Anthony Panozzo's Blog

Wanted to share an organization system that I came up with that combines my weekly flip fold calendar idea and life gamification. In this post I’ll give you a template to use to set up your own system. Wanted to share since I was thinking about systems like this recently and realized that I hadn’t written it up yet.

Basically, you set up your daily goals, and they total to 100 points per day. Then, you have some weekly goals, and they should total to 300 points. Then at the end of the week, you see how many of your goals you have accomplished. 700 points would be a 70% success rate. I made it 1000 points just because it was a nice round number and I think it was a good weighting for daily and weekly items. You need to do daily habits (they can be simple), but also keep your weekly goals in mind.

In one of the Slack organizations I am in, some of the people in the design channel were talking about how spec work permeates their industry and how it is harmful. They talked about how this came to be and the effects of it. I stayed out of the discussion for a while, but I finally posted this to try to help understand what they were saying and state my perspective. Since I thought it might be valuable to you if you are a freelancer or consultant, wanted to share it here.

The Post

I have worked more in a software development capacity, so I am not steeped in the “spec work” culture as much, but I basically would not give work away for free for someone who is able to pay money. I think part of our responsibility as people who take on clients is to verify the following before engaging to learn more:

I am working on a couple of projects that use Ruby on the back end and JavaScript on the front end. The Ruby convention for variables is snake_case, while JavaScript variables are camelCased. This causes friction when we pass things between the front end and the back end.

An ad-hoc solution might result in the Ruby code handling some camel-cased variables when reading in JSON or when sending a response. Otherwise, the JavaScript code has underscores all over the place, which is also undesirable. It has the effect of cluttering up our front end code.

Overall, this discrepancy makes it harder to derive the right variable name each time on both the server and the client. Languages have conventions primarily to make it easier to remember what to call things. However, this breaks down when there are two or more languages in play that have different conventions.

At HealthPro, we recently started having some company culture discussions. The general idea is that a company will always have some culture, and that you can influence what it becomes by being aware of it and proactively discussing it. After a general brainstorming session together, we started discussing things in Slack (“Work As If Remote”, right?)

The value that we were discussing was “Try new things / Don’t be afraid to make mistakes”. One of Kyle’s questions that seemed to get a lot of response was “What’s the most spectacular failure you’ve been a part of? What did you learn from it?”

At Haven, one of the unwritten values we had was “work as if remote”. In this post I’ll explain what this means and why it is important.

What does it mean?

“Work as if remote” means we always pretend that there are people working remotely, and behave accordingly. Even if everyone on the team is in the same room, or at the same meeting, we operate like there are people that are across the country. We do this by documenting:

• the plans that we have
• the decisions we make
• the things we do
• the things we learn
• meetings or conversations we have

The tools

We implemented this at Haven by using Slack for most communication, and Trello for capturing story-specific details in line with the cards that they were related to.

Also, MeetingHero (now the inferiorly named WorkLife) allowed us to record meetings in a collaborative way, although a shared Google Drive document could achieve the same goal.

Benefits

There are usually people working remotely, even if you don’t think they are. First, there may actually be remote people that you have just forgotten about. :) We had a designer working in San Francisco, and while he didn’t chime in often, writing as much as we could likely gave him more context for designs.