Did you know Nir Eyal, the author of this piece, is speaking at TNW2020 this year? Check out his session on ‘Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life’ here .

It doesn’t so much matter what you do with your time; rather, success is measured by whether you did what you planned to do. It’s fine to watch a video, scroll social media, daydream, or take a nap, as long as that’s what you planned to do.

Alternatively, checking work email, a seemingly productive task, is a distraction if it’s done when you intended to spend time with your family or work on a presentation. Keeping a timeboxed schedule is the only way to know if you’re distracted. If you’re not spending your time doing what you’d planned, you’re off track.

To create a weekly timeboxed schedule, you’ll need to decide how much time you want to spend on each domain of your life. How much time do you want to spend on yourself, on important relationships, and on your work? Note that “work” doesn’t exclusively mean paid labor. The work domain of your life can include community service, activism, and side projects.

Build your values into your calendar

How much time in each domain would allow you to be consistent with your values? Start by creating a weekly calendar template for your perfect week. You’ll find a blank template using my free online calendar tool at NirAndFarom/schedule-maker .

Next, book fifteen minutes on your schedule every week to reflect and refine your calendar by asking two questions:

Question 1 (Reflect): “When in my schedule did I do what I said I would do and when did I get distracted?”

Answering this question requires you to look back at the past week. I recommend using this Distraction Tracker to note when and why you become distracted.

If an internal trigger distracted you, what strategies will you use to cope the next time it arises? Did an external trigger, like a phone call or a talkative colleague, prompt you to stop doing what you wanted to do? Or was a planning problem the reason you gave in to distraction? If so, you can look back through your Distraction Tracker to help answer the next question.

Question 2 (Refine): “Are there changes I can make to my calendar that will give me the time I need to better live out my values?”

Maybe something unexpected came up, or perhaps there was a problem with how you planned your day. Timeboxing enables us to think of each week as a mini-experiment.

The goal is to figure out where your schedule didn’t work out in the prior week so you can make it easier to follow the next time around. The idea is to commit to a practice that improves your schedule over time by helping you know the difference between traction and distraction for every moment of the day.

Before moving on, consider what your schedule currently looks like. I’m not asking about the things you did, but rather the things you committed to doing in writing. Is your schedule filled with carefully timeboxed plans, or is it mostly empty? Does it reflect who you are? Are you letting others steal your time or do you guard it as the limited and precious resource it is?

When our lives change, our schedules can too. But once our schedule is set, the idea is to stick with it until we decide to improve it on the next go-round. Approaching the exercise of making a schedule as a curious scientist, rather than a drill sergeant, gives us the freedom to get better with each iteration.

Protect your most previous resource

By turning our values into time, we make sure we have time for traction. If we don’t plan ahead, we shouldn’t point fingers, nor should we be surprised when everything becomes a distraction. Being indistractable is largely about making sure you make time for traction each day and eliminating the distraction that keeps you from living the life you want—one that involves taking care of yourself, your relationships, and your work.

This article originally appeared on Nir & Far . Nir Eyal is the bestselling author of Hooked: How to Build Habit-Forming Products and Indistractable: How to Control Your Attention and Choose Your Life . Nir blogs at NirAndFarom . Get a complimentary Indistractable workbook here .

7 startup growth lessons I should’ve learned from other people’s mistakes

As the CEO of a relatively new marketing agency, I’m happy to admit there were a few things I got wrong in the early days of my startup journey… although maybe I should’ve avoided them seeing how common they are.

Growing a newly-launched company can be challenging but also highly rewarding. You are continually learning, and no day is ever the same.

If you are in the growth stage of your startup, take heart from the mistakes I (and many others) have made along the way — and try to be more prepared than I was.

Below is a round-up of seven things I learned while developing my agency:

1. Recruit experienced staff

One error we made early on was hiring people with little experience in the marketing industry.

Save money on employees and hopefully they will grow into the role. That was my thought process at the time.

While this worked initially, it created problems as we took on higher caliber clients. I found we spent too long training employees who ultimately failed to deliver the required quality.

Investing in more experienced personnel sooner rather than later is something I would recommend for all startups. In my opinion, having employees who can hit the ground running is vital.

Be prepared to pay a little more to secure the right candidate. The rewards will be evident as you develop your team and take your business to the next level.

2. Grow in a sustainable way

Once we began attracting a sizeable number of clients, there was a temptation to continue growing more and more rapidly. Revenue was up and confidence was high.

But in hindsight, I feel we overstretched too soon. We took on too many clients and tried to grow too quickly without having a solid foundation in place.

We simply didn’t have the team to serve our clients the way we wanted to. There was too much work, too little experience, and a lack of organization.

In my book, it is best to grow more slowly. Start with a core group of customers and then invest in experienced staff as you build your revenue over time.

3. Leveridge internal communications

I quickly found that a lack of clear communication was the root cause of many problems — at least in the beginning.

