The Lion, the Gazelle… and the Web
6 daily habits of successful people applied to our day to day work
Sometime ago I read an article about a new book: “Rise and shine: the daily routines of history’s most creative minds.” I bought the book and reading regularly one of two biographies every now and then. (Recently the Huffington post published a graphic summary)
The author of the article summarize success recipe into 6 rules:
- Be a morning person.
- Don’t give up the day job.
- Take lots of walks.
- Stick to a schedule.
- Practice strategic substance abuse.
- Learn to work anywhere.
I asked myself how it would apply to me, and at which cost. Therefore, In this story I wish to tell you how it applies to our team work. Irony mode on.
1. Be a morning person.
Wake up early means to me that we don’t wait that a technology is chosen by others departments, but we lead the change. In this way we drive the process and have a ROI on our time invested too. For example we piloted a new (for us) web content management system: we became a corporate best practice and we lead by example. Moreover, we wake up early and anticipate our customers needs, so they do not run after us to eat us for breakfast like the Lion and the Gazelle.
2. Don’t give up the day job.
We experiment all time, and still we do our bread and butter job keeping our user community needs on top of our priority list. We don’t close business just waiting next release. It is important to keep customer attention with continuous, sometime smalls, improvements. It’s a difficult balance either plan for the future or do day-to-day business at the same time in any given moment; but you need a mix. Planning is good to set a cap, give a direction to our path, point the moon and not the finger. Daily routine keep our feet on Earth close to the evolving needs of our colleagues.
3. Take lots of walks.
This can be interpreted in several ways:
- we “walk the corridors”, hence we meet our colleagues/stakeholder to get the sense of what’s going on.
- or we actually “walk away from corridors” to take a break from daily contingencies, brainstorm, get a fresh point of view so that when we are back we can put things in perspective and innovate.
Of course mixing both is the best. What matters is never to sit still.
4. Stick to a schedule.
Or… respect plans! We say what we do and we do what we say. We do not over-promise, still we look for challenges. Again it’s not an easy balance. Staying on the safe ground is comfortable, but on the long term you loose drive . While some good challenges can take the best out of us, it’s the Principle of the Hiding Hand of Albert O. Hirschman applied to our web practices.
Sticking to schedule also means that we have to value time: our time and our interlocutors, respecting and not abusing of it. Do daily plan and weekly and control advancements (for example we use JIRA as tracking tool)
Our habit in the team is to meet briefly all Mondays’ morning and discuss over a coffee and a cookie what are the priorities of the week and everybody is invited to put forward their view. This way it is easier to sync our activities and adapt the schedule to the needs. We haven’t come to the level of daily scrum as in our case we estimated it was overshooting. So the lesson is: take methodologies with a grain of salt, not as a bible. Adapt!
5. Practice strategic substance abuse.
What I’m going to say is dangerous and secret, but yes we also have our addiction, maybe not as dangerous as quoted in the article above… I know that by revealing it I risk a long queue in front of our offices but what is life without risks?
It is good for the team spirit to share some passion, ours is Chocolate! And the winning trick is everybody brings something tipical of his own country of origin.
6. Learn to work anywhere.
This is Strategic! All our “customers” are mobile, why shouldn't we? It’s only by sharing their experience that we can understand their needs. Therefore, if we deliver responsive design it’s also because we all work on mobile devices and realize how unusable are many websites on a 4" screen.
The other aspect of working everywhere is achieved by modern tools that allow accessing the system from wherever we are just using a web browser and a secure authentication. We don’t need to sit in front of our PC anymore to correct something on the website, that’s a revolution for a public administration!
Conclusion. It doesn't matter in the web world if you are a Lion or Gazelle, you better start Running!
Did you liked this story? I look forward your comments, tips, suggestions, tweets (@fabiozib), linked readings, feedback… any sign of life ;)
I will do my best to reply to everyone.
