24. The Weekly - Illustrated Value

On keeping it light on holidays, prioritising and Michael Angelo.

Welcome to the Happy Medium newsletter, where I share inspiration and bite-sized musings on creative business each week.

A slightly lighter weekly for the long weekend. Enjoy!

Inspiration

Things that have inspired me this week.

The 73 Best Illustrations of 2024

The New Yorker

A collection of beautiful illustrations - a nice way to find interesting artists and a gentle way to consume news. I really enjoyed scrolling through this collection of artworks from The New Yorker.

Cecilia Carlstedt

A small side note, when I was researching the topic of illustrations, I came across this passage which might have been interesting except I was totally distracted by how the author refers to Michelangelo as Michael Angelo.

Source, if you’re dying to read the rest.

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Quick thoughts

Musings on business, creativity, psychology and more.

The effort:value matrix

This is one of my favourite tools for working out where to start when you have a lot of potential options. I often use this for finding a solution to a problem - we might have brainstormed 15 potential solutions, but we cant do them all at once, so we need to prioritise.

It looks like this, with ‘effort’ on the Y and ‘value’ on the X.

Add all your potential solutions to your matrix, assessing where they sit on the effort and value axes.

Once you’ve done that, you can overlay a PICK matrix to determine which solutions you should focus on.

Possible - Low effort but low value, not worth focusing on.

Implement - Easy wins, these are high value and low effort, do these right away.

Challenge - High effort but high value, plan ahead to action these, consider budget, timing and resources

Kill - High effort, low value, don’t bother with these ones, you can rule them out.

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This is an excerpt from my Problem Solving 101 course. This is an in-depth course that equips and empowers you and your team to feel confident approaching and solving any problems that arise in your business.

You can learn more here and either schedule a class for your team, or register your interest for upcoming classes.

Or if you’re after the crash course, check out the Problem Solving Mini.

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That’s it for this week! As always, I’d love to hear your thoughts - you can DM me or leave a comment.

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