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Daily Growth

Intrinsic VS Extrinsic

I’ve come to realise in the last 10 years of development, there’s a single differentiating factor between success and failure. Or more specifically, perceived success and failure.

If you’re constantly looking inward, trying to create the work for yourself and not putting external pressures on yourself, you’re focusing on the intrinsic rewards.

If you’re constantly trying to judge yourself based on other actions people are taking or trying to gain certain accolades, you’re putting too much weight on factors outside of your control.

If you do the work and show up each day, yes there are many fires outside of your control, but what you do control is creating the work and if it’s just the work that matters, everything else is figuroutable.

Betting big

In my experience, you need to bet big to establish yourself.

You need to keep pushing in production until it’s right. You need a big idea, which may get scoped down, but you can’t start small.

If you start small you run the risk of going unnoticed. It’s likely people don’t want what you’re offering.

By all means start with constraints. Don’t plan something unachievable. Break it down into it’s component parts and tackle it in steps. But don’t start small.

Starting small means you’ll target a smaller market. You’ll likely give up from betting small because you didn’t get the extrinsic recognition you thought you’d receive.

If you bet big, you may not get all the way, but you stand more of a chance to carve a new blue ocean for yourself.

Strong opinions, weakly held

We have two core values that speak to openness and communication within the team;

‘To foster open discussion and provide candid feedback on ideas regardless of job role or seniority’ & ‘To be concise and articulate whilst also listening to each other’s perspectives to seek understanding on a given topic’.

We’ve always been a team of condensed hierarchy. New people joining the team have as much input as more senior people. Everyone discussed their thoughts and the best idea wins.

There’s a dichotomy I’ve noticed between having a good idea and how you communicate that idea. I’ve always been strong headed in my beliefs. A quote from Paul Saffo, technology forecaster and Stanford University professor, resonates strongly with me: “Have strong opinions, but weakly held”.

Throughout my career I’ve caused friction by having a strong opinion. When you’re wearing many masks its hard for people to differentiate who is speaking.

Some people on the team struggle to articulate themselves succinctly in real-time, but people listen. We try not to interrupt. We let other’s speak if it felt like we interrupted a pause they were taking.

When in design discussions, when you have to get into the weeds and cause some tension, I don’t believe work with a clear direction can successfully exist without people arguing for a clear direction (this includes the whole team not just an individual), it can cause offense.

Especially when you abdicate from a role. You have to remove your ego and know that someone more specialised for that role will have a better idea.

When that situation arises, you need to remind yourself of the mission. Why did you put this person in that role. Hold to your core values and know you’re working for the thing that’s bigger than yourself and you’re showing up to do the work for the team, not yourself.

I’ve caused offense and friction from doing this the wrong way, you have to tread the line and hold true to your core values. Even remind yourself on a cyclical basis.

You can’t be precious but you have to be clear and have strong ideas you articulate clearly, but when someone inevitably comes up with a better idea, as long as it doesn’t conflict with the mission, you have to loosen your strong belief and align with theirs to move the project forward.

Working on your business instead of inside your business

Michael Gerber has a great book where he coined that phrase.

In the early days of bookstrapping, you’re touching every moving cog and focusing on your energy on setting the course for the journey.

But once that journey is underway, you need to learn to pull yourself away from every task. It’s hard to delegate, but in order to stay focused on the direction, you have to give up some of the control.

If you’re only dealing with tasks when it gets too late to avoid them, you’ll constantly be carrying about the weight that slows down the momentum of turning the flywheel. This of course is the dichotomy between firefighting and letting fires burn out sometimes and you have to know what areas could cause true damage.

I learnt a good habit from Jim Collins where he writes down every task he does in a day in 15 minute blocks. I did this for a full 7 week cycle and with each task I assigned a task type such as finance, team, production, design, tech, fix, admin etc.

You’d be surprised in the number of directions your pulled in a day.

