Category: Workflow & Process

How gymnastics scoring changed how we think about resourcing our team in Asana.

How do you assign work:

  • Based on who is available.
  • Based on who is capable.

What if everytime, we based it on both?

Like the whole country, I’m usually glued to the Olympics, and somehow, someway, gymnastics is always makes our country proud with their achievements, although we’ve let them down in our collective character and care for them as individuals.

Something that’s always caught my eye is the scoring for gymnastics events. If you don’t know how it works, my summary:

  • Difficulty is a set score you go into an event with based on your routine. These scores usually range in the 6–7 area based on a standard set of criteria.
  • Deductions are taken from a max of ten, also pre-determined based on various ‘faults.’

So going into a particular event, an athlete is forced to balance their capability to perform a given action along with their ability to executed it as expected. This is dynamite logic that can be applied to any scenario, but especially in my context — how our staff can stretch their limits while also bringing their best within the time allotted.

Note on Simone Biles’ greatness: Her combination of difficult routines and flawless execution is why she’s probably the greatest gymnast who has every lived. Her ‘starting score’ is so much higher than anyone else’s, it would take catastrophe (which has happend like once ever) for her to lose.

So how can we apply this concept to our teams? Asana has a really dynamite function in its Portfolio feature called ‘Workload.’ How it helps us lead our teams better:

  • Empowers our team to do their best work in the time they need to make it happen while delivering a project on time.
  • Establishes an outcomes based culture instead of an hours logged one.

Try this:

Map a project out by allocating effort across the timeline. The example below shows the estimated effort over the course of the preferred timeline.

Assess the ideal assignee based on capacity and determine if this is an opportunity to stretch their capabilities. You can see that this project’s timeline and required effort will stress everyones capacity (red is no bueno, blue is muy bueno) to execute well except for two specific team members.

The more I use tools like this to help our team execute more consistently by helping them balance their capacity to perform with their capability to execute, the more likely we’ll all deliver what’s expected when it’s expected. Who knows, maybe you’ll give someone a shot to knock it out of the park who you may not have considered in the first place.

The Top 7 Keyboard Shortcuts for Digital Producers to Change Your Life

In this age of AI, everyone is talking about how to save time and all the efficiencies you get. Sure, there are amazing prompts and tricks to get the best output to plus up sooo many of our day-to-day tasks, but there are efficiencies you can be gaining without any AI or additional programs. We can’t tell you how many times we watch over peoples’ shoulders as they are walking through their work, and it is painful to watch as they navigate and…..use their mouse.

Just like the title, here are 5 keyboard shortcuts that we use on the regular that are going to be your best friends, and they will save you more time than you could ever image.

Some ground rules – we are Mac users, so we’re going to be referencing Mac shortcuts first, and then have the Windows Versions listed after. We’ll do our best to clarify which programs these shortcuts are the most effective in. Play around with the shortcuts in different programs – you’ll be surprised how global some of them are.

Keyboard Shortcut #1:  CMD + Tab ( CMD + Shift + Tab : Backwords)

  • While holding the CMD button, hit the Tab button and then release.
  • This shortcut will bounce you back/forth between the last two programs you were using. This works great when on a single monitor (just your laptop), or even between a multi-screen setup. 
  • Bonus tip – if you hold the CMD button while tapping the Tab button, you will see a toolbar that shows all open programs, and each press of the Tab button will change the highlighted program as it cycles through. Simply release the CMD button when the program you desire is highlighted.
  • Windows version: Windows + Tab

Keyboard Shortcut #2:  CMD + ~ (With Shift: CMD + ~ : Backwards)

  • This shortcut is similar in spirit to the CMD + Tab shortcut in that it switches you between windows….of the same program!
  • I use this regularly in Chrome – I’ll have multiple windows of Chrome open that have groups of relevant tabs in each window (there are great Chrome features where you can even organize or pin tabs!). CMD + ~ very quickly allows me to cycle through the different Chrome windows to access the information I need without ever needing to use my mouse.
  • Windows Version: Windows + ~

Keyboard Shortcut #3:  CMD + K

  • In G-Suite, this shortcut is the hyperlink function. So, you either can use keyboard functions to highlight the text you need, or you use your mouse and hold CMD and then press the K button. This will open the hyperlink text entry.
  • This same shortcut in Slack is how you can access the directory text box to quickly type in the channel name or person’s name you want to message or review. Slack did a great job with this feature because any channel or DM that has unread messages will show up at the top of the list without entering anything into the text field, and all you need to do is either hit Return to start at the top, or down/up arrow to the one you want and hit Return.
  • Windows Version: CTRL + K