Communicating well externally and positioning your brand is important. But what is often neglected is internal communications between stakeholders.

Fine-tuning internal communications is key to everything a startup does. Improve internally and your external communications will naturally follow suit.

As a company, we experimented with various methods to enhance the way our internal communications functioned.

The best results came as we hired more experienced employees and reduced our staff turnover.

To me, it’s obvious that experience and stability are key to building a positive organizational culture.

A settled team is a productive and effective team. So work on your internal comms.

4. Outsource work sparingly

Outsourcing was something I was reluctant to engage with at first. Keeping all work in-house just felt right for what we wanted to achieve.

The major concern was maintaining quality and control. But there came a point where outsourcing just made sense for certain types of projects.

Farming out smaller pieces of work freed up time for employees and enabled us to undertake more work while keeping costs sustainable.

I always recommend doing detailed research first before you farm out anything. Building a trusted pool of freelancers takes time but can be well worth it.

And remember: you still want to deliver the same standard your clients expect.

5. Invest in quality business support

Like many startup owners, I quickly learned that good accountants and solicitors are worth their weight in gold. Don’t fall into the trap of cheaping out.

The reason? In my experience, most entry-level services do the bare minimum and provide impersonal customer support.

If you want to grow, you need people that will work closely with you. By investing in a good accountant and law firm, I had advice on tap whenever I needed it.

A quality accountant in particular will save you time, reduce errors, limit tax liability, and ensure sound financial planning for growth.

Having a trusted legal firm on standby is also beneficial. Look to build a close relationship with all your support services to maximize the advantages.

6. Showcase your work and USPs

Early on in our journey, I feel we failed to trumpet our successes and skills effectively enough, especially across our website and media platforms.

Potential clients don’t know what you can do for them if you fail to demonstrate the advantages of your product or service. It sounds simple, but it’s true.

When we began demonstrating exactly what we could achieve for our clients, we won new business from better quality companies and enhanced our prestige.

For startups working in service-based industries, be sure to highlight your USPs so prospects know precisely what benefits you bring to the table.

7. Target growth — but prepare for change

In my experience, the way to grow is to have challenging but achievable targets (e.g. for review every quarter). This can form the backbone of your growth strategy.

But it is worth remembering that business throws up all kinds of unforeseeable circumstances: you may lose a major client, or a key member of staff might leave.

Be prepared for setbacks, at least in the short term. And use setbacks for learning, not for despondency. Remain flexible and agile in your strategic planning.

Revisit your strategy regularly to ensure you remain on the right track.

5 things to consider when you run an internship program

This article was originally published on ult by Randy Tolentino . . cult is a Berlin-based community platform for developers! We write about all things career-related, make original documentaries and share heaps of other untold developer stories from around the world!

In June of 2019, hundreds of college students arrived on the IBM campus in Austin, Texas, to participate in a three-month-long internship program. During these months, they’d gain firsthand experience of life at a large, global tech company.

The majority of them were aspiring software engineers, followed by a number of designers, researchers, and offering managers. For the entire summer, they’d be assigned to IBM product teams, where they’d engage in industry-level practices like design thinking, agile methodology, and the many stages of your typical product life cycle.

Personally, I’ve always been impressed by the interns, mostly because of their energy. From what I’ve seen, they carry themselves with an obvious excitement for learning. They’re punctual, intelligent, and passionate, and our company is blessed to have these early-career professionals join us for a short period of time.

That’s why I was excited when I learned our team hired interns to join us for the summer.

As a frontend developer on a cross-functional team, I have the privilege of sitting alongside a diverse and talented group of people. Each morning, after the routine coffee/tea, hellos, and stand-ups, we dive headfirst into a highly collaborative environment where we navigate the complex world of enterprise cybersecurity product development.

One morning, I came into the studio a little later than normal. I had a car appointment at 7 AM and didn’t get in until about 9:30. When I walked in and got settled, I noticed a new person sitting at the empty desk.

Ah… must be the intern, I assumed.

Manuel joined our team as a product designer but also had an engineering background. He was originally from Argentina and was on his way to Stanford to pursue his Master’s degree in the fall. But in the meantime, he’d dedicate his summer to helping our team in IBM Security.

For the first few days, Manuel ramped up through the team’s onboarding process. He learned about our products, our design language, and how the team worked. After the first week, we found out that Manu would be joining our product team — a group of eight designers and developers.

As a first step, we helped him get situated in our area. His new desk was right behind mine. He brought over his laptop and his backpack, and began to get situated.

“Alright, here’s your monitor… we just have to find the cords.” “Thanks”, Manuel said. I spun my chair to see what cords they needed. Mmm, what kind of monitor is that? I wondered. Everyone on our team has the same one — we have those 27” Apple monitors that you see in all the tech office stock photos. But the one they gave Manuel was different. Yeah, I definitely don’t have those cords. For the next few minutes, we looked around trying to find the right cords and dongles until we finally surrendered. “We’ll find ‘em… somewhere”, a teammate told him. “Don’t worry about it, it’s okay”, Manuel replied. He organised the rest of his workspace, then continued with his work.

