improbability drive

In today’s post, I draw inspiration from Woot! the popular online deals site, and look at how some principles that we learn from Woot can be applied to how we do things, and how they can make our lives better. More importantly though, I draw inspiration from self-described “experts” in the field of “self help”^[1] to take a subject I know very little about (Woot) and use it to explain a subject I know nothing about (Life), and in the process reduce something incredibly complex and nuanced (Life) into nice catchy sentence fragments.

For those of you not familiar with Woot, they are an online retailer that usually sells cool electronic stuff at great prices (for the most part). Their MO is in their own words, “One Day, One Deal”. They sell only a single product each day, and sell it only for that day. They also have other sites which sell t-shirts, wine and kids items the same way. If you need to know more, check out what the hitchhikers guide has to say about Woot, or let Woot do it in their own words. In any case, we will talk about Woot in more detail as we go along.

In today’s piece, I’ll show you how you can borrow tips from the way Woot goes about its business, and then adapt them to getting your own stuff done. (A good start would be to stop procrastinating, but you can do that later).

Lessons Learned in Getting Things Done from Woot:

1. Do One thing at a time:

Woot’s defining factor and shtick is that they sell one product per day. And they do it well. This, in my opinion, is the core principle behind getting things done. Concentrating on one main task at a time, and doing it well. This means you will have fewer distractions, and fewer things that divide your attention and bandwidth. This will also streamline your process to a great extent. For Woot, it means that all orders coming in on a particular day are all the same. Just slap a shipping label on each one, and off they go.

Given the nature of most tasks, you will have new related things popping up that need to be done — for instance, while cleaning a room, you might come across papers that need to be filed, or while programming, you realize that you need to write another sub routine to process something along the way. The best way to deal with these is to add them to your task list based on their priority, and then take them on when you are done with the current task. Going off on tangents every time something comes up is a great way to make sure that things never get done.

2. Know when to quit:

Not all tasks can be completed in one sitting, and not everything can wait while it gets done. When you get to the point where the Law of Diminishing Returns kicks in, and you stop making any real progress, its time to drop that activity for the time being and come back to it later after you take care of other important things. Woot features each product on its site for exactly 24 hours, and even if it has not sold out by then, its time for a new product. The idea being, that almost everyone who was going to buy it right now has already bought it. If it has not sold out, they will typically bring it back again the next month.

If you find yourself re-reading the same paragraph 10 times without making sense or trying to track an inexplicable bug for 2 hours without finding it, you probably should take a break at the very least. You can either move on to something else for the time being, or if the work is important enough, come back to it after a good break. It generally works wonders. I have often left for lunch after trying in vain to get some stupid code to work, only to come back with a full stomach to spot and fix the bug before I was even done with checking the mails.

3. Get smaller things done in a bunch:

The essence of 1 and 2 is that you divide your work up into functionally independent parts, and go at them one at a time in reasonable time slots, and if additional items pop up, add them to the list and tackle them later. Generally when you do this, you will end up with a number of tasks that do not take much time to finish off. Or there might be some small finishing touches remaining to your bigger items that are 90% done. So once in a while, round up all these little ones, and run through them in one fell swoop.

In an occasional deviation from its usual way, Woot has what are called “woot-offs” where it will feature one product till it is sold off, and then immediately feature the next product. This goes on for a day or two, or until all the inventory has been cleared. This is a great way for them to sell off smaller items, left overs from previous sales, or just items that are in small enough quantities to sell out in a matter of hours. They don’t have to dedicate a full day to those, and as an added benefit, the fans go into all sorts of hysteria.

4. “Good enough” is good enough:

Ever got anything done that was simple, elegant, and almost perfect? And then decided to make it just perfect? And then ended up spending hours on it trying to get it right, and in the process breaking something and complicating the rest? Yeah, we’ve all been there. Apparently, perfect is the enemy of good. And most of the time, your work only needs to be “good enough” and not perfect, and you could have spent those last few frustrating hours actually getting more work done. If something is simple and works well enough as per the requirements – stick with it.

I asked Woot about their shipping strategy (yes I research my posts, even the ones as bad as this one) and how it works out for them. The main site provides a flat shipping rate of $5 for all products, regardless of the price, size, weight or distance. Sometimes during woot-offs, the shipping costs more than the product itself. And HDTVs cost more to ship than the USB drives. So this is not the most ideal way of doing things, but still, it is very simple and consistent.

The Woot rep told me that basically, they more or less break even on the shipping costs. They have a single carrier alleigiance going that lets them offer cheap rates. Given their already low base prices, it is often still a great deal even after adding in the 5 bucks for shipping. The repeat customers know that they’ll basically save money on bigger items and are cool with a slightly more tax on the smaller items. Also, once they are hooked, its not like they’ll have a choice anyway (He seriously said that!!! Well okay, not in so many words…) So the gist of it: Even though their system is not “perfect” for each individual product, it makes up for it with simplicity and consistency that lets them break even on shipping AND does not cost them business either. Nicely done.

5. Consolidate then build:

All the tips before this deal with how to get work done. This one is more about how to achieve larger goals. Ever decided to lose weight/cut expenses/exercise more/learn a new skill? In doing so, ever gone at it all guns blazing, only to run out of ammo in a week? Everyone has done some variant of this at some scale. Sure, it gives great results if it works, but it is not _sustainable_. To make lasting changes in our lives, the changes need to be sustainable. And for this, we need to start small, and build up slowly, as we get used to the small changes.

It is much easier for our mind and body to accomodate cumulative small changes, than to absorb a drastic change. For instance when your goal is to lift 100lbs, when you have not done any heavy lifting for a long time, going all out at the 100lbs is not going going to help. Instead you need to start with lifing 10lbs and doing it till it just feels natural. Once you start thinking of 10lbs as ‘light’, move on to lifting 20lbs, and so on till you reach 100lbs. At that point, lifting 100lbs will feel like no big deal at all.

When Woot started out, it started as a single site selling a single product per day. Since then, it has grown and launched sister sites that sell t-shirts, wine, kids’ stuff, and even more random crap. They did not do it all from Day One. They first consolidated their base, and then one at a time, added new ventures.

And it works the same way for life too. Take it one step at a time, plan ahead, but still live in the present. Everything happens in its own time. Don’t worry too much about the future, nor obsess over the past. Take a deep breath, relax, and you’ll get there in due time.

So these, ladies and gentlemen, were the lessons you can learn from Woot about getting things done. We are running out of time today, but I will be back after the weekend with five more lessons on Life that we can learn from Woot.

[1] Which seemingly has two main schools of thought: “you are perfect just the way you are” and “you are doing everything wrong”. A third one exists, which essentially says “we are boned, so why even care”. Unfortunately no one has bothered to write up any literature regarding the third school of thought, because quite frankly, we are boned, so why even care.