Listen to Episode 1 to hear about Ben Gillenwater’s entrepreneurial adventures and how he balances work, life, sleep and health. Topics include:
- How Ben hacked Lyft’s referral code to generate $2k/week
- Juggling 5 businesses and maintaining sanity
- How to manage a 21st century workforce
- Hacking diet and sleep for ultimate productivity
Summary of Ben’s insight, with links:
- When starting a new tech project, prove out the core hypothesis before spending tons of money. Read The Lean Startup by Eric Ries.
- Juggle multiple projects by hiring the right people, focusing on the macro and avoiding the temptation to schedule meetings. Ask yourself “why” before starting something new or reprioritizing. Watch Simon Sinek’s Ted Talk, “Start With Why.”
- On remaining Zen. Don’t worry about stuff you can’t control. If a server goes down, accept that it happened and calmly focus on resolving the problem. Read The 4 Hour Work Week by Tim Ferriss.
- On diet optimization. Try Soylent to replace meals and save time.
- On sleep optimization. Check out Sleep Like the Dead and buy some blackout drapes. Use Sleep As Android to track your sleep.
- On schedule optimization. Weekends and holidays are the same as weekdays. Work when stuff needs to get done and/or when you work best. Ben likes to wake up with no alarm and often does his best work at 2am.
- On inbox optimization. Triage your emails better and snooze non important messages with Inbox for Gmail or Boomerang for Gmail.
Ben’s companies: SpeakUp, PackPoint, Drinkpoint, Oiled and Photogilly.
Ben can be reached on Twitter: @Bgilly