You need to highlight the areas of key importance for you. The rest, if important, you’ll need to eventually hire for. And the bonus of having the tasks tagged and archived is that when you come to writing a job description, you’ll know what the role will entail as you’ve been doing it; they’ll just do it better than you and allow you to work on your business instead of inside it.

Betting Big

In my experience, you need to bet big to establish yourself.

You need to keep pushing in production until it’s right. You need a big idea, which may get scoped down, but you can’t start small.

If you start small you run the risk of going unnoticed. It’s likely people don’t want what you’re offering.

By all means start with constraints. Don’t plan something unachievable. Break it down into it’s component parts and tackle it in steps. But don’t start small.

Starting small means you’ll target a smaller market. You’ll likely give up from betting small because you didn’t get the extrinsic recognition you thought you’d receive.

If you bet big, you may not get all the way, but you stand more of a chance to carve a new blue ocean for yourself.

Context Switching

Instead of multi-tasking, I try to think of it as context switching.

When you have many different masks to wear inevitably you have many different contexts to switch throughout the day and I generally have a 13 hour work day from 5am to 6pm. It’s important to schedule reset points throughout the day to recharge and keep your energy levels.

Having themed days is something I learnt from Jack Dorsey. If you have multiple job roles, having specific types of tasks to do on each day of the week helps.

I then write down my top 5 high value (HV) tasks to do that day. Some people prefer physical paper, I’m fine with Evernote w/ a checklist. As long as I get these 5 tasks done, it’s a good day.

The first 3 hours of my morning are for HV tasks. The tasks that can take any between 30 minutes to 90 minutes. Progressively throughout the day I open up the floodgates to fight fires and tackle the 1st-4th priority tasks.

By 3-5pm I’m on the ‘quick’ tasks that could take anywhere between 1 minute to 10 minutes and I’m ticking off as many as my brain has power for.

It’s important to know your body’s energy levels and have systems and routines in place to handle the workload but if you understand that you will have to switch contexts and go in and out of deep work, eating the frogs first thing in the morning allow you to fight fires in the afternoon.

Switching contexts costs power. If you start with smaller tasks in the morning, you’ve expended more energy and don’t have enough load for the bigger things. Staff offline where possible.

Stay focused and then complete tasks which require people interaction once you’ve got your 5 HV tasks completed.

Tin of Paint

How much does a coat of paint cost?

We’re in the process of figuring out when to move development back into the studio. The team has been working remotely, like many others, since March 16th 2020.

Working from home has given us many tools; the use of digital stand-ups, keeping a written record of meeting minutes & a more organised holiday schedule among many others. All things, you could argue, should have been in place before a global pandemic.

We’ve had a few different studio setups over the past 9 years of development, and apart from the early days when it was passing initial ideas back over email, meeting in coffee shops and coding from our bedrooms, White Paper has always operated out of Manchester.

So how much does a coat of paint cost?

By this, I mean, how much of your environment fosters the creativity of your team?

We started in a box room. The summers were incredibly warm with all the computers running full whack. The winters were bitterly cold and we even had our share of neighbourhood rats across the years. We didn’t know what we were doing so we almost needed a physical work space to keep everyone relatively in alignment.

We then expanded the studio space to gave ourselves a place to eat. We re-painted the walls, bought IKEA furniture, a couple of couches and, with the help of our friends at SCAN, brought home some of our marketing promo from an EGX event. We still didn’t know what we were doing however we had a larger space to give ourselves room to explore creatively and pin imagery on the wall and have decided meeting areas to share ideas.

We then managed to get extra space in the building next door. The first step was to knock a hole in the wall to connect the spaces. Put up some glass walls for a meeting room and give ourselves room to be creative. We also built a recording studio, and it finally felt like a professional space to host our guests.

But then we didn’t use any of it.

We had our processes and pipelines lined up. We kind of felt like we knew what we were doing this time. And we went fully remote. We’ve kept the project pretty much on track so our planning paid off. And this was in a fully digital environment.

I’m not sure I’d want to begin pre-production in a digital environment but in a heads down creation mode, digital worked out well for us.

