Lifehacker recently published an article “Five Best Startup Management Tools”, which I naively thought was a post on entrepreneurial webapps, but is in fact about autorun and trimming your Windows boot sequence. I don’t even use Windows (unless forced), so the article — which I keep seeing linked around the place — annoys me on multiple levels.

Here’s my take on what Lifehacker should have written to satisfy the other meaning of ’startup’. (Yes, it’s sort of a list post; I have another blog post brewing on that subject, and more.) The five top tools that help me run my startup, day in, day out, manage everything that’s going on, and not go insane in the process.

1. Email and Twitter

Two for the price of one. Really, the number-one ‘management tool’ that keeps everything flowing is communication, but there are platforms and webapps and gadgets galore for such a basic human act. I spend 95% of my communication time writing, reading and managing email or Twitter. Email… well, no need to go into details, although multiple inboxes, superstars, more filters than you can shake a stick at and labelling really save the day. Not sure what I’d do without Gmail.

Twitter isn’t a key internal management tool, but it has great benefits of its own — new opportunities, new contacts, quick attention-grabbing DMs, keeping up to date on trends, fostering relationships with key people and building a brand/reputation around a specific anchor. This isn’t just idle speculation, either; everything I just listed has actually resulted from my use of Twitter as a sort of mixed corporate-personal communication channel (both on @jennielees and, in August, our shared @festbuzz).

2. Dropbox

I use multiple machines, from multiple locations, across multiple platforms. Having the headache of ‘oh shit, that file’s on that computer 300 miles away’ totally removed from my life is worth the Pro subscription’s weight in gold. I mainly use this for startup work, as personal stuff is just less likely to be as vital, but I’m starting to put more trivial content into Dropbox just for the convenience. Because it’s a ‘real’ folder, I’m not worried about losing the data, but I am a little niggled by the ‘it’s all on the cloud’ aspect — I deal with uber-secure stuff in a slightly more paranoid way. Not sure how I’d transition from personal-dropbox to startup-dropbox shared with multiple people, but I can totally see the benefit of that as we grow.

3. Skype

We don’t use this tremendously much but it’s been insanely valuable when we have. Being a distributed company with the main lynchpin in the arse-end of Scotland people often assume we can meet face to face with them when we can’t; free video calling really does help to bridge the gap. (And, initially, having an 0131 number without a real phone.)

“Virtual facetime” isn’t quite the same as real facetime though, so I should probably add a tiny mention for Easyjet here, despite their monumental awfulness. (And big up the Generator hostel in London, yo.) My mileage for the year’s nowhere near Ewan’s, but I’ve still spent plenty of time on those lovely bright orange 6.30am planes.

4. Macbook Pro

My trusty laptop. I’d say “a” laptop is useful — really, required — to run a startup, but major props to the MBP (disclaimer: matter of personal taste). It’s over three years old, and although it feels quite sluggish now, and the battery life is somewhat laughable — about one and a half hours — it’s definitely served me well.

The main reason I love Macs is because I’m a control freak and command-line junkie on one level, but I also like shiny pretty things. OSX combines the best of both worlds in a way that’s well and truly converted me to the Cult of Jobs; I can get dirty stuff done quite happily in Terminal, set up a near-perfect coding environment that beats ‘four-terminal fwvm2′ into the dust, and yet also use a fantastic array of apps which are generally jolly good. And it doesn’t do games, which is great for a work machine, but it does do WoW, which is great for a junkie’s fix on the road (yesyes, I gave up for good over six months ago).

Honourable mention goes to the iPhone for keeping me connected on the move (providing there’s signal), but frankly, its call quality is terrible, the no-ring/voicemail bug is frustrating in the extreme, the ‘no service’ weirdness I’ve experienced lately is even worse, and the bewildering array of apps is entertaining yet ultimately a huge problem that’s just not being solved. Yes, it’s a great mobile email, web and SMS client, yes, some of the apps are great, yes, Google Maps has saved me more times than I can count. But international data rates, poor signal, low battery etc mean it’s usually an expensive iPod most of the time I’m travelling.

