I wrote a vomit trigger titled “3 years from now…?” It was a question one of my colleagues asked me when we were having a 1-1. If I’m feeling stuck, it could be because I don’t know what I want to be working towards. What do I want to have accomplished, 3 years from now? If I’m not clear about that, then there’s no strong reason to do any particular thing. If I have some sort of achievenment or desired end-state, then I know that I ought to work towards that. Or at least I’d have a better sense of what to prioritize.
Well, what do I want to have achieved? I guess I’d want to have been responsible for building a great content team. That’s a seductively simple idea in concept. What goes into that? What does a world class content team look like? Right now there are 3 guys producing content, with some guest posts and some visuals from our design team. Okay. What’s the next step? What’s missing that needs to happen? What does a world-class content team do that a regular content team doesn’t?
The first word that comes to my mind is rework. Review. Going over old things and seeing what did or didn’t work. And I haven’t been doing that. We’ve sort of been trying to solve the problem of production, and we’ve just been producing as much as we can for the past 2 years. And I think we’ve done a pretty decent job of that. But what got us here won’t get us there. The next step requires some changes. It requires some thinking. There is something that needs to happen and I have to insist on it. There are conversations that we need to have, questions we need to ask and answer, and new questions we need to come up with and resolve to answer.
A content team exists to solve an information problem. Who are the people who have this information problem? Do they realize that they have this information problem? How do you describe the information problem? What is the information that is necessary? How should it be presented? What’s the most important thing about each piece of information? What is the job that the information needs to do? How does it help them? What is the current state that the readers are currently stuck with, and how do we get them unstuck? What are we trying to achieve? The best X blog in the world, sure– how do we define that? It has to get people interested in the problems, and get them excited about taking steps to solving the problems. Right. All of that sounds nice and good, but what are the first steps that need to be taken? What can I do without having to consult with anybody else? I guess I could sit and evaluate what we’ve done so far. Haven’t I done a bunch of these evaluations so far? What’s the verdict? What’s the learning? Oh, but my evaluations so far have been kinda vague and general, isn’t it? Yes. What’s the specific thing that needs to happen?
I guess it’s all about learning. The point is to educate, in a way that is compelling, interesting, useful. Anybody who comes in through any entry point should be given interesting pieces of information that make them go, “Huh, wow, cool.” How do we do more of that? I don’t quite know yet. If I already knew the answer I would already be doing it. But okay, that’s life, we operate in spaces we don’t understand. What are the next steps? I was thinking the next thing that needs doing is– to ask every possible question imaginable, and answer as many of them as possible– perhaps after putting them through a rudimentary prioritization. Yeah, I can do that.
And what’s the outcome? How do I know when I’m done? Should I measure the output, and just go for raw output? That might work better than the arbitrary nonsense I usually try to come up with. I do believe that I’ve gotten better at my work over time, but my main source of anxiety is probably that I’m not quantifying my work enough. So I flaff around far too much and don’t get enough done. And it’s simply not clear what “enough” means. That’s the slightly weird and sad part. 2 years in and I’m still kinda improvising my way through everything half the time, maybe more than half the time. I should have a very clear sense of what needs to go in and what needs to come out. I think I now know that a bunch of things are missing, and I should just systematically attack that. I’ll write out a plan after lunch.
Okay, but that’s work. And I still haven’t actually gotten a precise answer to the question. What about outside of work, what do I want to have done in 3 years? Oh, that’s simple-ish, I think. I’d like to be really, really fit. I need to break that into measurements. I’d like to run a really good time for a 5km. I’d like to do 20 pullups. I’d like to bench press 60kg, more if possible.
Oh wait, I just realized that I wrote a whole bunch of things down in my workflowy that are related to this. And I’ve set a bunch of arbitrary dates (“In 3 years, I’d like to be able to draw little comics and sketches that I’m personally proud of, that I feel are expressive”.) Which is a good start. But then I need to break down these large, long term goals into little actionable measurable things. I suppose I could do that as a reward after getting some work done today. So that’s what I’ll do. I’m going to publish this, then I’m going to shower, have lunch, and get to working. Before I start working I gotta plan what work I’m going to do. Let’s do this.