorization. 

The people who join earliest are rewarded the most, with affordable lifetime access and the chance to steer the community from the very beginning. That’s something I can’t offer to someone who joins after a thousand others. 

There’s a level of exclusivity that people value and are willing to pay for with their time and money.

This is also the nice thing about launching a community; you can take advantage of the fact that people enjoy status in any group, whether it’s a community, society, the workplace, or a friend group. 

I think everyone, to some extent, cares about status or at least feels good when their status is acknowledged (even if they don’t care about it). It’s just human psychology. 

By engineering this into my community from day one, the people who join early also get a status boost. This reinforces the value of the community to them over time, which reduces churn. 

Companies do this all the time with exclusive memberships or VIP programs. Movie theaters do it a lot. Making people feel special and important is just another form of status, and people are willing to pay for that. 

When you take advantage of it in an ethical manner, it’s a powerful tool for building a loyal base of customers. 

So was the main thing I was up to this past week: getting everything set up and getting those initial members into the community. 

A Productivity Tip

Another thing I’d like to talk about isn’t related to business, but to productivity. 

Today I tried an old version of a productivity system of mine, and it’s been refreshing. For the past couple of months, I’ve been time blocking every single task for the day on my calendar. 

Today, instead of blocking every task, I just blocked categories of tasks. 

For example, the biggest block today was for my community-related tasks. In that block, I listed everything I wanted to do in order of priority and worked through them one by one. I found this more efficient because of the way I usually work.

I like to take advantage of Parkinson’s Law by setting aggressive deadlines for myself. 

Today, before starting or resuming a task, I set a timer as a challenge to see if I could finish it, or at least make significant progress, within that time. It gamifies work, makes it more fun, and also makes me more efficient. 

Parkinson’s Law says work expands to fill the time allotted for it. In other words, if you give yourself more time, a task takes more time, and vice versa. 

Humans are terrible at estimating how long tasks will take, so instead of scheduling based on inaccurate predictions, I think it’s better to block time for progress in a specific area and try to get as much done as possible. It’s less stressful from a scheduling standpoint. 

Of course, if something has to get done that day, I do it first, then move on to everything else. This is more of a reminder to myself, since I basically forgot it over the past couple of weeks while being pulled in different directions.

The Instant Pot (Meal Prep King)

The last thing I’d like to mention in this edition, which is really random, is the Instant Pot. If you’ve never used one, I recommend it. 

I started meal prepping a few weeks ago and usually cook everything in a single pan; it’s fast and simple. My diet is basically whole foods and high protein. 

With an Instant Pot, you don’t even have to stand at the stove. You can put everything in at once, and it cooks on its own. You just add your veggies, meat, whatever you want, and it tells you when it’s done. 

It does take some experimentation though, but then again, I’m not a gourmet chef, I just cook edible food I enjoy, and for meal prepping, it’s very efficient.

Here’s how I use it in my meal prep: 

During my breaks from work, when I get up to rest my eyes from the screen, I prep ingredients in small chunks. 

For example, this morning I cut and weighed all the broccoli for the next three days. On the next break, I did carrots, onions, and bell peppers. Later, I weighed all the turkey, put everything into the Instant Pot, turned it on, and went back to work. 

Over the past 6 hours, I made a lot of progress on work and also finished cooking an entire meal. 

It’s a very efficient way to meal prep, and today was my first time trying it (I highly recommend it). 

If you have any questions or suggestions for future content, feel free to leave a comment (happy to chat). 

That’s all for this week. 

See ya next Sunday 🙂

Whenever you’re ready, here’s how we can help you: 

1. Newsletters: Our newsletters provide tactical information that innovative entrepreneurs, investors, and other forward-thinking people can use to scale their impact.
2. Community: Coming soon! You’ll automatically be added to the waitlist by joining any of our newsletters.