5. Other Startups

One of the things that has helped me learn, improve and generally stay on top of things has been other people — specifically other people who are, or have been, in the same boat. Thanks to communities such as Hacker News it’s easy to learn from others’ mistakes and get a quick opinion before you plunge; of course, I’ve still made plenty of my own, but I feel I somehow did so with a little education. There are a load of events that help startups in various ways, through learning, networking, presentation practice and so on, and it’s easy to get carried away and go to too many. However, having the option and the amount of information there for the taking is still great.

In meatspace, it’s also important to balance the often-isolated habits of entrepreneurship with the real world, and that’s where things like the Informatics Ventures/TechMeetup communities and EPIS have really helped. There’s something nice about the size and energy of the Edinburgh tech community; it’s small enough that you can really get to know people well and yet not too small to be insignificant.

Events like the Silicon Valley speaker series, Ken Morse courses, School for Startups and so on bring the world to Edinburgh. We still have a lot of barriers to get over to put the city on the map, so to speak, and there are plenty of times when I wish I was in London — but I do sense a force for change up here and some genuinely serious interest and investment in pushing Edinburgh’s ’scene’ further.

A side note: simply being in the right place is important to startup management, although not necessarily a deal-breaker. For example, it’s easier to manage a company if your co-founders, employees, investors and clients are all in the same city as you! However, it’s not impossible to succeed if none of them are, which is practically the case for me — you just have to think about things a little differently, and use tools such as those listed above to help with the process.

Having said that, there is a balancing act on hand. Despite the loveliness of Edinburgh and its awesome community, I’m going to be spending the next year in San Francisco simply because I feel I need to be there in person to nurture various things along, and get to a stage I don’t feel I can achieve remotely. But I’ll be back, and that’s what counts.

Photo is of Citizen Space, where I spent a happy nomadic afternoon working. Fortunately, the hot desks have power sockets.

Lifehacker recently picked up a story I’d read some months ago, but not really thought too deeply about, planning as I am to remain in this timezone for the immediate future. The story? How to reset your body clock by not eating for 16 hours.

We all know the theory about getting up early. Set your alarm for an early time every day. Get up without fail. Immediately do some exercise or take a shower to get the blood flowing. Even if you go to bed stupidly late, still get up at the same time. But somehow, it’s never quite worked for me. My early-morning willpower just can’t overcome the miasma of “I went to bed at 6am after a late night’s hacking and I can reprogram my alarm while entirely asleep”.

Something clicked when I read the Lifehacker piece, though. Maybe my recent cycle of work-late, bed-late, get-up-later, work-later, bed-later wasn’t due to lack of willpower in the morning, but due to my internal body clock drifting as a result of what I ate. Coincidentally I’d been keeping a food diary at the same time as a protracted fortnight of late working nights, and there it was, writ large in the data: I got up late when I’d eaten late.

OK, that’s clearly not the only factor. Perhaps the late night activity of my brain due to work was causing the drift, perhaps it’s a result of the numbing effects of BBC iPlayer programmes on teenage mothers, perhaps it was the weather. But this was something I could test.

Step one. Set a golden rule not to eat after 8pm. This was derived from the 16-hour idea, with supporting anecdotal evidence that a 12-hour fast was sufficient for some people. 8pm means getting up (and eating) at 8am. That’s four or five hours earlier than my drifted body clock was managing; my internal ‘alarm’ was set to a solid 12:15 for several months.

Step two. Obey golden rule. Simple enough; nothing but water after eight.

Step three. Set alarm, wake up, and (to ruin the scientific nature of this experiment) schedule meetings at 9am to force the issue.

Step four. Observe results.

It really is incredible. After about three days of not eating beyond 8pm I was getting up early just fine, and feeling way more alert too. I then pushed the rule a bit, working late and eating late, and tested to see when I would naturally wake up – 10am. That’s a reset of over two hours! I’m entirely sure that if I keep this up for another week or so, I’ll have a circadian rhythm in line with my actual timezone for the first time in years.

Way to go bodyhacking!

It’s a nice dream, that of the aspiring problogger. Address a fascinated Internet audience daily about a topic you – and they – love, while earning money? Too good to be true!