In the world of remote work, how much does that cost you to keep? Do you even need to go above and beyond to create an environment that your team may not be using frequently?

As we start to the process of bringing people back to the studio, how much should be fixed, and how much should be remote?

We’ve always built our own computer tables, painted our walls, build our furniture, and tried to create a space to develop in. The space will no doubt look different in another year’s time when we’ve fully fleshed out the space. As the team grows into the next project, it should be a space away from home that we feel comfortable in.

The use of Discord has been great in combination with Slack. It allows us to quickly hope on calls with any configuration of people across teams and with external people. Sending invitations was easy.

This year, more than most, saw the lines blur between holiday and work. Since people couldn’t go anyway, our holiday days excluding our summer & winter studio-wide holidays were incredibly low. We work in 7-week cycles and recently we’ve decided to trial a forced long weekend per person that doesn’t have a holiday schedule that cycle.

I see the studio as more of a base of operations than a place that’s fundamentally needed for creation.

A company isn’t the 4 walls or the desks. There’s no real physical entity which forms a company, a company just is.

But with our team having a shared space to explore ideas and catch up with each other, it’s our safety blanket. With people choosing either a blended approach, fully remote or fully in-house, operations will adapt, but whatever the future, it seems as though the studio will continue to receive a lick of paint after each project and will be a constant member of the team.

Delegate vs Abdicate

The first time you do this, you’ll likely not get it right.

You’re deep in production, you realise you need support, but you haven’t provided enough time for on-boarding.

You hand off the work. Explain it with as much detail as you can. You review the tasks and answer questions but because you don’t believe in micromanaging, you leave them to it.

When you view the work, it’s not anywhere close to where you needed it to be.

You take back the work because you realise you can do it quicker yourself.

This wasn’t delegating, it was abdicating.

You don’t realise the impact this has on that individual and trust will be broken with them at that moment.

In the book constraints there’s a story about an irrigation company, they found that they save water by drip feeding the resource. You need to do this with your delegation. It should be slow and consistent but overtime, can produce better results.

Set up a system of continuous feedback that works for both parties, whether it be daily or weekly, at the start of the week and the end of the week, having a system in place with help with consistency.

Take smaller tasks and build up to larger ones. Give them aspirational goals instead of committed goals to help them hit the flow.

Delegating is a tough skill to get right but knowing the difference between abdicating and delegating will be the starting point to growing a team who trusts one another to do the work without too much oversight which allows you to look for new challenges.

Firefighting

There’s no better work-based feeling when you’re stood behind a coffee bar on a cold winter’s day with a queue out the door, the café full, you’re running out of paper cups, the dishwasher’s broken & the team still need to take their break.

You’re fighting fires constantly. And it’s fun.

You need to plan for the unexpected and it’s your experience and knowledge of the situations that account for it.

There will never be a perfect production unless you’re not aiming high enough and doing exactly what it says on the tin. As with most creative endeavors, the rules aren’t yet written. The path is untrodden ground.

When it comes to production, you should measure what matters and track as many variables you feel creates proper planning.

But there will come a time when you’re running out of time, there’s not enough budget, you still have X features to implement but you can only implement 1/2 X and the responsible team member is moving house and can’t be available.

You need to leave your doors open for this chaos. Plan for it during the day. You don’t know in the morning what is about to catch fire, but you know there’s enough dry material out there that something will.

When these fires inevitably break free, make sure you have a cut off point, a way to kill the oxygen.

Some fires are in high risk areas and need prioritising. Some will burn out if you leave them.

Firefighting can be fun, but install the fire doors. Open them when you’ve completed your 5 HV tasks for the day.

But know when to shut them before they consume you and cause you to burn out. You need the stamina to keep fighting the unknown fires on the horizon rather than wearing yourself thin on the first fire.

All creative projects need that rush and infusion of heat so don’t be too overly cautious when it comes to creativity as to not let spontaneous ideas ignite the team.