Thursday, February 25, 2016

Headed to Spain Tomorrow!

Tomorrow afternoon my bike and I are flying to Spain for Strong Like Bull Training Camps.  I'll spend next week biking (and swimming and running) all over the South of Spain with a bunch of other athletes.

A biking vacation has been on my bucket list for as long as I've been doing triathlons.  Biking is probably the only thing I've done where I've consistently experienced "flow." Needless to say, I'm very excited about next week.

Check out the camp.  The coaches are awesome (John Hirsch, my coach, is on their coaching roster!)

(If you are a last minute person, consider joining for this week or next week!)

Stay tuned to my instagram account for posts.

Thursday, February 18, 2016

Data! Numbers!

Last week we had a bunch of grants due, so I skipped posting.  (Writing clearly is really hard and time consuming work).

Our grant submissions got me thinking a lot about data.  When we submit grants, we provide a ton of data on our program -- how many students we've served, how many students get internships, the demographic makeup of our student body, the social emotional growth stats on our program, our partner companies internship satisfaction rates, and so much more.

I like data, and we love data at ScriptEd. I've been using data since I started swimming at age six.  Measuring progress with numbers is a great way to understand where you are, where you are going, and how well you're doing.

Data also allows you to define success in an objective and measurable way. I think this is so important, especially in the field of social entrepreneurship where success can so easily be confused with attention.  ScriptEd has been very lucky to get a lot of media attention and awards, which are crucial to help us attract resources, but are also pretty arbitrary markers of success. Data keeps us focused on what we're working towards.

At the same time, data can be incredibly intimidating. Numbers don't lie.  There might be a million reasons why my swim times didn't get faster in a season, or why we didn't get as many internship positions as we would have liked last summer.  Doing a lot of work and not having the outcomes you hoped for can be disappointing.

When numbers don't move in the way you want them to, you have to change your approach and start working smarter towards your objectives.  When things go better than expected, you have to try to determine what made you successful and replicate those actions if you can.

And finally, sometimes people (and companies) are successful in spite of themselves, or not successful for reasons beyond anyone's control. It's important to recognize the difference between things you can control (and work on improving those things), and things that you can't.


Friday, February 5, 2016

Early Bird Gets the Worm

It has been a very busy week at ScriptEd, so am just getting to my weekly post at 6pm on a Friday.

As you'll see from my post last week, I've been in the middle of a bunch of longer term projects recently and was struggling to sit down, focus and tackle them.  Thanks so much to the folks who emailed me tips -- they worked well.   I think getting into an environment away from people, the constant notifications on my phone and social media was the most effective thing I could do to focus.

For me, this means waking up really early.  A couple of times this week, I woke up between 4 and 4:30 am and got solid work done until 7:00 am (and moved my workouts to the night time instead!).  Early mornings are the only time of day when I feel like I can easily get rid of all outside distractions.  I normally have to interact with people all day long, so it's hard to sit and focus for long stretches of time during the regular work day. I'm usually pretty tired by the end of every day, so evenings have never been very productive for me.

(Yes, I'm pretty tired from these early wake up times this week.)

I'm headed to DC tomorrow morning for Teach for America's 25th Anniversary. I'll be presenting on ScriptEd and Computer Science Education on Saturday with some of my team members. Hope to see some of you there!