Week 32: Bits and pieces.
The challenges of working with freelancers + a plethora of smaller topics that kept us busy. Join us for our weekly musings!
Hey there, I’m Harry and 8 months ago I founded a new digital studio called diesdas.digital with Lars, Lorenz and Max. Some time ago Nicolás joined us and from September on we’re gonna be six people working on digital bits and pieces in the heart of Berlin.
At the end of each week we take a step back to reflect on the challenges we encountered, share learnings and provide an honest look at how we run this company. If that makes you curious, you’ve come to the right place! Let’s get going! 👻
Working with freelancers is fun … and comes with new challenges!
Let’s start with a tricky one … now that we’re working on bigger, more complex projects, combined with the overhead of accounting, new business and communications we just can’t do everything ourselves anymore. That’s why we started working with freelancers, which takes some load off our shoulders and is also a breath of fresh air creatively. However, this new situation comes with its own challenges, which we didn’t really consider before:
- If you’re a freelancer coming into a company, you rightly expect to have a reasonable amount of stuff to do at all times. How do we secure a steady amount of work so it’s never too much, but boredom doesn’t creep in either?
- How much supervision is reasonable? How much do we need to be involved in a project so freelancers don’t feel left alone, but also not annoyingly monitored?
- Do we require exact time tracking?
- How open are we about internal discussions, like budgets on new projects, salaries, etc? How much secrecy is advisable?
You see, it’s not as easy as providing somebody with a desk and handing over some tasks … and typically you only stumble upon these questions when it’s too late and the person is already sitting there, looking at you, waiting for instructions.
Well, we improvised and reached the following conclusions:
- Amount of work: Tricky, but manageable. We just need to plan ahead further than we’re used to and have a plan for at least a week in advance. We also need to let go of the extreme efficiency we were rolling with before, when we only spent as much time as was absolutely needed on projects. We now typically think in chunks of 2–3 days, so if a freelancer is working on a project and the work is done after 1.5 days, but we have nothing new to do yet, we just find areas of the project that can be improved even further, like performance or interface fidelity. It might not be perfectly efficient, but that’s okay if it means everyone is busy and the quality of our work ends up being higher.
- Supervision: It’s not ideal to be alone on a project, so we try to team up and just talk about the progress twice a day: in the quick daily standup meeting in the morning and towards the end of the day. Supervision is an ugly word for that, it’s more of a check-in, so everyone is working towards the same goals.
- Time tracking: We don’t do time tracking ourselves, because we accept that the 8h day is an illusion when it comes to creative work. Designing and coding is not an assembly line, so it doesn’t make sense to track tasks by the minute. So for freelancers we agreed on a simple system, made up of full days, half days and extra hours on top. So being a freelancer you just write down if you spent closer to eight or closer to four hours with us each day and should there be any extra hours, these are added on top (there have never been any so far). We think that’s a fair and easy-to-grasp system, which has clear advantages for the freelancers, because most days are rounded up to be billed as eight hours. This may seem idiosyncratic from our perspective at first, but we believe the gains in happiness (and therefore hopefully productivity) are worth more than saving a couple of hundred bucks per months through annoying and condescending time tracking.
- Secrecy: This one’s easy … we haven’t kept much to ourselves. If somebody is sitting full-time in our office, then it means this person is part of our company at that time. So we talk openly about project budgets, clients and important decisions. Sure, there’s the occasional meeting among ourselves, but in general we want to be as honest and transparent as possible, making everyone feel welcome and taking every opinion into account.
Cool. Does that mean we solved all these challenges? Far from it. These are just initial observations about a new situation we’re getting accustomed to and we’ll see how it works out. We’ll probably introduce regular feedback talks as well, to hear first-hand how we’re doing and what we can improve. But that’s for another time. 😇
Social Media: Gifs, Gifs, Gifs!
We had ambitious plans of taking Instagram stories for a spin this week, but then all our social media energy ended up on Tumblr (of all the places, haha). We had created a Tumblr way back in 2015, but never used it much … and if we did, it was mainly for reposting stuff from Instagram, Twitter and Medium – which was rather pointless and understandably nobody cared.
This week we decided to revive it by flooding it with gifs, making it a proper channel with its own personality, next to Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and Medium. Here’s a preview:
There’s a certain magic about these short, grainy, looping impressions, pulling you much more into the moment than a photo could. The full thing is available under feed.diesdas.digital (don’t open this if you’re on mobile data, you’ve been warned!) and needless to say, we’re very happy with the results. 😅
Project News!
Time for real work! Max went on well-deserved holidays early this week, so it was only the four of us …
- … mainly working on two bigger projects that are nearing launch and we’re making super rapid progress on both. 👌
- … deciding to take part in a pitch, which will require investing some time up-front, but our chances of getting the project are quite good and we decided that the risk is worth it. 🔬
- … talking to another potential client about a new project. 💥
- … clearing all the legal hurdles of a bigger project, so we can get started soonish. ⚡️
- … skyping with students from Codecats.io about everyday life as a developer: daily rates, type of work, how to acquire projects, how to estimate project complexity, what a typical day looks like, etc.
- … preparing and conducting a workshop with a new client, for whom we’ll write a proposal now. 📋
„Why found a company and then enslave yourself again doing client work? Why not work on your own products and enjoy full liberty?“
This was a question I got from a friend this week (👋) and I found it interesting because I never thought about client work like that. Anyhow, four quick observations that could be expanded into a full blog post at some point, but I’ll just leave them here for now:
- When you’re self-funded you better do two things first: 1: Stick to what you’re good at in order to minimize risk. 2: Do something that makes money, quickly. In our case, with all the agency experience we had, client work was the obvious choice.
- We don’t perceive client work to be confining or restricting per se. We work with our clients as partners, at eye-level and push back if we don’t agree with their decisions. We usually refuse to work for free (except when it’s a conscious decision with good prospects like the pitch mentioned above) and we don’t pull all-nighters. In most cases it feels more like joining forces than working for somebody.
- We very much work by our own rules which creates a sense of freedom and being in charge that I’ve never felt before. To me this fact alone is way more liberating than the specifics of what we work on. How and why you do something is often more important than what. We hope to be able to transfer this feeling to the people working with us as well.
- That being said, of course we’d be interested in doing a product from A to Z ourselves, should the opportunity arise. But we’re not forcing that to happen and right now we’re happy with the current setup.
And that’s it for this week!
Thanks for reading and we hope you could take something away from this post! If you have any feedback, questions or criticism: send it our way and we shall respond!
Have a great weekend everyone, get some rest, catch some sun and see you all on Monday! 🖖
