Making time work for you
You don’t know what you’ve got til it’s gone. How many times do we tell ourselves this? How many times do we sit around telling other people? Well yesterday was one of those days for me.Mostly Head First advertise video games. It’s become a speciality that we pride ourselves on. Whilst we are keen to show the world how this knowledge can be used on other products, it’s a speciality we have no intention of moving away from. So with all eyes on E3, we managed to, for the most part, make use of a little down time. We saw clients, we did R&D and we worked on the dreaded SELF-PROMOTION, getting this blog running, preparing brochures, coming up with off-the-wall ideas we have to pitch existing clients, that sort of thing.
This week, however, E3 released its captive audience back to their desks and with it the work has stepped up. So yesterday I felt a little robbed of time. I just needed another half day to get that website done. I just needed another hour to polish the brochure copy. I had planned on squeezing in a few more meetings that were going to be about pitching inspiration and proactivity rather than responding to commissions. Time had caught up on me.
Then I remembered a talk I heard a while back from David Heinemeier Hansson. Among its key points was the concept that working smarter was more effective than working harder, or longer. It’s a reworking of quality not quantity of course but Hansson places the point in the context of developing Ruby on Rails. It’s the real world experience that prevented me from dismissing him as yet another business bullshitter – you know, the sort who go around spouting cliches. There was a great episode of The West Wing where Josh tells Donna how much nonsense these people talk. He takes apart the seminar she’d been on and it’s a wonderful bit of writing that leaves you wishing you had as many points of reference to call upon during an argument.
That’s how I thought I’d feel when I started watching the Startup School lectures.
It didn’t end that way and I took a lot from his speech. Especially the need to work smarter. I was at the point, at the end of the day, when I felt I needed to cram in a blog entry because it was on my to-do list. It was probably going to be about the great games at E3. But I’d have been repeating what other people had already written about. I wasn’t at E3 so what else could I add? Our analysis (and there will be some of sorts) won’t be based on what E3 had to offer but on what games we, as a company, are looking forward to. It’s going to be written about in our own good time. It will be interesting and relevant. It won’t be rushed.
Other things are more important right now and there are only so many hours in the day.