Strengths and weaknesses

Do you know what your strengths are?

Do you know what you're weak at?

If you can be honest with yourself about your strengths and weaknesses, then you can start to act on them.

You don't necessarily need to improve where you're weak – just admitting that you're weak in a specific area can help you to decide if you should get better there, or find another solution.

For example, if you're running a business and you're weak on financial knowledge – you can choose to improve there, or you can choose to give that role to someone else. The only option you can't pick is to continue to be weak in that role and hope something changes by luck or magic.

The only caveat to improving all your weaknesses is you end up in the age-old situation of being a jack of all trades and a master of none. In the early days of any business, this is not necessarily a problem. But as soon as you have a team – of even, say, five people – it's time to start thinking about what you want to be a master of.

Do you know what your strengths and weaknesses are? If not, don't be afraid to ask those around you. People are often very nice, so it's likely they won't be forthcoming with your weaknesses. So make it easier for them – if there's an area you feel isn't your strength, simple ask those around you "Others have told me I could improve in X area – would you agree?"

Once you're clear on your own strengths and weaknesses, and you know where you want to improve, then it becomes a lot easier to worry less about your weaknesses and shortcomings.

Time boxing

Over the last few weeks I’ve been trying hard to box out my time each day of the week.

One of the challenges I struggle with, and from speaking to many other people – both founders and anyone working in a small team – is it’s hard to switch between the hundred different tasks you have each day.

It’s widely understood that constant task switching destroys your productivity, but it’s so hard to escape when there’s a constant torrent of new tasks to be accomplished and decisions to be made.

But escaping the torrent and becoming productive requires you to be in charge. You need to take control of your time.

Control your time

If you can control how you spend your time you can do so much more.

I was always sceptical of this, but since putting a concerted effort into boxing out my time during the week, I’ve become dramatically more productive, less stressed, and I’m able to spend my energy on the most important work – not just the most urgent.

How can you start to take more control of your time?

One simple change I’ve made is to book in my calendar the time I would normally leave as empty with an event – perhaps it’s titled “Map out our plan for Q4” or “Deep creative work”.

It doesn’t matter too much what tasks you put in – what matters is you treat your “free” time in the work week as protected time.

If a meeting deserves to get a fixture in your calendar, why the hell doesn’t the most important work you do get to feature there too?

A chance to reflect

As a bonus – it’s one thing to map out your week ahead of time, but it’s another to reflect on where your time went.

During the week, stuff comes up. Priorities change. "Urgent" tasks – even when we try our hardest to avoid them – tend to take priority.

I’ve been trying to keep track of my time throughout the day retrospectively by adjusting my calendar events based on what actually happened.

None of this is highly scientific. None of this is necessarily “industry standard”. And none of this requires any fancy tools or software. It just requires a calendar and a mindset change.

Do you feel in control of your schedule? If you do, I’d love to hear about what you’ve done to accomplish such an achievement.

What is your top priority?

It’s important to know what you’re going to do today. It's important to know what you’re going to do next.

It’s also important to know what you’re not going to do today, this week, this month, or ever.

But establishing your set of your priorities doesn’t happen by chance or by accident. If it does, then they’re not priorities, it's just a list of things to do.

To be clear on your priorities you also need to think about what’s most important in your business, in your social life, in your family, in your relationship, and to you personally.

Is figuring out your priorities a priority right now? Maybe it’s time to make it one.

For the record

Meetings changed recently at GoSquared.

They got quicker.

They got clearer.

They started more promptly.

The need to be in every meeting reduced.

And the amount of “he said she said” reduced to zero.

What happened?

We started recording meetings.

At first, it was an alarming change – it felt weird.

Was it a step towards overbearing surveillance? Could this be used against me in the future? We all had concerns when starting out.

But a few months in, and the results have been undeniable.

The inspiration came from learning of Ray Dalio’s approach to running Bridgewater Associates. At Bridgewater every meeting is recorded, and direct, clear, honest feedback is strongly encouraged.

As with Bridgewater, recording meetings is part of a wider understanding across the team that we want to grow as individuals and as a team, and if we don’t hold each other to a high standard then we’re letting everyone down.