Keyboard Shortcut #4:  CMD + W

  • This works on a system level, and can act differently for different programs. 
  • Let’s start with Chrome – want to X out of a tab? That is what CMD + W does for you. When in a tab that you are done with, you hold the CMD button and then press the W button and it will kill the chrome tab you are in. Super amazing.
    • This is especially awesome for those of us who have 10 gazillion tabs in each window, and selecting the X with the mouse can require brutal precision when you are in the flow.
  • General programs – CMD + W will kill the window you have open. For example, I’ll sometimes have multiple PDFs open in Preview. When I’m done with one, just hit the CMD + W shortcut, and it closes only that window out and pulls the next recent Preview window up. Snip snap!
  • Windows Version: CTRL + W

Keyboard Shortcut #5:  CMD + Shift + 8

  • This shortcut applies to many programs. The programs I use this the most in are G-Suite, Slack, email, Asana.
  • This combo is the shortcut to create a bulleted list. There are some fun additional shortcuts to keep in mind with this:
    • CMD + Shit + 7 can switch it to a numbered/ordered list, and this can be mixed/matched with the bulleted list. For example, maybe you want to start the top bullet as just a bullet, but you want to have the sub-bullets list as (a), (b), etc, you can do that with this combo.
    • CMD + Shift + 8 within a bulleted list will remove the bullet and take the line to the beginning of the indented area (in continuity of whatever sub-bullet you are at).
    • CMD + ] will indent the bullet your text marker is on (Tab may be the only option in some programs)
    • CMD + [ will un-indent the bullet your text marker is on
    • These two will be clutch as you are taking notes and really getting into the sub-bullets.
  • Windows Versions:
    • CTRL + Shift + 7
    • CTRL + Shift + 8
    • CTRL + ]
    • CTRL + [

Keyboard Shortcut #6:  Shift + d-arrows

  • This one is going to actually be a grouping, because they all play around the same function. This is generally an OS level keyboard shortcut, but it may play differently in some programs. The descriptions below are geared towards the G-Suite, Slack and Asana.
  • Shift + d-arrows will highlight/unhighlight text. For example, if your text indicator is at the beginning of a line of text, and you hold Shift will hitting the Right Arrow, this will highlight a letter at a time. Pay attention to the following list, as this is where things get wild:
    • CMD + Shift + Right Arrow will highlight from your text indicator to the end of the line
    • This will also work in reverse – from the end of the line to the beginning of the line with the Left Arrow
    • Option + Shift + Right Arrow will highlight a word at a time, as well as special characters when paired with words/numbers, per tap of the Right Arrow.
    • Similarly, Option + Delete will delete a word at a time, and a special character at a time when they are paired with words/numbers.
    • CMD + d-arrows will take your text indicator to the end/beginning of a line if you use the Right Arrow/Left Arrow respectively.
    • CMD + Delete will delete from the text indicator to the beginning of a line.
  • Windows Versions:
    • Shift + d-arrows
    • CTRL + Shift + d-arrows
    • CTRL + Backspace

Keyboard Shortcut #7:  CMD + Z (perhaps one of the most famous keyboard shortcuts)

  • This one is going to actually be a grouping, because they all play around the same function. Maybe even the Holy Trinity of Keyboard Shortcuts…
  • CMD + Z is the UNdo function. Every time you hit it is executes one step back of the Undo.
  • CMD + Shift + Z is the REdo function. If you have gone too many “undo’s” back, this will take you forward.
  • In the spirit of “undo’ing”, CMD + Shift + T in Chrome will re-open a Chrome tab or window that you may have inadvertently closed. I can’t tell you how many times this has saved me. You’re welcome.
  • Windows Versions:
    • CTRL + Z
    • CTRL + Shift + Z
    • CTRL + Shift + T

There you have it. These will make your life as a producer even more efficient. Have fun with them, play around with some of the combinations, and who knows what you’ll discover.

What are your favorite Keyboard Shortcuts? Let us know which have made the biggest difference for you.

