Cool Things That Make You Better At Work

It’s Easter weekend, and I’ve left my section late.

So here is a listicle of the two coolest things I’ve found this month, and I paired them with an older newsletter to make them better:

1. Creative OS - a website where you get a 3-day free trial to see what ads other brands are running

> Pair with last week’s newsletter on how to implement it in your business

2. Methyl Blue - This is a nootropic I took one afternoon while hanging out with one of my co-founders.

It’s the most present I’ve been during an afternoon working session in a long time and I had no come down (unlike caffeine, etc).

I bought some from here (no affiliation).

> Pair with this last year’s newsletter on my supplement stack for getting shit done

Work On Less

A while back I stumbled onto a work mode that reshaped how I run my businesses.

I burned through dozens of management frameworks to get here.

Traction, OKRs, Getting Things Done, High Output Management, and at least 50 of my own variations.

But they all suffered from the same problem.

They encourage you to do more work.

They're sold as ways to boost productivity and reduce complexity. But they're products of their environment. They were created to clean up business mess. So "doing lots" ends up baked into the system itself.

If you just did less from the start, you wouldn’t need management systems the size of bestsellers.

And that's the thing: if you sat back and thought about a smarter way to run a business, working from first principles, your first instinct might be to simply do less. Fewer people, fewer tasks, fewer tools.

I was very slow to this conclusion. Peter Thiel, Bezos, and many others have been saying this for 20 years. Single-threaded leadership. The One Thing. They are all calls to do less.

Even Sam Ovens published a video about this seven years ago. YouTube says I watched it, but I was probably too busy creating my 22nd productivity system to take note.

The idea is simple: sprints. Work hard for a short period of time. Then stop. Rest. Reset.

This is agile methodology 101. Jason Fried (Basecamp) wrote about this in Rework. Which I also read back in 2012 and, again, missed the point.

Granted, my businesses are small and simple. Compound and Gravy each have five people and each do under $750K in revenue. Maybe that makes this easier to follow. Then again Basecamp and PayPal are huge so there’s evidence size is irrelevant.

Stuff still breaks. Issues pop up. Now I just ignore them until they’re loud enough to actually matter.

For example, at the start of this year we had a bunch of issues at Compound. Our customer service scores were dropping. Then came consistent complaints - cleaning, maintenance, service, the works. So we ran a sprint to address them.

That sprint just finished. Churn is already down from 8% to 5%, and complaints are back to one-ish per week.

No doubt these issues will return. And when they do, we’ll run another sprint to address them. In the meantime, we’ll focus on building better services, testing new revenue lines, launching campaigns and resting in between.

As I write this, I’m enjoying a Wednesday off, doing nothing, because I just finished a big sprint for Gravy.

I’ve written about this before, and I’ll keep circling back to it because nothing else I’ve changed in the last few years has had a bigger impact.