In some ways, it’s the hardest hat a microISV can wear: how do you stay focused and keep moving forward as you build your microISV?

It’s not easy, as “The Tired One” lamented in this post at Business of Software recently, but it can be done.

But first, you’re going to have to disenthrall yourself from the way “normal people” who are paid by someone else work:

Here’s the short list of habits that have to go:

“Being available is important.” Maybe when you are a cog in someone else’s company, or when you’re contracting, but as a someone trying to get a microISV to the point of making money, this value has to go out the window.

“Someone else is responsible.” Again, a favorite among the corporate set and impossible when the company is you.

“My job is planning.” That’s a big NO – it’s good and right to define your product/service, marketing strategy, blogging/social networking strategy, but that’s only the start. It’s all about execution, which is why a formal, formatted business plan (unless you’re going for angel/vc money) is a waste of time.

“I have time for that.” No you don’t, at least during the time you’re working on your microISV. You need the best you can do – not just what you get by with on your hundred times a day interrupted day job. If you want to focus that means making the decision that what you are doing is important and all of the distractions are just that.

And here’s a starter list of tips to get your focused and keep you focused:

Compartmentalize your life. That means, when you are in microISV building mode, that, and that alone, are what you are doing. Off goes email, IM, twitter, the phone, the net, the spouse, the cat. You can’t sort of work on this stuff – it’s too hard. You need to build a clear mental space, reserved for this work alone, which you come back to again and again.

Get used to saying No. No, you don’t want to go out with your friends. No, you don’t get to take the day off. No, you can’t indulge in any of the countless distractions out there. You’ve said Yes! I want to create my own software and my own company and that means you’ve also said no to a lot of other things, opportunities, people and yes, family and friends for the duration.

Schedule. Start. Work. End. Building your commercial app – be it SaaS, desktop, mobile or whatever – and building your company’s identity, marketing, support systems and market positioning are going to take time. Lots of it. Get in the habit of scheduling time and targeting what you are going to do, defining it down to the level of detail you need to so you can execute it. I strongly recommend you establish a set of starting and ending rituals for this, even if those rituals are nothing more than pouring a new cup of coffee, starting the same playlist, and putting on your favorite baseball cap. (See last point as to why.)

Keep score. Specifically, keep some sort of log or journal – from simple text file to the most elaborate tracking system you can find. And in that log or journal you want to track three things:

• The decisions you make as you plan your microISV/app (otherwise you’ll just keep making the same decisions over and over),
• The ideas you get in the middle of the night, after a shower, on the way to your day job. Those little flashes of inspiration/insight that light the way to adding a really good feature, dropping one no one else cares about, writing a Hook that works, positioning your product to sell really well. “I remember that” isn’t a plan for capturing these gems, it’s an unanswered prayer. Write it down!
• How much time you spend, what results you’ve gotten. If you don’t measure it, it doesn’t count.

Keep moving forward. That means you plan to spend at least 30 minutes each day alone with your microISV, just the two of you. Sounds like to little time to be useful, right? True if you spend the first 20 minutes figuring out where you left off, what you’re doing, what your desired outcome is. False, if you make how you get back to working on your microISV a ritual, a routine, a habit. Spending 30 minutes a day on any longterm project, IMO, keeps it loaded in “near-term memory”, quickly accessed via the same entrypoints. Even if you only have 30 productive minutes a day to put into your future, you will get there.