How changing my homepage let me loose forty pounds and start a company.

Almost two years ago, I decided I was going to sit down and make some changes to my life. I had just finished a four year stint at microsoft, felt burnt out on tech, gotten out of shape due to working regular sixty hour weeks in front of a computer and smoking like a chimney. I sat down and thought about what it was that I wanted to achieve and came up with a list of stuff that I wanted to do. I decided to focus on accomplishing three -smoking, weight loss, and starting a company. I did several things to accomplish these goals, but one of the best, and easiest, was just changing my home page.
Nowadays, when I open up my browser in the morning, I’m greated with three pages. They are as follows: (my company) entrenza.com’s beta page, gmail, and foremost – a google docs spreadsheet entitled yyyy-mm goals and actions. The beta page is related to one of these goals, but lets talk about the spreadsheet. It’s really simple and looks something like this:

It’s been a pretty successful system. I don’t worry about huge strides, I just worry about accomplishing, one thing towards each goal each day. So far, ‘ve registered a LLC and and have regularly worked part time on a startup for over a year. We’re right about to go into beta. As for getting in shape, when I left seattle two years ago and got my California license, it listed my weight at 205lbs. I renewed last week and had 185lbs on it. Prior to leaving Seattle, you could add another 20 lbs to that. I no longer smoke.

I don’t know if this will be useful to anyone else, but I’ve had some success with it, and who knows, maybe it will work for you. If you try it out, I’d love to hear from you and see how it goes.