How Being Frugal Was Limiting My Productivity

How Being Frugal Was Limiting My Productivity

by | Jul 13, 2020 | Life Style, Productivity, Technology, Time management

This is something that I’ve been battling for a while. My laptop has been showing signs of its age. It used to get me through the day. Now I have to charge it every few hours. Opening up more than a few tabs causes it to need to think for minutes and everything takes a lot longer than it used to.

 

Not to say it’s all the computer’s fault, I’ve been asking much more of it than I used to as well. These days I do some basic video and image editing. I also use it for work. It’s on and doing something all day. Still, it’s been working well since I bought it in mid-2015, much longer than the typical 3 years I had laptops before it.

 

You would think that it’d be a simple and rational decision to go and look for a new laptop. Almost all my work is done on it whether in medicine, the blog, or my other businesses, but it’s been hard to let go. It still works. It’s a little slow but doesn’t have any major problems.

 

A couple of new versions of it came out through the past few years. Before this one, I would replace my laptop every 3-4 years due to necessity. Something would break and it would be cheaper to buy a new laptop than fix it. It seems like such a large expense. And my laptop still works.

Laptop helps productivity

Well, my amazing wife got me a new laptop. She knew I was being stubborn and not buying one even though I needed it. Or she was sick of me complaining about my current laptop. And you know what? I should have replaced it years ago. I lost countless hours of productivity throughout the years due to being stubborn.

I can see now all the patches I had put in my day to work around a slow laptop. I had bought that laptop as an intern and had to skimp to afford it. It had minimal specs. All that I could afford. There were some good times. I had to get creative and outsource stuff that I couldn’t do on my computer. Or it would take too long.

There were other times I suffered through and did things myself. And it took a lot longer than it should have. I know now that I was limiting myself. Trying to cut a tree with a dull ax. My laptop was my tool of the trade and because it got the job done. Well, eventually. It doesn’t mean it was right for the job.

What are the tools of your trade? Do you keep an eye out when it’s time to upgrade them?

 

An Expensive Lesson: How I Wasted Thousands on a “PRO”

An Expensive Lesson: How I Wasted Thousands on a “PRO”

by | Jun 27, 2020 | Learning, Productivity, Time management

We knew when we got the idea to make our course that we wanted to do it right. I thought of all the videos I had watched from Ramit Sethi and wanted to be like him. So we rented an all brick studio. Hired a professional video guy and filmed it all in one day. We even had a teleprompter. When it wasn’t perfect, we even took off another day from work and filmed again. This time we rented a house by the beach.

Do you know how much of those videos we used in our final course? One segment. Five minutes out of the countless hours that we filmed. We lost thousands including the time we had to take off from work.

There were a ton of lessons we learned, expensive lessons. So you guys can learn from them. First, we were trying to do too much at once. Peter Kim and I are both physicians, so we had a little money saved up for the project. We decided to do it the best we could afford all at once.

Instead, we should have thought of the project as a startup. We would have tried to do it the best we could with limited resources. What people often call a minimal viable product. The best we could do at the time. And then try to improve it over time.

Affordable video than thousands wasted on pro

We didn’t need to hire a professional videographer. And actually, we didn’t even know what qualities make up a good one. We realised there were different types of video professionals. And that we had hired the wrong one. Some of our other friends started with their phones. They filmed themselves. We ended up wasting money and more importantly time.

Once, we did some more research, we found out that most people do their courses with voice over slides. We wanted to be different for the sake of being different. In the end, that’s what we did too. There was no good reason to have us in the video. This way we could make a new video at home. Our course would be a living, breathing class that we could update in real-time. There was a reason the industry standard was to do things a certain way.

 

To summarize:

1. When trying something new, limit your resources. Try to come up with a minimal viable product.

2. Look at what resources you already have and try to use them

3. See what others in the industry are doing, try that at first, and then innovate.