[20:30] – I’d love to hear more of your thoughts on work debt and how you plan to avoid it for you and Isaac. —Justin
Work debt means you have a backlog and you have unfinished work that needs to get done. This can be somewhat just a mindset: your “someday maybe” list holds too much power over you. Or this can also be real life: your shipped something that was incomplete and now it’s costing you. Or you can’t move on until something is wrapped up.
You get this when you bite off more than you can chew and thus you either keep on working far past the deadline, or you ship something that isn’t really finished but you ship it anyway while fully planning to come back to it. Instead of doing many things poorly, do one thing well. Then do the next thing well.
Our mindset is that when we’re done with a project, we don’t assume we’ll come back to it later. So it has to ship in a state that we aren’t embarrassed and that we aren’t in trouble. But with our 6-week work sprints, we get 6 weeks to work it out and get it to that point.
[31:56] – In your retrospective post, I think there’s a sense of focus for the entire team on a goal. Do you think this is something applicable to teams / businesses that serve 2-3 clients at the same time? —Justin
Yes. Though I can’t speak into this as well. But I’ve heard of businesses that get their clients onto these 1-week sprints. Or break up your team so that each team only has one client, and then do the short-term cycles with those clients.
The big takeaways are:
Challenge the assumption that “bigger is better” and “more is better”. Bigger means bigger and more means more. They don’t inherently mean better.
Only bite off what you can chew — keep the scope within reason
Have a clear hierarchy of what is the most important component of a project, what is 2nd-most, etc.
[36:42] – Can you speak more about your plan for 6 week sprints? How might you suggest a person who is working alone use the strategy vs someone on a team? —Chris
If you’re working alone, then you have multiple responsibilities, so you still have to manage your day-to-day whirlwind and also work on the important stuff.
I’d try to carve out several hours per day to focus on the single most important task.
You could do one “big” project during that 6 weeks, or you could do a few “small” projects that add up to improving a particular area of responsibility, or whatever.
Then, at the end, you can breathe and fix anything that’s broken, or do whatever. And then take some time off as a reward.
When you work for yourself, it’s easy to just keep working and working and working.
You have a reward, and you also have a limitation.
[47:47] – For 2017, how often do you plan to do postmortems for your project with your team? With the teams I work with, we do postmortems after consulting projects. The challenge I have is how do we take what we learned and truly put it into practice going forward. —Justin
I prefer “retrospective”, but it’s the same idea.
In 2016 we did 2 big retrospectives: One after we launched the Time Management Class and one after the Creative Focus Summit.
We did these by talking through the project itself and figuring out what we did that went well, what didn’t go well, what our goals and expectations were, and how we did at meeting those.
For 2017, we’re going to do a retrospective after each 6-week cycle. Make notes of what we worked on, what we shipped, what we learned, and what was a win, and what we wish could be different.
The way you take what you’ve learned and put it into practice is to write it down somewhere, and then pull up that document when you’re working on the next project. And you have to trust your notes. Our mind and emotions will pull us to go back and do the same thing again. Don’t do that. Avoid what you said DIDN’T work and double down on what you said DID work.
[52:05] – Definitely looking forward to hearing a bit about the Basecamp trip.What are some practical examples of ways you have changed your workflow or mindset since returning? —Joanna
A calm company that values everyone’s time, that gives a lot of space for “deep work” and that empowers the whole team to do their work in a reasonable amount of time.
Big takeaway is to have margin / breathing room within the company culture. You do this by keeping scope within reason, not having to “maximize” everything, and by allowing asynchronous communication.
[57:57] – Going through the value-defining and goal-setting exercises of Module 2 has made me realize that I’ve been living my life with a very short term mindset overall. I’ve been driving toward “being better today”… It’s easy to get wrapped up in the day. Now that I’ve set some long-term goals and have a vision for the future of sorts. How do I make sure to remind myself of these goals daily? How do I ensure that I’m on course to achieving these goals? —Eli
Lifestyle practices and daily habits.
Monthly and yearly check-ins with yourself.
[1:00:22] – A goal must be quantifiable, measurable, in order to set a strong milestone and give us a finish line to work towards. I’ve noticed a pattern in the longer-term the goal, the more I seem to shift from a quantitative goal to a qualitative one. This makes sense to me, because the future is uncertain and unlimited. How have you taken a qualitative goal and boiled it down to the quantitative goals, or milestones, that will put you on track to achieve it? What sort of process do you go through personally? —Eli
Again this also comes to the similar answer as before. What are the practical steps that need to happen? Let’s say my long-term goal for finances is to be independently wealthy and to give away a lot of money. Let’s start with a goal that says 5 years from now I want to have my house paid off. My next major step toward being independently wealthy is to be 100% debt free. That means several things, but first and foremost it means I need to try and spend less and put more money into my mortgage. So, let’s turn that into a bite-sized chunk right now. I can look at my budget, find a few things that I can cut out or reduce, and then use that leftover to. Once that’s in place, I can look at ways to make additional income that’s above and beyond my monthly budget, and then use that extra to pay down my mortgage within the next 5 years.
[1:04:05] – A few examples of how we use Basecamp.
