RWDevCon 2016 Inspiration Talk – Going Deep by Ken Yarmosh

4) Regulate “News” Intake

This ties into that last point, but another common trait of those who are prolific and very creative is that they’re smart with the news that they actually consume. Take a look at someone like Adele. She actually just broke all these records for her last album and she had a nice little interview that I thought was relevant for this.

She talks about social media and how she doesn’t participate in it because she wants to spend time writing music. She wants to spend time in the studio. She wants to spend time with her family, which is a really inspiring thing for her.

I think it really stands on itself here. This doesn’t mean, again, that you should just completely get off those things, but I think you should be smarter about it because if you think about it, it really is the food for your mind in many ways.

I also want you to think about the fact that often time news is depressing. It’s sensational. It’s rumors. It’s things that we can’t actually act on.

I like to think about this. Is the human mind actually built to take in information that’s happening 1,000 miles away that’s tragic? This is why some people who often look and read news all the time are depressed.

Our mind’s just not really built to take in all this information. Again, I’m not advocating that you’re ignorant, but just be selective with what it is that you put into your head every single day.

5) Now Versus Later

Another thing that we’re guilty of is the tyranny of the urgent. We have this propensity to have to respond to everything that happens at every single moment. Someone mentions us on Twitter, we have to respond. If we get an email, we have to respond. It goes down the line there.

What I want you to do as you go back next week to work, consider if a task requires immediate attention. If it doesn’t, deal with it later. Allocate specific times for conversations and collaboration with your team members, and especially when something comes in that requires thought, give yourself the time to have that thought.

Step away from things when you’re emotionally charged. This one actually does require a little bit of team buy in, so if you are out there and you’re in this environment where everyone has to be urgent and immediate, you might have to be the champion for this one specifically.

6) Use The Right Tools

For tools itself, we have tool overkill today. There’s just a million things out there. I mentioned some of the ones today already, but how often do you get a text message or a Slack message that says, “I just sent you an email.”

Your response back to it is “I’m not sure if you understand how this works. I got a notification the first time. I didn’t need a second notification about this first notification because that’s what the purpose of the first notification really was.”

What do we have? Some ideas or guidelines for how we use the different tools at Savvy Apps, and it really comes down to just being smart about the right tool.

If we’re working on something right now, it’s a ticket that’s in progress or a card that’s in progress, we’ll discuss that thing in Slack, but we don’t want to spend all day managing Slack. If you’re talking about something, and I’m saying Slack. You could use HipChat, whatever it is that you might use, but we don’t want to spend all day messaging back and forth on these things.

If you’re spending more than 10 minutes talking about something, jump onto Hangout, walk over to someone’s desk, whatever is the relevant thing, but again, we don’t need to just message the whole time about this.

If it’s something in the future, use the relevant tool. Again, Trello, Pivotal Tracker, JIRA, whatever it is that you use, but put the context on that future item. Those real-time messaging things, they don’t maintain context very well. If you’re talking about something in the future in a channel, guess what? You’re not going to have that context on the future item because it’s going to be left in the channel somewhere. You have to go dig it up later on, so use the relevant tool instead.

Mention it to someone. Assign it to them. When they get through their cue, they’ll get to that item. Wouldn’t that be nice to not be interrupted every five seconds? This is something that we do in our own workflow.

If something needs a lot more attention and thought, you really need to lay out the pros and cons, advantages and disadvantages, use something like a document base. Use Quip, Google Docs, whatever it may be.

Amazon actually goes to the extent of saying that people in certain kinds of meetings need to write 5-page memos before they step into that meeting. The reason why they do that is they just want people to really think through the problem before they start having lots of conversations about it.

Finally, if something is much more focused on a private exchange, an HR issue, compensation, whatever it is, we actually prefer email even versus a direct message in Slack, and we’ll use email to have those kinds of conversations.

You can see here just thinking about the right tool can really help you so you’re not interrupted 100 times a day because that’s not going to be helpful for you doing this deeper work.

7) Automate Whenever Possible

It may seem counterintuitive, but actually having a process automation can actually help you focus on the most creative parts of what you do.

Instead of continuing to ask questions over and over again about the way to setup an Xcode project, how to ship an app update, how to have a new person join the team, you can instead focus on the special parts of your app, the thing that you are real excited about and that fulfills you.

At Savvy, we use Trello a lot. We have a bunch of different Trello templates. They’re just literally templates that we can take and copy into a new board.

We have a new team member join, they literally get put into here, and they start going through all the different items to help get them up to speed, and we have a lot of documentation. We have crazy amounts of documentation.

They read through that relevant documentation, and then they’re able to understand how we work at Savvy, and they can start focusing on contributing to the team almost immediately.