If you work as part of a blogging team for a large site, chances are you will be tasked to come up with multiple daily posts on the blog’s topic. While inspiration and introspection can get you so far, the job of keeping content fresh and covering breaking news means you need to establish good work habits, particularly if you’ve only blogged as a hobby before.

Blogging breaks down into handy steps:

• Find something interesting to write about
• Write about it
• Add appropriate images
• Add metadata: internal and external links, tags, etc
• Schedule
• (Optional) Promote
• Babysit – Edit, update, monitor comments

Find something interesting to write about

This might sound like the easy part, but on slow news days and slow inspiration days it can seem nearly impossible to pull 5 or more posts out of thin air.

RSS is your friend. You’re probably already subscribed to relevant feeds, but did you spend a couple of hours daily combing them? Learn which feeds have interesting commentary, which are fastest to break news, and which are your competitors. Expand your reading – you can often get inspired by posts that aren’t directly related to your subject. Maybe your co-bloggers can recommend some new subscriptions for you, or there might even be a team OPML file.

When you find something interesting on the RSS wires, you have a choice. Write about it immediately or file it away. The former is pretty self-evident; if it’s an amazing post, or breaking news, jump on it! Double check to make sure nobody else is working on the same story, though; bloggers often overlap, and there’s nothing worse than wasting your time.

I can’t stress enough the importance of a good filing, or notebook, system. Whether you use a web product such as Evernote, delicious, pbWiki, or many others – or simply star things in your RSS reader, or save URLs to Notepad – you’ll find it invaluable, I promise. Try out different systems and see what works for you; I found I prefer a combination of simplicity (I just want to press one button) with tagging (to remind me why), so something like delicious and flagging/clipping in NetNewsWire worked well for me. Not every link comes in through RSS, hence the dual system.

Say you’ve set up a delicious account; bookmark interesting posts that you’re not ready to jump on right now, and tag them (“to-post”, “commentary”, “news”, “totally-wrong”, “controversial”, “nintendo”). Then when you’re done crawling and ready to write, you have a set of links right there, with reminders why you bookmarked them. Most importantly, stuff that doesn’t make it into today’s posts is still there tomorrow and you can start the day by talking about something that’s still fresh. You can also highlight posts you might want to refute, or elaborate on – I’d occasionally find a really interesting academic post and muse on the topic for a more mainstream audience, for example.

RSS isn’t the centre of the world, mind you. Other sources for interesting stuff to blog about include Twitter, a goldmine for things people are finding cool right now. Twitturly and to a lesser extent popaculous show you just the URLs being tweeted about, though following a ton of interesting people in your subject area is a more personal approach, especially since you can contribute to the conversation. However, don’t fall into the trap of thinking that just because something’s popular on Twitter, it’s going to be popular with your readers: filter everything before you post.

As well as Twitter you can use services such as TechMeme, Digg, reddit and so on. You should be aiming to get coverage on these sites, rather than use them as a news source, but sometimes you can find an interesting story you hadn’t stumbled across before it hits the front page.

Don’t underestimate the power of press releases, either. Get on some mailing lists and sign up for press sites; even in this day and age, there are times when the first you’ll hear of something is the press release. Based in the UK, I used to scour GamesPress and GamesIndustry.biz daily to jump on new press alerts before the Americans woke up. However, again, you need a filter between the release and your readers. Simply spouting off the release adds zero value to the site, but adding some unique insights, an interview, reader polls, sarcastic commentary or humour reminds your readers why they read your site and not the press releases directly.

Your readers are also a source of inspiration and links. Perhaps a comment left on a recent post is worthy of a full article; perhaps they have written in with some news you haven’t even seen yet. (Having a tip line, if you obviously use it – thank readers in your posts – is a great way to ensure you wake up to Stuff To Write About). Maybe one of them is interview material, maybe you find their comments interesting enough to ask them a daily question (we started this with WoW Insider’s Breakfast Topics and it’s been a hit).

The team of people you work with on the blog can also be very helpful. Discussions can throw up post material, they can pass on subjects to you they don’t have the time or expertise to cover, and perhaps you can trade off skills: if one person really enjoys trawling RSS for cool stuff, and you hate it, why not team up? Coming up with regular feature ideas as part of the team is also really useful; if you’re posting a different regular feature each day, they can almost write themselves (or you publish and answer a reader question – easy!) and it keeps the blog content nice and varied.