5 Best Ways to Get Ahead of Your Next Interactive Web Experience Project

While we work with a lot of very experienced teams around the world on digital experiences, activations and web-experiences, we work with just as many teams who aren’t regularly doing digital. For those clients, it can be daunting, and there is a lot of information out there that may or may not apply to you and your current situation for B2B and experiential marketing (and plenty of other scenarios, really). Here are 5 regularly consistent points that come up that can save a lot of time, heart-ache, and can seem like a magic wand waving over a project to get it to the finish line efficiently.

The Top 5 Things to Have Prepared

1 of 5:  Privacy Policy / Terms & Conditions / Cookie Policy – “The Legalese,” as they say

  • Ensuring you have your legalese i’s crossed and t’s dotted is about the easiest thing you can get the ball rolling on early, and stay ahead of launching your website or experience. It is way more exciting to see your designs coming together, and playing around with the staging link and doing QA – it just feels like you are making progress and checking off tasks left and right. 
  • But once we get right to the finish line, and the Privacy Policy isn’t ready, or the Terms & Conditions aren’t there, or a fully approved Cookie Policy isn’t sourced (assuming we aren’t the ones providing that), everything comes to a screeching halt and those seatbelts engage in full force. Youch!
  • So, as soon as you know you are doing a website, whether it is a simple landing page, a small interactive, a web AR experience, start getting these 3 things in motion and approved so that once QA is all done and the kit and kaboodle is ready to launch, you get to roll right into that launch and start cheersing some butter beer.

2 of 5:  The Right People in the Room

  • Nothing is more disappointing than working on an activation that is ready to go live and have some stakeholder who was not included come in and shut the whole thing down, or introduce nearly insurmountable hurdles in the final hour. Sadly, this happens despite our best efforts to avoid this, even after establishing processes to hedge against this.
  • Some questions to ask as you get into a digital project or activation to help grease the wheels:
    • Who from the IT team do we need to include in this discussion/project during production to make this as smooth as possible?
    • Who has the veto authority over this project and any of its deliverables? How can we include them at the right times?
    • Is this the kind of project that the legal team needs to review? If yes, then get a debrief meeting set asap and get the guardrails defined.
    • Who from the Brand Management team needs to be included, or the Creative Directors who will have final say on look/feel? They need to be included at the outset of any interactive experience.

3 of 5:  Brand Guides and Approved Assets (and the right file types!)

  • This is one of the first questions we ask when collaborating with an existing brand/IP/company when we are engaged to design an experience. True to having the right people in the room, if we aren’t starting with the right material, things get derailed and potentially shut down. 
  • Every now and again, we encounter a brand/company that doesn’t have a fully fleshed out Brand Guide, or even a curated library of assets that is central to an organization. In these scenarios, lots of questions and check-ins with the Right People in the Room helps to smooth over any potential hangups this can introduce. 
  • Similar to the Brand Guide, what are the approved assets that can be used, or the content that will be implemented into an experience? Who owns them, and are they in a sharable location with our team? This conversation can get started even before signing an SOW with us, and can be refined during a kickoff call so that any and all assets that could be used are prepped and ready for us to run with by the time we get to design.
  • Now, the prep part of approved assets is potentially a much longer conversation, but a few quickies to pre-heat the cauldron:
    • In the digital world, we are often trying to work with the largest versions possible, and then we can scale them down. Like a haircut, you can always take hair away, you can’t add it back.
    • Vector art is what we prefer for brand assets. 
    • Powerpoint is not a design file…
    • Videos can be compressed/optimized on our end, but it is always helpful if they are compressed for us prior to implementation.

4 of 5:  Necessary Access for Integrations

  • Almost all the web experiences we build have some degree of 3rd party integrations. Whether it is analytics through our partner’s/client’s accounts, CRM integration, or a career embed, we often need to have access to the platforms we are integrating to effectively implement and then test. 
  • For our much larger clients, they have procedures that need to followed to allow either the proper access or the proper permissions to be able to set up the integrations, i.e. API integrations.
  • One workaround for this for some integrations is to set them up for our clients and pass them over/migrate them to our clients upon launch. That said, the note about procedures/permissions applies, and this approach can’t work for the majority of the integrations we work with.

5 of 5:  PII – Who’s Responsible

  • We work in a lot of different industries, and one thing that is consistent across all industries is respecting PII and everything associated with it. For example, there have been quite a few pharmaceutical projects we have worked on where they strictly do not collect any contact information.

asana: routine to ritual

New working asana slogan: the more you f*ck around, you’ll find out.

When it comes to project management software, they’re so similar, the only true difference is your taste.

