Weekly Recap #24: Hang in there!
We had ambitious plans for this week, but they were all shattered by a crushing amount of work. Oh well.
In case you’re new to this series of blog posts: I am Harry and 24 weeks ago I founded a friendly digital agency with three friends, called diesdas.digital (the company, not the friends … duh). Since then we’ve been writing these recaps to share what we learn along the way and how we’re doing, mainly so our parents know we’re okay. 👋 😇
Surprisingly enough, other people found these posts interesting as well, so we just keep writing them. Whoever you might be, we’re glad you’re here, so let’s get to it!
Originally we had ambitious plans for this week, intending to experiment with a 6h day (= 30h/week) and also sharing much more on social media … but then work happened and we were buried in code, presentations, asset creation, a workshop, conference calls and meetings.
Up until June we had always been very careful about the amount of concurrently running projects and decided we’d rather operate under less pressure and stress, but now that we intend to grow the team, the situation is a little different. After all a new person is basing their life on the success of our company, so we better get it in the best shape it can be and build up a financial buffer. That meant accepting a few more projects which we might otherwise have declined, mainly burying Lars and Max in additional work.
We still reject the idea of night shifts or staying longer in the office, so at least we kept our usual routine of starting between 9–10am and leaving between 6–7pm, but it did mean that Lorenz worked over the weekend and the added stress was definitely noticeable in the daily interactions … everything felt more tense and impatient than usual.
That’s okay for now, everybody sees the bigger picture that we’re lucky to have these projects and that there will always be times when it gets a little hectic … but I think we gotta be careful not to make this the norm. When there’s no time for joking around, discussing, experimenting and learning, then we lose the one advantage we have as a small company that can make its own rules.
At some point Lars stated that he finds it important to know how the team operates under stress. My view differs slightly … I would prefer a setup where that’s not necessary to find out, but I do find it interesting, now that we already are in that situation.
Still, we kept our humor, laughed a lot and got heaps done … looking back at the week, I’m pretty proud of what we achieved. Week 25, bring it on!
The project stress sadly also meant that we couldn’t be on social media as often as we intended… originally we wanted to crush it this week, mainly on Snapchat and cross-posting more between Twitter, Facebook and Instagram. But then none of that happened. We’ll do our best next week, but it’s hard sometimes … social media requires a light-hearted mood, which usually occurs inversely proportional to your stress level. 🙃
Sometimes you just need a kick in the butt to get started again. So this comment from Maximilian Bornmann, summarizing our joint breakfast with sehen und ernten, comes with the perfect timing:
[…] whereas on Snapchat Harry takes us with him through his mostly superbusy professional life. By the way, where have those snaps been lately? We sure miss them! 👋
Aight. We’ll ramp it up from Monday on! Promise! And in case you’re curious, here’s his full post:
Cool. I’ll wrap it up now, enough of the whining. We’re incredibly happy this whole company experiment we started almost half a year ago seems to be working out and in the grand scheme of things we’re deeply grateful that we get to do all this. Sure, it’s stressful at times, but also immensely fulfilling. I feel that had to be said after all the moody vibes in this post. 😇
Wishing you all a restful weekend, thanks for reading and see you on Monday. Take care! 💚 👀
