Focused Work Leads To Focused Art Project, with Justin Higgins, Ep. 39
Justin Higgins was able to start working remotely two years ago when he moved to Los Angeles, California, by negotiating with his employer at the time to cover his coworking space fees. He's often running personal growth experiments, and in the past year decided that he wanted to improve his sales and marketing skills and has built 24-Hour Homepage, a website where visitors see one clickable image for the current second of the day. It's like a big, 24-hour GIF or art project that will live online forever that he is selling one second at a time.\n\n\n\nApril and Justin actually met in a Focusmate session as he was preparing for a presentation later in the week, a pitch about his new project; and April was working on her podcast show notes. For those who are unfamiliar, Focusmate is an online accountability tool where two people are semi-randomly assigned for a video chat where they each take a moment to state a goal for their 50-minute session and then discuss whether or not they finished their task at the end of the session. This has been, by far, Justin's favorite productivity tool for the past two years, and using it helped him realize he could get a lot done at home, so he eventually stopped using the coworking space.\n\n\n\nIn the past, Justin studied physics and astrophysics and then helped startups like Beats Music (later Apple), Polaroid, and Hustle strengthen their software engineering services. As such, he has a lot of interest in some of the up-and-coming apps and online tools on the market as well as connections in those spaces; and he shares about several others, in addition to Focusmate, that he's testing out or keeping an eye on.