Hey, happy Monday!
9:00 You should arrive at the office
9:45 Finish reading the weekend emails, even if you know them all because you read the work email on your phone, delve into the newsletters, then open Facebook, Instagram and Linkedin in sequence. To stay up to date on the weekend of those you don’t know, your colleagues, and the Coronavirus.
10:00 First meeting or series of phone calls
11:30 Ends meeting that was supposed to last an hour or phone calls that were supposed to be short
15 minutes to decompress
11:45 Reply to emails that came in while you couldn’t read
12:15 Now you can concentrate… No: here comes an urgency!
13:00 Ends urgency
This is discussed after lunch.
How many times has your week started like this?
Deep Work
Being focused has become a major competitive advantage. The background noise that comes from bad team routines and your bad habits constantly undermines your productivity.
A research study you find in the links (yes I know it is American), the “Global Agency Productivity Report by Float” shows a staggering figure, on average you can concentrate for only 2 hours a day.
In practice, distraction is responsible for 75% of the costs. We are paid to distract ourselves.
Unclear goals, lack of direction, and lack of motivation make it so that every time you get on the computer you don’t know where to start but most importantly it is difficult to prioritize what you need to do.
Don’t worry, you have only part of the responsibility. Let’s say 50/50.
While it is important that you learn to self-manage, you have to overcome the inner resistance to do so. That’s the difference between a professional and an amateur. Yes I know it’s big, I’ll come back to it in a paragraph.
The other is from the culture of your team. If everything is important, nothing is important. Some people expect you to do certain things, but the beauty of it is that they never told you. It’s called Managing by Expectation, it doesn’t work, and I talked about it in footnote No. 5
In collision trajectory
Two figures more than any other are colliding in companies that put innovation at the top of their priorities.
It happens in all professions.
Not so long ago, the photographer was the one who had the camera. You called a photographer because he was the only one who could produce an image with a certain technical quality (I am not talking about artistic quality). The photographer knew how to use the tools.
If you wanted a passport photo, the photographer had a white background and Polaroid with your portrait repeated four times. You also paid for the ones where you looked bad.
On the other hand, if you wanted photos at your wedding, he arrived with photographer’s help and the camera loaded with flash tripods and film.
The photographer had the tools that would have been too expensive for you to purchase.
Photography today is not even digital anymore, it is computational. The sensor records data and a properly trained artificial intelligence builds images that, based on some signals provided by engineers but retrieved from the web, are judged to be “good photos.”
Thus the algorithm generates an impossible but beautiful photograph for us humans.
That’s why my girlfriend doesn’t want me to take her pictures with my Android but she wants to use her iPhone. It’s better. Apple is a better photographer.
You don’t have to have a view camera to be Avedon. You have to have an algorithm.
↔ Designers ↔ Developers
These are two who as we have known them must know how to use their tools well.
Designers know how to use Sketch and Figma (some XD and hopefully more none Photoshop and Illustrator but I have heard of a few CEOs doing mockups in Powerpoint) and developers the programming language best suited to their needs (front-end and back-end).
But today designers are no longer asked to know the tool.
Designers are asked to enable the business to achieve its goals. To channel perfect strangers into a funnel at the end of which someone will pay a florin to move on. To oil the friction that forms between the problems of everyday life and the possibilities offered by new business models.
Today a designer has access to no-code tools. To entire design suites where without knowing a line of code at all you can literally design a site or application by connecting data and enabling features that just 2 years ago would have taken days of development.
This leads developers to move a new level of abstraction where the code produces a new aesthetic effect. It must not just work but excite. To help and predict instead of wait and execute. To simplify by taking on complexity. In short, to become designers.
Real professionals
If you have read Steven Pressfield’s “The War of Art,” you already understand what I am getting at. It has the best definition of what it means to be an amateur or a professional. I steal, adapt and expand, so you pick a side.
The amateur plays a few days a week. The professional plays 24×7.
The amateur does it for pleasure. The professional devotes his or her life.
The amateur waits for inspiration. The professional schedules his work.
The amateur gets distracted. The professional has a method of not doing this.
The amateur is in a hurry. The professional is patient and tidy.
The amateur identifies with the instrument. The professional uses it to do the work.
The amateur has no limits. The professional recognizes his own and asks for help.
The amateur becomes obsolete. The professional reinvents himself and continues his journey.
The amateur is afraid of another amateur. The professional elevates others to his own level.
Regardless of what your organization’s maturity level is (if you don’t know it download the STRTGY Maturity Index, go to the Files section of our Facebook Group The STRTGY Community), no one needs amateurs.
Good work!
For anything, click reply, I’m here!
Talk to you very soon!
