You have to start today

No more excuses and waiting for better times. You won’t have more time next week or at some point later in the future.

You have heard this many times from wise people (this must be true then, righ?) — the best time to start was yesterday, the next best time to start is today. Ok, originally it’s a metaphor about planting trees, but we are keeping things straightforward here.

There is a reason why you are on Medium. (Note – this originally was posted on medium) You want to be better, achieve more, have better future. You find the inspiration here. But probably you, like me, just can’t make that final decision — to start.

You are not alone. I also have several drafts of the stories you wanted to publish on Medium with just a title. I also have a list of business ideas and I pay annually for domains I bought for some of them. It’s time to take some action and make these ideas happen. This is the reason I am writing this story. This will be my statement of commitment.

Announcing you plans to the world is a particularly good way of keeping you motivated to move forward. You might feel uncomfortable posting you plans on Facebook or Twitter. I get it. You realise that you shouldn’t worry what your judgmental cousin/aunt/friend will think of your ideas, but you still feel uncomfortable revealing your dreams to them. I get it. Post it here, on Medium. We are all dreamers here, we will understand. You can even post it in the comment section under this story.

Another way of moving forward with your dreams is to get into habit of making your dreams come true. Start small. Whenever you have an idea of doing something achievable in a day — do it. Ok, maybe not every time. You have to be sensible.

My personal example — I wanted to show my kids yesterday what they can do on scratch in an hour or so. I ended up with a simple version of Space Invaders game. That’s an insignificant achievement, but for someone using this tool for the very first time, I felt quite proud and motivated.

But I was ‘making my wish come true’ for a while now. And it is not limited to one day projects. Some longer-term challenges have helped me to build my confidence. I will write about some of the challenges I’ve been doing for a while, like zero-sugar diet, jogging every second day, managing my personal finances to reduce my spending. I will also write about a couple of other ‘projects’ I started recently, depending how well they will do for me — investing and intermittent fasting.

See what I did there? Some more commitments.

But this is not the main reason of this story. The main reason is to start my two projects I was thinking for a while now and did some prep work already. I have to start them now. There will be no better time. I am on furlough scheme and it seems I will be on it for at least two more months (the industry I work in is a combination of travel and hospitality, so yeah, the COVID-19 crisis has hit us hard). Well it might not be the best time financially but coming out of the recession I should be fully ready to go live.

Idea 1: this is something I did for my old work and I really enjoyed every bit of that project. I was working in a green-grocer company and we had a picking conveyor where people were picking products for our customers. I had access to the raw SQL data of the system that was used on the conveyor and after brushing off my coding skills I built a tool I was really proud of. It was showing quantitative data in graphical representation of picking shelves. It was a heatmap designed for that hardware and software only.

I was thinking about the work I did there a lot lately. And I realised this is what I could offer to the companies with picking shelves, warehouses, sitting venues, anything with physical locations that have records of those locations in their databases.

Idea 2: It’s a tool I made for myself in Excel when I was looking for a new place to move. I had a list of potential houses to rent in order to keep track of the places I’ve seen. I started adding columns with the data I retrieved from the ads and secondary sources about the houses and I ended up creating a very useful tool allowing me to compare various attributes of the items in the list. I am now thinking to make it SaaS tool for everyone to use.

That’s my two ideas. Next step — making a more detailed plan for both of them.

Now it’s your turn. What’s your big idea?