Closed this week (Week 15)
Newspaper Club did something magical back in 2009: they closed for August.
Here’s what they said:
I’ve always thought that the joy of being a small island floating between Europe and the US means you can select the best from two great business cultures, and while we’re happy to embrace the early-rising and grande-lattes of our North American friends we should also honour our European heritage and bugger off for the summer.
(Here’s the their archived blog post, from 3 August 2009. Newspaper Club was acquired in 2015 and has printed in excess of 12 million newspapers.)
I’ve always thought that was pretty special. Why run on somebody else’s schedule? Build the thing according to the values you want. Russell, Tom, Ben: 👏👏👏
Also it gives me a good excuse to take a week or two off while simultaneously making a cheeky reference to all the web stuff that happened in the good ol’ days.
So as you may have noticed, I’m not here. Even though it’s the middle of July and not, per Newspaper Club, August.
I’m writing this post about a week before it’s scheduled to publish. What will I be doing at the moment the post goes live? Probably having a think about where Job Garden goes next (given it is now three months old) and generally relaxing.
Relaxing is important. Three months is sustainable as a single sprint, and I’ve run projects in the last few years which had awesome outcomes in part because they were hard sprints — you create a kind of crucible of making and thinking in the team and special things emerge.
But this isn’t a sprint. It’s compound interest. It’s a step and a step and a step and a step.
Anyway: I’m not here, but YOU can still check out Job Garden, find new jobs, get the watchlist emails, see it on my Twitter. Etc.
The joy of automation! What are computers good for if they can’t pretend we’re working while we’re actually outside enjoying the sun. I think we forget that sometimes.