Finally don’t forget the subject matter as a source. For example, on WoW Insider many post ideas surface just from playing the game and noting down interesting things you observe, the issues that worry your guild mates (and by extension your readers), funny bugs you’ve found, annoying habits people have, etc. This isn’t as easy in most other subject areas, but if, say, you’re writing on nutrition then why not write about the things you cook and eat as well as looking abroad for inspiration? Fitness blogger? Try a new regime and write about it. Or you could talk about blogging itself, of course.

Between all these tips, a daily quota seems like nothing. You start the day’s work with two interesting stories from yesterday, a tip mailbox with three great possibilities, five popular links from Twitter, a regular feature to write, a reader comment you’ve been meaning to follow up, an idea you had while at the gym this morning and a press release that nobody seems to have torn apart yet. Of course, now the fun part is prioritising and figuring out which to cover and which to drop… or which can wait until tomorrow.

In part two, I’ll cover the rest of the problogging pipeline, and look at healthy work habits in part three.

I’ve got plans for the notes that go beyond a blog post, so while the world stays in suspense, I thought I’d share a tip from a more experienced entrepreneur – let’s call him Kevin, as that’s his name – about due diligence and document organisation.

What Kevin does is to scan every important document his company deals with and back them all up to the company’s servers online. Whether it’s incorporation paperwork or grants, loan agreements, supplier and customer letters, etc; everything gets a virtual home. When it comes to due diligence, all he has to do is give them access to this repository of documents, and that’s it. Paperwork made easy.

What sort of stuff should you make copies of, and how should it be organised? A due diligence checklist like this one can help to give some idea of the headings documents can come under. Personally, I’m thinking maybe even a wiki format might work for general information organisation, where important hardcopy PDFs can be attached ready for future due diligence, but more volatile information can simply be edited with an audit trail. Of course, security is really important if you’re storing this stuff online, but that’s another story.

I’ve been doing a lot of development on my Ubuntu box lately — though my machine of choice is still my laptop, the advantage of a dual-monitor setup for coding really can’t be overstated. It’s an interesting mix of incredibly easy-to-use, easy-to-install software and the usual dependency-chasing (Perl modules, I’m looking at you). But here are some pages I’ve found useful lately:

• Rails on Ubuntu. An entirely hand-held, un-scary process despite what the documentation looks like.
• Medibuntu – non-free codecs and whatnot that can’t be distributed with the OS, but which you should install tout suite.
• Linux Twitter clients. There are quite a few roundups, but this one has pretty pictures, and it’s lovely to notice the gradation from your standard GTK look’n'feel down to AIR-for-Linux apps. Of course, for those of us with a more command-line bent…
• Twitter for irssi – ah, the joy of Open Source. “Maybe I could just put twitter as a fake ‘irc’ channel? Let’s see if there’s a plugin… Oh, there it is!”. There seem to be a couple of others, too – I’ll update if this one doesn’t work.
• Nvidia Dual Monitor HOWTO – Verging on the specific, here, but the very first thing I had to do on my new Ubuntu install was dive into xorg.conf. Ah, the memories.
• Even more specific: Aliasing SSH using .ssh/config (if your login name on one machine is different to those you regularly SSH to, this saves typing!) and setting up passwordless ssh.
• Don’t forget some awesome Blizzard wallpapers, of course.
• Lifehacker also kindly rises to the occasion with Five Tweaks For Your New Ubuntu Desktop and an excerpt from Ubuntu Kung Fu. Interesting takeaway: Dropbox supports Linux, so no excuse not to back up.
• Finally, did you take advantage of Codeweavers’ free software day last week? Even if you didn’t, I’ve found the CrossOver products to be worth paying for if you find there’s something you really can’t live without — if gaming’s more your thing, I used Cedega to great success when I first started playing WoW. Productivity tip: don’t install either, and force yourself to reboot to play games. You get more work done, trust me…

Obviously that barely touches the Ubuntu iceberg, so maybe there’ll be a power-tools followup at some point. However, all you really need is ssh, screen, vim, a keyboard and monitor, right?

[CD image from themactep]