Er, Ev Williams was probably not the best example to use for "it's better to focus on one thing." Would the author have told Ev to focus on Odeo rather than work on that crazy, silly side project called Twitter? Perhaps Billy Chasen shouldn't have been "distracted" by Turntable.fm?<p>The article is essentially one big tautology: don't be distracted by distractions! Well, the problem is no one knows what's a distraction and what's the next Twitter. That's the skill that matters - not ignoring "distractions" altogether.<p>It's perhaps important to remember that Clay Christensen remarked that nearly all disruptive innovations look like toys at first.
The author writes: <i>Usually side projects help you learn something new that you can incorporate back into your start-up.</i><p>How true is this! I'm on the side learning Django (because I want to use its admin feature to do a lot of CRUD) and on another side stint I'm dabbling in MongoDB, which also can come in very handy for my main projects.