The single best improvement to my workday has been a daily sitdown that me and my marketing team (writers + designers) do every evening, a short while before we head home. We started out simply just discussing what we did that day. We talked about what we had done, what we got stuck with, what we needed help with, and what we planned to do the next day.<\/p>\n
Initially, we found each other’s feedback invaluable for getting unstuck\u2013 we were often missing simple things that other people could catch. We also found that talking about getting stuck at a daily level allowed us to move faster\u2013 previously we would only get unstuck at weekly meetings or so, and things were moving too slowly to be meaningful.<\/p>\n
After a while, we found that we got stuck less and less.\u00a0I think this was because our daily commitment to chatting about what we’re stuck with actually jogs our subconscious into picking things that we’re less likely to get stuck with. We anticipate the “what are you stuck with?” question and we start applying it ourselves, before anybody else. We frame our problems and challenges more precisely, so that failure is less likely.<\/p>\n
After a while, we realized that we could keep track of the stuff we were talking about, and use it to plan future tasks, to assign other tasks. (We tied this up with Asana, which we tried earlier to use as a collaborative task-management system, but we would often fall short on it because things would happen and not get checked off, and it wouldn’t be the most accurate representation of reality… so we would all have multiple versions of reality, and end up having to ask each other over IM or email).<\/p>\n
But since having daily sync-ups, we’d just double-check on all our tasks, update and\/or delete old ones, reassign things, update things, so on and so forth.<\/p>\n
I then thought that merely talking about status updates was getting a little bit boring and stale (in a good way\u2013 like a boring news day because there’s no drama), and that we could get more out of each other if we used the opportunity to also tackle interesting questions and challenges outside of the scope of our daily work. I decided that we’d have a “question of the day” to think about and to answer\u2013 things that would make our work more interesting, things that would help us get to know each other better, things that would make things better on any dimension. Questions we started out with were- what are you curious about? What do you want to get better at? What can we do to make our environment more fun? Things like that. And then we create and assign tasks, and then we get things done.<\/p>\n
These daily sync-ups have become the highlight of my day. I feel more connected with my team members. I feel like I understand them and their interests better. I feel like I know better what they want to do, what they want to learn, and I have more context for how I can serve them, both through my work and through things outside of work. Talking to other people about the work I’m doing\u2013 and committing in advance to the process\u2013 helps me make sense of why my work is important. Prior, I would just pick tasks at random\u2013 and more often than not pick things that were simple or easy rather than things that were important. It’s not like I’m the most systematic man around right now\u2013 I’m still really random and inefficient, but just being accountable to other people has made me make much better decisions.<\/p>\n
I’m thinking now about smoking as well\u2013 how I’m pretty sure my work environment played a huge factor in helping me quit smoking, because I cared about what my colleagues thought of me. And while I’m sure none of them thought horribly of me just because I was a smoker, I enjoy having quit smoking in their company. I want to do other things that make them happy and proud, because they’re great people.<\/p>\n