  • They each have a high level of invitation, tailoring to tons of habits-both good and not so good.
  • Work routines are sussed out almost at an unconscious level with how seamless each platform’s features are.

At that point, the system is just purring. You or your team don’t even have to think about what to do next, it’s all automagically going to guide you. These software sell routine straight from the assembly line.

✌️ Experience experiences

I came across a word that, for me, is the type that rocks in Scramble while simultaneously scrambles my brain. (Like when my wife said two routes were probably equidistant…an MBA way of saying the same distance.)

Metacognition. My definition: f*cking around with intention.

Like thinking about thinking and knowing about knowing. It’s just being aware. Lately, I’ve been more and more aware of the limitations of auotmations. While they should exist, platforms still need the touch, intentionality and consciousness of you and me.

They’re less lines of code and more sand boxes. We need to get in there and f*ck around a little bit more to truly get the most out of ‘em.

☠️ Routines are just average habits

In Michael Norton’s latest release, The Ritual Effect, he says:

Rituals are also providing more meaningful ways for people to step away from technology’s drive toward optimization…

You can’t optimize energy and consciousness. The things we’re optimizing are just the average of our good and bad habits. Why are we so slow to question how it was so easy to optimize that task, that project, that task.

Anything being optimized was probably a less conscious, less focused version of itself. Maybe, optimization is just a fixer for the ways we kinda stink at what we do.

💪 You can’t spell routine without roi

The missing piece to go from routine to ritual is connecting our actions to a reward. But sometimes this isn’t always super clear in the software we use or the reports we run.

Insert: consciousness.

Going about our workdays with a little more intentionality rarely fails. That word can be hard to chew for many of us. It has a connotation of carving out even more time when we have less and less of it.

But what if you’re thinking of it all wrong. Being intentional is as simple as taking a minute to f*ck around, and really see what your software (and you) are really capable of.

Marketing outcomes: never lose your dinosaur

Recently, we just started spinning up some marketing magic. We’re talking Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, Mailchimp campaigns, etc. We all struggle with making this a priority for our brands, but once we start firing them off…it typically goes better than we expected

Then fatigue and blurry ROI starts to make us question how we’re doing it and even worse, have imposter syndrome on why we started in the first place. Over the years, regardless of the company, I get reminded that the best outcomes for marketing aren’t easily found on the balance sheet.

🦖 Instead, our best outcome is not losing our dinosaur.

💒 Practice what you preach

I first got a real taste of what it was like to be who you are, everywhere you are at Crossroads Community Church. There’s a simple reason they’ve grown to be a top 5 church nationwide: they speak up, all the time, everywhere, all at once.

In a piece by Bloomberg, of all the photos they could show how the church is disrupting the ministry marketplace, they chose… a soda machine?

  • There are more opportunities for people to get to know you than you think there are.
  • Our brand voice can be as impactful on the front of a soda machine in the hallway as it is on the main stage.

🧠 Words create worlds

I lost my dinosaur for a couple of years until I started the consulting arm for a mobile app developer. In my experience working with clients with vision for the next great app, I felt they all suffered from the same core symptom: we think everyone wants what we have to offer them.

What I learned at Crossroads (which was founded by former P&G brand managers) was cheeky candor is fun, pointed and infectious. I deployed it at will so we could have an honest conversation about whether or not anyone really wants your app. Of course, Mailchimp campaigns were a big part of our outbound strategy.

Surprisingly, the hardest rub I ever received from our voice had nothing to do with it at all, instead it was a really displeased email subscriber.

Most brands would just unsubscribe and talk sh*t about him at the water cooler. Oh, but not us, that’s not on brand. I emailed him directly back, in part:

Dear, ______ –

Appreciate your willingness to let us know directly this upset you so much. We enjoy these types of emails. They are very much in-line with our culture here. We are happy to let you know how we resolved this for you:

  • Nothing sly about simple unsubscribe buttons. They are at the bottom of every email. Whether they come from TJ Maxxx, Target or your local small business. We are attaching a screengrab where you’ll see that. Just in case you have someone else you want to not receive any messages from who uses Mailchimp.
  • We noticed when we subscribed to your daily devotional (yes, we do our homework here), that you are using what’s called a double opt out strategy. This is when a user has to click twice to actually unsubscribe by confirming the email they want to have removed.
  • We use a single opt out strategy. Plain and simple. One click and you’re done. We went ahead and clicked that button for you. And we’re attaching the line-item from our CMS to show you that it’s been removed

We don’t send this email as a gotcha moment, but we hope it makes you take a beat before sending a similar message to anyone else.