Now every individual in a meeting is aware that anyone else in the business has the opportunity to listen at a later date. It encourages everyone to bring their best to every meeting.

Why do we do it?

The key reasons we started to record meetings:

If someone can’t be present and wants extra detail on why a decision was made or how an idea came to be, there’s a place to understand that.
So anyone in the meeting can reflect on their own performance – just as a sports team reviews their performance after a game, it gives us a chance to review our own performance.

How do we record meetings?

There’s nothing complex:

Start the meeting.
Remind everyone the meeting is about to be recorded. If someone isn’t OK with it they can veto the recording any time. Consent is required.
Open the Voice Memos app on your phone.
Hit Record.
Remember to hit Stop at the end of the meeting.

To be clear, we don’t record absolutely every internal meeting – private one-to-one catchup conversations with the team and similar situations where discretion is critical are not recorded.

Customer conversations are a different ballgame entirely. There's a huge benefit to recording conversations with customers and potential customers. The emphasis on consent is even greater here, and is a topic for another day.

It’s worth noting that we’ve evolved how meetings are run at GoSquared a heck of a lot over the years. Those learnings are also for another post – stay tuned.

I hope this is helpful, and reach out to me on Twitter if you have questions about our approach.

Create more. Consume less.

The start of the new year always provides time to think deeply about what you’ve achieved (or failed to achieve) in the last year, and where you can do better.

Life can be short – when a new year comes along it reminds me of everything I still want to achieve.

For me, at this point, it comes down to two areas: create more, and consume less.

Create more:

Art. Draw more.
Writing.
Photography.
Time for exercise.
Good habits for money management.
Happy memories.

Consume less:

Social media.
News.
TV.
Plastic.
Poorly made, short-life products.
Meat.

Best of luck with your own goals for 2019.

My morning routine

I would not describe myself as “a morning person”.

I love a lie in. At the weekends I’ve always enjoyed lying in bed – perhaps with a cup of tea – and making the most of relaxing.

But during the week it’s hard to justify spending your morning under the covers – there’s a job to do, a business to build.

Needless to say, there are articles galore out there about building a good morning routine, to the point where the mere mention of the topic induces an audible sigh from those in the same room.

Despite the extreme cliché of the subject, I’ve been trying to figure out the right routine for me, and I thought it might be worthwhile sharing my learnings so far.

What I have learnt so far seems to suggest that waking up earlier – and happier, with more energy – requires more than just a loud alarm.

Goals for the morning

I have a few goals for my mornings:

Wake up early (to give me time before any scheduled events in my calendar).
Get myself showered, and feeling fresh.
Wake up with energy to start making decisions and acting on things.
To arrive at the office with a clear plan for my day.
To arrive at the office in a good mood, ready to crack on with the day.
To ensure I have enough energy to keep on form for the entire day – especially after lunch.

With all these desires for my mornings, I realised I clearly need to avoid any situations where I wake up late, rush to the office, and feel like I’m playing catch-up from the moment I’m in. I also need to avoid situations where I'm in a total grump and a pain for the team to work with.

My current routine

My routine so far goes something like this:

Set my alarm for 6am.
Actually wake up and get out of bed at 6am.
Get the kettle on.
Jump straight in the shower – no questions asked.
Leave the shower, shave, dry hair, get dressed.
Make tea (kettle now boiled!), eat a bowl of cereal.
Catch up on more casual / personal tasks like reading the news and messaging any friends who are waiting on me to get back to them.
Run through my tasks, emails, and other items and get them prioritised. I've started using Superhuman to manage my email workflow which has been a massive help here.
Leave the house for a leisurely stroll into the office, mulling over my first tasks for when I get in.

The morning routine starts the night before

Getting up at 6am has been painful for a long time. I'm only just getting used to it, and I still have my days of failure.

Even before I started reading "Why we sleep", I was vaguely aware of the importance of a healthy night of sleep. But waking at 6am simply can't happen (for me at least) if I'm getting to bed at

Productivity

A 31-post collection