Read This If You Need Strong Monday Focus
This is a sneaky one because almost everyone does it.
Choose the right domain name.Design the right logo.Develop the 5 year business plan.
Get all your ducks in a row.
And that’s exactly the problem.While most of us are out there “thinking through” the problem, our competitors are already done with version 1 of the prototype and getting feedback from customers.It’s so easy to get caught up in the easy stuff because it feels like it matters. It’s much more difficult to ask yourself: “what’s the hard part of my project?”If your project doesn’t have a hard part then you don’t have a project—it’s probably a hobby or dead end.Steve Blank used to say (and I guess he probably still does say) “Get out of the building and talk to customers.”
No matter what your problem is, the people you’re solving it for know the answer.
Example:
Need better sales copy?Go read some of your customer reviews and testimonials.That’s way faster, easier, and cheaper than taking a course on copywriting and reading the top 5 books about sales strategy.
You don’t need to optimize, yet. You need to start.
The time you’re spending making it perfect is the time you could have spent getting the traction you need to then have the opportunity to have something to optimize.You know that little yellow “buy” button on Amazon’s website?You better believe that they spent a LOT of time and energy optimizing it. And they should, because they have a bazillion customers.If you don’t have a bazillion customers, you’re killing yourself by focusing on the wrong work!
2 Minute Action:
What’s the thing you’ve been dreading doing? Do that first.What’s the feedback cycle you’re getting on your work? Could it be more frequent or more actionable? Ask your supervisor or colleague, today.Give yourself permission to have an ugly, embarrassing website (or none at all!) and re-center your focus on the hard stuff.The discipline early on is going to pay dividends later.It’s Monday, people. Let’s start this week off strong.
What The Heck Is "Delivery Sauce" And How Can It Change Lives In Under 2 Minutes?
"Hi! How are you? I'd love a small, black coffee, please.""Uh, yeah, I'll be with you in a second."
Has this ever happened to you?
You bring the courtesy and it's not returned?Your job, whether you're on the clock or off the clock is to treat people with respect.
If you're in the service industry, it's your job to go above and beyond that benchmark.
Let me explain how this is relevant to life and how it's not just me complaining.
Our job is to deliver value, not just create it.
If you make the coffee and deliver it with a smile, the coffee tastes better and people want to come back to your cafe.If you make the coffee, push it to the counter and yell "CHRIS!" you're not making customers for life.
Just creating the deliverable isn't enough.
You need to DELIVER it in a way that your customer, student, client, patient, or user can accept and enjoy.It's like adding bearnaise sauce to a steak, or Caesar dressing to a salad. It will work by itself, but the enhancement is a differentiator from the usual.You need to add your special delivery sauce!
2 Minute Action
How can you add more delivery sauce to your work?Is it reading an article on bedside manner?Is it sending a follow-up thank you email to customers after their first purchase?Is it getting a coffee with the teacher in the grade ahead of you to see how to you can better "on-ramp" students from your class to his?
Do you know what doesn't even take 2 minutes?
A smile. A fist-bump. A pat on the back. A "thank you." An anonymous post-it note on the monitor of your colleague.You have all the resources you need to improve the state of the world around you.And you can make a difference right now.
How To Align Your Team, Continuously Improve Work, And Make Everyone Stronger
Every morning, I ask my team to stand in a circle to have a 5 minute meeting.
Everyone answers 3 questions:
- What did I accomplish yesterday?
- What will I accomplish today?
- What is in my way?
At the end of the sprint (in our case, one week of work), we review how we did.
This is called the Sprint Retrospective.
We look at how much stuff we did and whether we did the right stuff by asking two questions:What went well? (So we might replicate those things in the next sprint)What could we improve?From there, we turn the most notable things into action items, sometimes requiring teams to assemble around them.
It sounds straightforward and easy, but do you know what the hardest part about this is?
Not skipping the meeting.It feels like it’s just this one time or that we don’t really need to have the meeting because not that much stuff happened this week . . .
I’ve never run a Sprint Retrospective that hasn’t generated meaningful action items.
It’s this discipline, early on in your work that is the compounding interest of your project.By staying the course, you will continuously be aligned as a team, you will be focused on the right work, and you will have a team that feels capable in the face of challenges.
2 Minute Action
Since it’s Saturday, chances are you just finished a work week.Take today’s 2 minutes to ask yourself “what went well?” and “what could be improved?”