I’ve always had an extra sensitivity towards the onboarding process, so not knowing where the monitor cables were bothered me. I felt accountable. I thought to myself, why didn’t you plan ahead so that he’d have everything in place before arriving?

At the end of the day, I started to pack up. I spun around again. “Hey, Manuel!”, I said quietly. He turned around. “What’s up?” “You’re gonna take my monitor.” “What? No, Randy — you need it, man!” “Nah, I’ve already decided… besides I want a more minimal desk anyway”, I pretended. “Randy, you sure?” “Yup, I’m sure. When you come in tomorrow, it’ll be on your desk.” “Thanks, man. I owe you a burger.” “Haha alright, sounds good… I’ll see you tomorrow, dude.”

The next day, I came in early and disconnected my monitor. I wiped down all the cords, cleaned the screen, and cleaned Manuel’s desk.

When he came in, his monitor was good to go.

Contributing to growth

As people who work on a team for a company, we have the inherent responsibility of contributing to growth. These growth metrics typically measure everything from sales and customers to project-level deliverables like features, bug fixes, or optimizations.

This all makes sense, we work in businesses.

At the same time, we have responsibility for the growth of people , especially as hosts for aspiring professionals. This is a great opportunity for us who work for companies that have internship programs.

After reflecting on my experience with the interns we worked with, here are my five main takeaways that you can use to frame the overall experience while they’re with your team.

Understand the opportunity

Naturally, the first question that comes to mind when an intern joins the team is based on skills. What programming languages does she know? What’s his design process?

But forget skills for a second. It’s important that we take a step back and remember that they’re people first. Ask them questions, listen to their stories, and learn about what inspires them or what goals they have . There’s so much value in knowing people for who they are and not just as resources on a project.

Remind yourself that interns are people who come to both learn and offer knowledge, but only for a brief moment in time. We should help them make the most of this amazing opportunity.

Establish sponsors

Every intern should have at least one sponsor . This sponsor will answer questions about the team, the broader company, and also serve as a guide for everything else there is to know about how your team works.

In many cases, these sponsors help interns with their first few project deliverables, but, a great sponsor does more than just help the intern complete work.

Share the luxuries

A teammate of mine loves his chair and he can tell it’s his because of the leather seat and leather backing. One day, he came into work and realized that somehow, his chair was swapped out with another one — this happens in ‘open’ office spaces all the time. When he noticed that Manuel had his chair, he let it go and decided to let Manuel have it.

Whether it’s your standing desk, your extra monitor, or window seat, consider sharing these luxuries with your interns. Lending these perks out to interns is only temporary. In addition, it also creates a long-lasting, positive impression on your interns to give up your own personal luxuries for their sake.

Team experiences

If you were to create a list of all the experiences that you go through in a given week, what would that list look like? For me, it would involve a good amount of time at my desk, writing code, followed by a number of informal presentations. On the team culture side, you might also attend team lunches, after-hour outings, or other social events.

Instead of just having interns focus on heads-down work, give them a chance to have all these experiences. Create a real checklist and ensure that they’re time on your team includes all of these activities. By doing so, you ensure that they get the full experience of what it’s like to work with your company.

Future success

Remember that interns are only with you for a short time, but, you can have a greater impact on their career than you think. I encourage you to have conversations on their career paths, introduce them to other people in different roles, and let them explore a variety of possibilities.

Lastly, help your intern document their work so that they can carry their experiences with your team as they progress in their careers. Help them create a small portfolio of the work they accomplished so that they can update their resumes, social media profiles, or add it to their personal websites.

Remember, they chose you

I love the analogy of comparing one’s career to a journey. On these journeys, we encounter challenge after challenge while learning to master many valuable life-lessons. Along the way, we intersect the paths of others who are also on their own journey—some of these people will serve as our teachers, while others find you in search of knowledge or wisdom.

I think this way when thinking about interns because it gives a deeper meaning to the context.

It’s important to keep in mind that for many interns, we’re their first impression of what it’s like in the tech industry. While there are hundreds of other programs they could’ve applied to, they decided to join your company’s program. This is an honour.

If you understand the opportunity, you’ll see that you have a direct influence on the future of our industry.

Consider being a sponsor for an intern on your team and let them sample some of the luxuries you’re privy to on a daily basis. Let them experience all of it. And lastly, set them up for future success by helping them establish a portfolio of the work they did with you and your team.

In the end, the goal is for your interns to walk away from their time with you thinking, ‘when I graduate, I want to come back and work for this team, and for this company’. If you can get that sort of feedback, then rest assured that you just created a memorable experience for the people who represent the future of our industry.