🦖 wanna see some coolsh🪄t

When we’re talking brand voice and outbound marketing, it can all come to an abrupt halt if we choose to spend more time talking about ourselves rather than listening to what we sound like when we talk about others. It seems obvious when you step back for a moment: what we sound like to others is all that matters.

You know that friend that whenever you’re telling a story, they seven ways to Kevin Bacon find a way to tell you a similar story about them? Yah, guilty. That’s kinda the point here, we don’t need to talk about ourselves for others to get to know us. Curiosity is reciprocal.

Take a look at your brand guidelines. What would it look like for you to add a section like:

  • What interests us (Brand Intrigue)
  • Who we’re friends with (Brand Association)
  • Who we trust (Brand Perception)

If we did, it would feature some pretty cool people doing some pretty cool shi*t. Real recognize real.

Recognizing the dope things around us is the surefire way for us not to lose our dinosaur.

The Unthinkable Reality of Not Going Viral

🐕 Guys, believe when I say this, my dog is the cutest. Really.

Last year, I posted this absolute banger of a Reel thinking it was going to go viral instantaneously. I even made my profile public. I even included #hashtags. A thousand views, a hundred likes and a dozen shares later, I thought: that’s it? Just like anything we think is really great, it’s not up to us to define ‘great’ for others.

🎅🏻 There’s an estimated 350,000 Santa Claus imposters…I mean impersonators.

I genuinely was a little disappointed I didn’t achieve some flash in the pan fame because of this cut, it was like thinking I’d actually sat on Santa’s lap just to find out…nah. But the more I think about it, the more honest I start to get with myself:

The Santa Claus Network boasts some 10,000 members.
Some 30,000 Santa’s run in the San Diego Santa Run every year alone.
2009 apparently was peak time for Santa imposters, at an estimated 350,000.
But Loma isn’t a Santa Claus, she’s a Golden Retriever Santa Paws. She has to stand out, how many can there be?

🧑🏻🤝🧑🏼 You’ve got something in your eye.

“Beauty is in the eye of the beholder” as they say. Those adages sure have a way of being applicable in just about every aspect of our lives. Not long ago, I came across a post from a guy I have met, collaborated with, know well enough to say hi if we’re in adjacent urinals and highly respect his view of the world around him.

He pumped out this great article after Tik-Tok took down a viral video he posted. This line had me feenin’: There will come a success that will threaten to derail you.

🐻 The bear you must wrestle.

The greatest work that I’m currently doing is the work happening in me. In the agency world, it’s easy to forget that we are one of 350,000 Santas at any one time. There’s a lot of us, doing great work, pumping out great ideas. But we’re killin’ it. Proof is in the pudding. We’re landing bigger, bolder and better projects by the quarter it seemed. And then…

🏷️ The unthinkable happened.

Tik Tok did to Joe the unthinkable (especially if you know him): they took his video down. Like Joe, we had the unthinkable happen. We didn’t deliver someone else’s definition of great. Which in the end, is the only definition that matters.

We knew the risks, we tested thoroughly, on-site leading into the event we felt great. But once things got going, it was clear, things weren’t great. And we got shut down. Truly unthinkable. In the last four years, we have pumped out bangers. Nothing remotely close to not delivering the goods.

But that’s the definition of unthinkable. Of all the viral opportunities we’ve had, this one was considered the Santa Paws of them all. This was going to be that hang-your-hat kinda delivery, until it wasn’t.

🔮 That bear is you, but not all of you.

It’s tough to come back from something like that. We really struggled to figure out exactly where to begin. Then we remembered, learnings from that experience certainly taught us something about areas we could grow, but it also affirmed there’s way more to us, and we’re built, through humility and wisdom, to come out of the other side somehow even greater.

Lookout 2025, a bear’s coming.

PS: You know you’re from my generation when you think it’s spelled Santa Clause. There’s just no possible way it can be anything different. Ho ho ho.

(Don’t) Optimize Your Life

This last week I finally caved to one of the hundreds of instagram hacks of everyday items that promise to optimize that imperfect thing you own. (That my wife lovingly sends on a daily basis.)

You see, this time, I actually agreed that the Step2 Water Table did have a major flaw: no consistent water flow. I had that thought when I put it together a few months ago, then wham, a hack! Now it can be perfect.

