30. The Weekly - Smart Work

On deleting busy work, protecting your peace and having fun.

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

Quick thoughts

Musings on business, creativity, psychology and more.

Busy work

When helping a business to become more efficient, the first thing I look for is busy work. Busy work is the work that feels productive but doesn’t drive any outcomes. Meetings and emails are the most common offenders.

I often say, if you wanted to, you could have a full time job where you just answer emails all day - after all, the more you send, the more replies you get. But we weren’t put on the earth to answer emails. Regardless of your religious or metaphysical leanings, we can all agree that emails and meetings cannot be the purpose of our lives.

Now meetings and emails are not totally avoidable (and not always bad) but they can be contained and made to be helpful. Here are my tips:

• Turn off pop up notifications. Take control of your headspace, don’t let your emails interrupt your flow.

• Meetings must have purpose. I’m not a big fan of creating and circulating agendas, this can quickly turn into more busy work, but be intentional about the purpose of a meeting, give attendees a heads up so they can come with thoughtful responses.

• Communicate via the most efficient route. It’s easy to send an email because now the task is off your plate and on to someone else’s. That may have felt fast for you but now realistically that task is going to drag out over days of back and forth. Would a 5min phone call take this off your plate for good?

• Call out circular topics. Do you have the same meetings over and over, circulating the same topic, talking about it endlessly? This is the ultimate busy work. Talking about a problem feels good because you feel like you’re doing something without actually doing anything. Identify and call out the problem and use a problem solving framework to actually resolve it.

• Prioritise your time on meaningful work. Don’t just squeeze your actual work amongst your busy work. Make sure that the meaningful work is prioritised first. This could be blocking out your calendar, finding a quiet uninterrupted space or making time for collaboration and workshops - whatever unlocks your creative energy and facilities your best work.

Photographer: David Van Dartel

Never change a good process for a bad client

Every now and then, you’ll get a client that makes you second guess everything you do. They don’t listen, have unreasonable deadlines, don’t accept the deliverables or won’t invest the time required to create something great together. These people can throw you off and make you feel like your process is wrong.

If these clients are rare (less than 1 in 10) then I can tell you fairly confidently that there is nothing wrong with your process. These types of people can trigger you emotionally and make you question your value, but they are wrong.

Designing a process to manage these people is a waste of time, as is the time spent worrying about how to get them back on board. Stay calm, be firm about your process and try your hardest to not take it personally.

Evolve your process to improve it over time, but don’t change a good process in reaction to a bad client.

Sidenote: if these clients aren’t rare, then it is time to assess your process. Do this after the projects are completed and you can be reflective, not reactive. Trace your process and identify what worked and what didn’t. Ask clients for feedback too. Use this to design a new process, then test it out. Apply your lessons learnt to the next project. Avoid changing the process mid-project to give your new process a chance to be successful.

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Inspiration

Things that have inspired me this week.

20 short rules for better days at work

Bree Groff, What Work Should Be

If you’re going to spend 38 hours of your week somewhere, at least some of it should be fun!

“14. Decide that your days matter. People shouldn’t work for businesses. Businesses should work for people. Businesses are the structures that allow people to jam with others and create stuff of value and not have it be all Lord of the Flies. It is possible to run a healthy business this way.”

20 short rules for better days at work

Google

Aquired

I feel the need to report that I’ve now finished this episode. Here are my key takeaways:

• To compete, you need to continuously evolve, look for ways to be smarter, faster, more efficient and importantly, preserve your own way of thinking. This is achieved by looking forward, keeping eyes on the competition but essentially forging your own path.

• Challenge the status quo - In the early days of Google, competitors such as Yahoo were focused on keeping users on their site for as long as possible (to maximise advertiser revenue). Google changed this by surfacing exactly what users were searching for as quickly as possible.

• Have a mission - “To organise the world’s information”. Broad enough to encourage experimentation, specific enough to drive invention.

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I have a question for you…

Let me know what you think about this new publishing time. I’ve switched from Monday mornings to Tuesday evenings.

The data indicates you like better but I’d like to validate that with another data point.

I’d also love to hear why - you can DM me, leave a comment below or send me an email at hello@happymedium.au

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