Did you ever successfully motivate a person, to pick up a task, that might have a benefit 3 months from now? Most people don’t even think about the next month, except for some holiday or a birthday.

Wikipedia has a nice theoretical write up about motivation.

Do you do some thing that might benefit you after putting years of energy in it, without being obligated to do so? That feels great right? You’re doing stuff only for enjoyment, praise and money, but you don’t have to do it.

One of the biggest steps i’ve made to put obligation aside is not doing any client work any more.

Try not to do client work for a month. Only do stuff you enjoy and praises you and you might find your passion.

The start-up variant of meetings. Time consuming, cola draining and breath taking fun.

Every day we have at least 3 storms. With 12 people on 50 square meters it is ofter quite tumultuous. Since a few weeks all our sessions are moved to the hall way. Besides the obvious advantage that you don’t bother your office mates with your nonsense, it also has a positive effect on the efficiency of the session. The thing is, there are no chairs in the hallway. When you stand during a conversation or a brainstorm session, you talk less, switch topics and move forward faster. Stelios Haji-Ioannou, former chairman of easyJet, is well know for his stand up meetings. Sometimes we take is a step further with “the elevator decision strategy”. With only 8 floors up and down and maybe 3 stops/ timeouts, you force yourself to go even faster.

Today i had lunch with Mathijs van Abbe. We discussed the possibilities of mobypicture. We want to transform it into a modern mobile online service and make it fit our communication strategy for the upcoming year. With moby you can share the photo’s you take with you mobile phone across several online platforms with a single action. It will be a great addition for our open European platform. We’ll be showing more of the platform in the upcoming months.

During the discussion about all the different platforms we can connect moby to we both came to the same conclusion. We mis a specific type of online social community that would actually help you do business and maintain contacts. Where is the online social network with CRM capabilities?

Today is a great day. A new long awaited version of cakephp is released. A counterpart of ruby on rails implemented in PHP.

Cake is now up and running for about two years. At the office we do all our projects in php and now after some mild pressure we do all our project in cake. I love it. It takes you probably twice as long to set up your initial project, but after a while you really feel the strength of this elegant framework. Fleck.com V3.0 is also baked in cake, a few weeks ago Sander started at one of our new projects from scratch in cake, he never touched it before. Without any effort we took some components from the new fleck.com, plugged it in and it worked like a charm.

Keep up the great work guys.

Dragons den is one of my favorite shows.

Right down to business. No bull shit.

Since 1998 i’m working in the internet industry, most of the time as a freelancer. After a few years i took the decision to open my own office. During a development job at fleck.com i met a few people who are way longer in the business. Some of them had already sold a company. Now they where back into some freelance jobs, back to where they probably started.

Then it hit me, for how long do you want to do client work. Always the tight budgets, always the deadlines, always the explaining why this and that. I often felt like a chicken, just picking at the grains right in front of me, and always watching out for all the great things that happen around.

Working at fleck for a few months, at no special occasion, i was at Boris’ place. Out of the blank he asked me to become his business partner, together with Patrick in Meganova. At first i thought that it was more of a joke or just a something he was thinking about, but as it turned out he was serious.

This opened up a whole new way of thinking for me. It amazes me every day how much energy a great team can give.