Category: book

How do you feel like you’re super busy? 

It feels like you’re a key piece of the puzzle, like if the company _depends_ on your skills.

It might happen from time to time to be extra busy, but if your go-to answer for any question or request for help is “I’m too busy” then you should rethink your role.

You’re not important, you’re a bottleneck.
I know, it’s nice to be extra-busy, to feel that buzz of importance. But if it happens too often or if it doesn’t allow you to help people _on your same team_, then it’s not working as it should.

You should think about _why_ this happens and find a plan to get out of it. 
Plan some buffer time to allow busyness to compensate and extend like water, ask for help. Whatever the solution, think about it.

There might be times when you don’t agree, maybe it’s a decision that will backfire, or maybe you feel like you’re risking the face of the company.

Whatever the reason is fine if you disagree. But is it fine to _always_ do it?

It all boils down to choosing the battles you really care about.
In a growing company everything is a work in progress, which means that everything can be improved.

Should everything improved right away? Probably not.
Some topics are more important and urgent than others, while other topics can be left out for a while.

If you always disagree or you’re always the one giving advice there are consequences. Your words will be valued less because they’re so frequent, while if you choose wisely the topics to discuss you’ll have higher chances to explain your views.

Pick your battles, because you wouldn’t have the energy to fight them all anyway.

Working might feel like trying to help a ship going forward with no idea on where we’re going. No information on where we’re heading. It’s easy and sometimes required to hide information. To share less of the task to avoid people trying to do something they’re not supposed to. This is a way to control the flow, it works under some circumstances but it has one major flow: It doesn’t allow people to grow.  To let them grow you should allow them to make some mistakes, to learn the boundaries between “this is a topic you are competent in and you can contribute” and the “this topic is way out of your context so it’s hard to produce a great contribution”. Obviously this argument suppose that you’re surrounded by people who can think with their own mind, leaving ego aside and caring about the project. If any of these attributes is missing hope is still not lost. It’s all a matter of doing one small step at a time, learning and working on the attributes that are not quite there.  Once you have them all in place, you can proceed.  “Why it matters” adds a lot of value to everyone. Because people can help you, but they can also understand why you’re doing something, leaving aside some personal consideration. For example: If a mail is sent to everyone asking to do a specific thing, you might wonder: “What’s the deal? Why is it so important?” If it’s not written in the email then you add your own conclusions like “well, they just want some spotlight, etc etc” and they might be wrong. But if it’s written, like “Please, if you feel this new blog post on _balblalla_ can contribute to the team or the customer you’re working with, share it with them. Our goal is to help grow both our teams and customer and gain some visibility throughout this journey”. That doesn’t sound so bad, isn’t it?

What’s your ideal day? You wake up, drink a cup of coffe, head to work, sit on your desk and bam, ready to work?

I rarely had that day. It happens that when I get to work I open my email and some crash happened or there’s some urgent matter to be taken care of.

My first reaction was to start working on the problem. Fixing it asap. It felt so important after all. 
But after many times I realized that no, this doesn’t work because you’re postponing the important work in favor of the urgent work.
They might _seem_ the same, but they’re not. They surely _feel_ different. Important is something you care in the long run. Urgent in the short term.
Urgent is going to the bathroom, important is having a bank account named after your son so that when he becomes adult he’ll have some money to back him up.

So how can we decide what’s important, what’s urgent and what can be left alone for a while before it becomes urgent?

The problem is the urgency itself, let me show you an example.
There’s a coworker that was on the support team and she answered to a customer. The customer was angry, like _really_ angry. 
The reason was because there was a bug in the system that didn’t let hime change one content. Everything else was working but this feature.

At that time we had quite a lot of other bugs and features to develop and a scarcity of developers. So my question was: What should be the priority?
And the top issue to fix was the one related to the user, while on our todolist there were some other much more critical and important things to fix.

Urgency creates the illusion that something is important when it’s not. It tricks the mind into thinking that is a priority. But guess what? In the long run urgent things rarely matters.
There are only few _real_ urgent things in life.

Death, you don’t get paid, your customer don’t get paid, and, in case of web development: the website is offline.

Everything else can be delayed, postponed, discussed.
So how to we get that vision? 
When you come to work, take your time. Don’t rush it. Don’t start working right away.

Instead plan. Think about what are the priorities, the short and the long term. Breath again. Take a deep long breath.
If you are still chained to the urgency think about what would happen in the worst case scenario, how much will you or the company loose, and how much would you lose in case the important thing doesn’t get done.

If nothing else works think: “What would I choose if I had no fears?”
Then write down the plan for today, but by all means do it slowly and take your time.

This is a short howto in case you’re wondering how to get the attention from a person you don’t know.

Let’s say you want to engage with a popular youtuber to publicize some of your products.

Usually what happens is this: You write an email to the youtuber asking please help me bla bla bla.
This doesn’t lead to anything for a bunch of separate reasons.

1. If the person is popular he/she will receive TONS of requests, many of them will also be so generic and missing names (his/her) from the email itself.
2. You’re asking for help but why would he/she wants to help you out?

Those 2 reasons are the main roadblocks you will encounter.

So here’s the thing.

1. You have _first_ to provide some value to them
2. You must be able to greet them in a way that lets them understand that you know them perfectly, that this email is not a mail sent to a crowd but only to them.
3. You have to explain why you’re helping them and what you gain from it (there’s no such thing as free gifts and everyone would be skeptical at them).
4. _If and only if_ they want, they can contribute by helping _you_.

Step 4 is optional and you know why? Because you first give something and only then you expect some returns.
Nobody in the entire world would expect something different.
First you help them, then they _might_help you.

Do your best, know your topic and their topic, help them practically and go on.

“Ok, but what would it be like in real life?”

Let’s say you want to get in touch with this youtuber. An email might be like this

“Hi Chris
I know you’re busy so I’ll keep it short.

I saw that you like promoting great hair products, I loved the review on the O’Douds Pomade, fantastic.
BTW I agree, such awesome product.

That said, I saw that in your reviews you’re missing the transcript.
I happen to know a person that might help you doing them at a good price, this would give your website better seo indexing and visits.

Why I do this? I love your channel and if you like it then (and only if u want) I’d love to share with you one of my new products I’m testing out.
No obligation, just a man that share your same passion.

Lemme know,
Be amazing”.

This adds all the info, it shows that you saw his/her videos, you know the topic and you’re willing to help.
He might not reply and this ideal email is far from perfect, but if you compare to a classic one like this

“Hi there, I’d love to send you free samples of my product for you to review, can you send me your address?”

It’s clear the difference.
In the second one you don’t use the name, you ask the other person do to some extra work for what? Your popularity?

First help, then you might get helped.