Week 36: Holidays… relaxing for one, stressful for the remaining!
This week was hectic, because holidays! But we still made excellent progress and ploughed through all the tasks! 💪
Hey there and welcome to the 36th weekly recap of what we’ve been up to at diesdas.digital. I am Harry, one of the people who founded this new digital studio back in January and each week I write a blog posts to reflect on what happened; looking at the good, the bad and the ugly as transparently as possible. This week kept us rather busy, so we better get started… let’s punch it! 👇 🚨 🔊
Holidays present challenges for a small team!
It’s late summer in Germany and that means everybody is leaving for holidays, enjoying the sun before we head into the sad, grey darkness that is winter in Berlin. When we first started this company we had a brief discussion whether we should even take holidays in the first year, wondering if we could afford taking time off. None of us seriously suggested to skip vacation though, so we quickly decided in unison that something was fundamentally wrong with our approach if taking holidays should turn out to be impossible. After all we sell creative work and everyone’s creative energy needs to be recharged at some point, outside the office, away from laptops and meeting rooms, skype calls and trello boards. And so Max was recently gone for two weeks and now Lorenz is.
The flip side is of course that the remaining people have to cope with the added workload. In our idealistic vision at the start of the year we imagined we could just tell clients to take a break or move slower in periods of reduced team size … but now that we are in that very situation, the picture is a bit different: clients absolutely don’t approve of tasks taking longer to complete and easily get grumpy. 👹 Not all of them, of course, but some and that’s also understandable: We’re offering services after all and the people paying our bills can rightly expect that we get things done on time.
So with Lorenz gone to explore a beautiful island called Hiddensee, I was left with five mostly development-driven projects to oversee and at times I felt completely overwhelmed with all the things that needed to be taken care of, feeling like my head would explode any second. Luckily Nicolás was back for most of the week, handling the most intense of those projects all by himself, but I still got stressed quite heavily. In the end we managed to get most things done, but I’ll still have to work one day of this weekend to catch up with what was left on the table. That’s okay now and then—we knew we’d sign up for this occasionally, but it absolutely shouldn’t become the norm. We guarantee our employees 30 days of vacation time per year for a reason and we should apply the same thinking to ourselves as well.
The current situation poses a question again that we struggle with frequently … what is a productive, healthy amount of work to tackle? Do we want to be able to enjoy life, working less and taking advantage of the fact that we’re in charge here (but therefore missing out on some budgets) or do we need to hustle every day to establish a solid financial foundation for the future? There’s no definite answer here, obviously … sometimes, when it’s all too much, you lean towards the former, and then, when you just finished a big project, you return to a “bring it on 💪” attitude. At least I am constantly oscillating between these two poles.
And so Max, Lars and I sat down Friday evening, having a beer and giving our finances a comprehensive look to have a more informed discussion. As it turns out we seem to be financially safe for several months, which will make it easier to focus on current projects in the near future and accept fewer new projects. We just gotta survive the current onslaught. 😅
This also was the first full week in a new team constellation!
Nicolás finally returned from holidays and it was Sharon’s first full week with us. I gotta say: Now that we’ve grown the team, everything feels way more substantial and somehow real compared to before, when we were just four people.
Lots more is happening daily, little discussions taking place here and there and everyone’s frequently surprised about the progress on projects, because with the bigger team and more things going on at the same time, not everyone can be involved in every discussion and every project anymore. And so it’s quite exhilarating to see the team grow and projects evolve. We’ve been preparing two things for launch in the near future and in general this week we found a good rhythm of working individually, but then frequently reconvening and sharing what each person did with the others.
At first we were very cautious to grow the team, knowing about the responsibility coming with it, but I’m confident now that it was the right thing to do at the right point in time. Always trust your gut feeling, folks! Often it makes better decisions than your brain. 😇
Now for something different: We’ll speak at up.front.ug on Oct 11!
up.front.ug is the most popular and most lovingly organized user group for developers and designers in Berlin and they’ve invited us to give a talk about our learnings as a new company. There’s certainly a lot to talk about, but I thought it might be more interesting to crowd-source the contents of the presentation! Below you’ll find a Google form allowing you to ask us anything and we shall try to weave a talk around the entries you all submit.
So help us out and take a second to think of something you might want to know (anonymously, in English or German). This is obviously an experiment and we might simply get nothing, but I’m curious where it takes us. Worth a shot, in any case! 🙃
Cool, thanks for your input! Anything else happened this week?
Sure, we’ve got one more thing: This week I was super delighted to receive a bit of feedback on these posts from… a fan in south-east asia. 😳
Hallo! Big fan here. I only found your Medium blog like… awhile ago. Devoured all the posts in a single night.
Gut gemacht! Love your updates. I also run a small boutique marketing agency in Southeast Asia and your posts actually help tons!
You know who you are, so this is for you: thank you so much for your feedback, you totally made my day! I know, it’s the internet and it’s global and all, but I still find it incredible that somebody from the other side of the globe is following what we do here in Berlin. 😮
There’d be more tidbits to share, but your attention is precious, so I’ll let you get back to whatever you were doing before starting to read this post! Take care, get some rest and if you want to stay in touch, consider adding us here, here, here, here, here or here. Especially the last here is a good one, with lots of new gifs. 😇 #justsayin
Alrighty then, that’s it for this week… see you around! 💚
Your slightly exhaused, but happy friends at diesdas.digital
