This past Saturday, Joel Runyon and I celebrated our first anniversary.

Aww, shucks.

One year ago, with a mission to inspire gut-wrenching adventure and deconstruct extreme sports for the masses, Joel and I launched Nerve Rush to the world. We set out to interview professional athletes, to curate heart-wrenchingly cool content and ultimately, to tackle Red Bull as the #1 extreme sports brand.

Fast forward to this evening, 170 posts later.

Things, I must say, are going swimmingly. Traffic has shot up these last few months, and each week Joel and I are  speaking and working with some really cool people. Building Nerve Rush, I’ve taken away business lessons and experiences that will undoubtedly help me in the future.

In an effort to jot down my thoughts more frequently, here we go.

1. Scheduled Communication is Critical

Joel and I live in two different cities, so this was important to hash out early. After talking through our schedules and weekly bandwidth, we decided to speak at least once every two weeks via Skype or phone. Between then, we agreed to use email and our project management HQ to keep pushing projects forward. This continues to work well for us.

At HubSpot, I meet once every two weeks with my current manager for an hour long, one-on-one session. On my last team, I met once a week. In both cases, that frequency of communication worked really well.

I know Kristen and Shannon, founders of Revolution Apparel, as they worked remotely from each other to build their business, made a point to chat with each other at least once per day.

What kind of regular, communication do you have with your co-workers? Scheduled communication is critical to a team’s, a project’s and a company’s long-term success. Particularly when the agenda is clear, but that’s another bag of marbles.

2. Define an Organizational Process

Trello, Basecamp, Evernote, Dropbox — these are a few of the tools that groups can use to collaborate with each other online. Over the last year, I’ve become comfortable with my own personal organizational process, as well as a process that works for Joel and I as a team.

Individually, I use a combination of Dropbox and Gmail tags/filters. As a team, Joel and I use Dropbox and Google Drive. There are a number of other tools that we use, but everything, in some  form or fashion, makes it onto Dropbox or Google Drive.

At HubSpot, my manager and I use one single Google Drive doc to track everything I’m working on. Personally, I use Evernote, Google Drive, Gmail and yes, a series of hand-written notes and post-its around the desk.

There is a lot more I’d like to say here, but I defer any additional insights on organization to David Allen’s Getting Things Done. A phenomenal read.

What tools and processes do you use to stay organized?

3. Deconstruct the Vision to Work Smarter, Not Harder

At any given moment, Joel and I have 101 half-brained ideas.

We constantly revisit our 30,000 ft. vision for Nerve Rush and break  that down into small, manageable tasks. By writing out these tasks, estimating what it will take to complete them, prioritizing them and relating them back to our vision, Joel and I have learned how to work smarter, not harder.

It’s been tough. We haven’t really pinned down a business model for Nerve Rush. At this point, we could see Nerve Rush manifesting in a lot of different ways.

And I think that’s OK.

We’re ready to pivot when the data starts pointing us in one direction versus another. For now, we’re testing out a series of these small, manageable tasks, each with it’s own micro-vision, to help us better assess our future plans.

I look forward to Nerve Rush’s future milestones, to working with Joel and to sharing these stories and insights with you.

In the meantime, stay adventurous out there.

#boom

In 27 days, I will be attempting to hike the Presidential Traverse in New Hampshire’s White Mountains for the second time. I tried to complete it a couple of years ago, but due to my group’s pace and injuries, we made a joint decision to turn back.

In a few weeks, Nate Damm and I will set forth from the Appalachia Trailhead off NH Route 2, leaving at around 4am. We plan to move at a quick pace for the first 8-10 hours, as we ascend, descend and ascend our way back up to the summit of Mt. Washington, the highest part of the trail.

Some facts about the hike:

1. The 20+ mile traverse spans 7 mountain peaks, with 9,000 ft. of elevation gain
2. The suggested book time to complete the traverse is just over 16 hours
3. The route is famous for its tumultuous weather and sometimes dangerous conditions

As SummitPost says, “The Presidential Traverse is arguably the most spectacular and challenging one-day hike in the Northeast. Unquestionably, it passes over the highest peak in the Northeast, as well as the second, the third, the fourth, and the fifth, a couple of sub-peaks that are just as high, and a couple of “smaller” peaks that are still among the fifty highest in New Hampshire.”

Sounds fun, right?

I’m using the next three weeks to kick up training.

I recently read Moonwalking with Einstein.

In this non-fiction book, the author, Joshua Foer, is on assignment, writing a journalistic piece on the U.S. Memory Championship. When Foer learned that most of the people competing were not in fact geniuses but average folks like himself, he wanted to learn more.

Soon, Foer finds himself among a quirky subculture of mental athletes. Foer learns how to memorize decks of cards, faces and poems through a series of mnemonic techniques.

Long story short — he adapts these practices and wins the U.S. competition less than a year later.

Tackling My Own Mind

This book got me thinking.

While I’m not particularly interested in memorizing decks of cards or long poems, I’m very passionate about expanding the capacity of my own mental bandwidth. I love reading about nootropics, solving puzzles and figuring out ways to think faster and more effectively. Where can I improve?

As we hit the gym to get our heart rate going, so too should we flex our mental muscles and workout the brain. Below are three mental workouts. If you complete them, let me know in the comments!

1. Being able to name all countries of the world.

You can use Sporcle to practice memorizing. Over the course of a couple weeks, I probably spent 5 hours practicing. I then whipped out my camera. It still took 6 tries to get it right.

2. Solving the Zebra Puzzle.

It is said that Einstein created this puzzle as a boy, and that only 2% of the population can solve it. This took around 45 minutes to work out. Can you solve it?

Let us assume that there are five houses of different colors next to each other on the same road. In each house lives a man of a different nationality. Every man has his favorite drink, his favorite brand of cigarettes, and keeps pets of a particular kind.

1. The British person lives in the red house.
2. The Swede keeps dogs as pets.
3. The Dane drinks tea.
4. The green house is on the left of the white house.
5. The green homeowner drinks coffee.
6. The man who smokes Pall Mall keeps birds.
7. The owner of the yellow house smokes Dunhill.
8. The man living in the center house drinks milk.
9. The Norwegian lives in the first house.
10. The man who smokes Blend lives next to the one who keeps cats.
11. The man who keeps the horse lives next to the man who smokes Dunhill.
12. The man who smokes Bluemaster drinks beer.
13. The German smokes Prince.
14. The Norwegian lives next to the blue house.
15. The man who smokes Blend has a neighbor who drinks water.

The question is, Who owns the fish?

3. Solving the world’s hardest Sudoku puzzle.

Deemed the Everest of numerical games, this particular Sudoku arrangement was designed Arto Inkala, a Finnish mathematician. I don’t quite remember how long it took me to solve this. I spent 3 or 4 days picking it up and putting it down. I love Sudoku puzzles and do them frequently.

Do you do have any challenges like this? What would you recommend?