Here’s the takeaway: living an optimized life usually has setbacks greater than the gift you gave yourself. There’s actually a sick article by Leo Babauta that you should totally read in full heresies that provides a great Case Against Optimization for this among other reasons, but first, the water table.

  • The table has a part that flows water down a shoot which leads to slides, gears and this cool tipsy teeter totter piece. My son loves watching the water take a fun little journey to the bottom maybe more than just dripping from the middle.
  • When you install that pump, it actually is placed over and through (therefore blocking) that part of the water table, making it totally unusable and pointless.

As I stood back and watched this for the first time, I just thought how much of a cost this new optimized benefit came with, and I didn’t love it. But maybe my son would?

  • Nah. You see, there’s a plastic straw that the pump uses to pull water from the bottom. Guess what any 1.5 year old is going to do? Pull that straw right out from the bottom.
  • In what world would I have thought the consistent flow of water would ever beat pulling on a plastic straw that pops out from something and then he can swing it around and hit stuff? (I am a first time father.)

That hack was totally whack. I reflected on this way more than the average person should. Which takes us back to Leo’s article, he has two considerations that I love regarding optimizations:

  1. The savings never get realized.
  2. Optimizing is a focus on what’s not important.

The savings (my time physically pouring water through the top) was literally never realized. Speaking of me physically pouring water through the top, that’s actually the most important thing: playing with my son.

So what is there to take into our vocations? Focus less on trying to make things perfect and more on doing less. You see, this water table is already perfect. It’s actually what it needs to be. If the engineers thought consitent flowing water would make it better, it would come with it, right? What they didn’t bet on, is you overriding its actual design for another purpose.

Not long ago I wrote an article about how I’m transitioning from a year of growing our processes to pruning those same ones I’ve built. Why? We’re spending more time trying to optimize and less time playing. What have you been spending time on optimizing again and again and still standing back without the savings realized? What happens if you just did less…

ps: an argument could be made that doing less is actually just optimizing in the other direction, but my point still stands!

If you really want to change everything, you have to use your imagination

best prac·tice | noun

commerical or professional procedures that are accepted or prescribed as being correct or most effective

🤔 Recenly, I sat in a meeting with a think-tank team made up of capable, invested and determined-to-get-things-right-this-time-people. The question for this particular session was: what are the blue-sky ideas that you would implement if you had the power, authority and resources to do so?

10 minutes into our discussion it hit me… we were over-valuing experience and under-estimating our imagination. All I was hearing were best practices. Simple, low-hanging fruit, easy win ideas that honestly could be implemented simply by someone choosing to do it at a regular rhythm, with follow-up that involved collaboration with at least one other person. That’s not to say they weren’t great ideas. I just wasn’t hearing them as original.

🧙 Then I tossed out what I thought was the first truly blue-sky idea I’d heard all meeting: we need a magic harry-potter sorting hat that helps guide people to where they should be based on more than just logistics, ie, time, place, etc.

What I was getting at is we need to lean into our creative strength and turn that weird but strangely accurate wizard hat into a digital product. That it needs to be so good, so precise and so well built for the long run that you can’t deny how spot on it was in leading you to where you needed to be.

We do a lot more reimagining of best practices than actually using our imagination.

Have you ever tried to Google a question like this:

  • Tips for building a great website.
  • How much does a mobile app cost?
  • Keys to marketing that works.
  • Ways to skin a cat.

What do you usually get as results in your search? Stuff like this probably…

  • 7 Keys that Don’t Work for Business Today
  • 12 Ways You Can Improve Your Website
  • 19 Essentials to a Great Mobile App
  • (According to most, there are 50 ways to skin a cat.)

‘Best practices’ are simply the average of what everyone else has already done. Here’s the reality: you’re never going to find innovation rooted in a best practice.

So here’s the question for you this week: if you had the power, authority and resources — what would your blue sky idea be? Use your imagination.

(Go from Project Manager to Performance Moderator with AIDon’t) Optimize Your Life

Some jumpers out the gate:

  • Dax Shepard has the absolute best editing of any podcast. Whatever tool they use to cut the dead-space (dare I say it’s an AI tool) is clutch.
  • Bill Gates is a stud. Microsoft products are not my vibe, but this dude spun up something for the other half of the world and they’re using it.
  • I wanted to answer one question this year: what benefit does AI actually have for PM’s who don’t need help spinning up emails and summaries?

Although he doesn’t say it overtly in their conversation, “Trey,” as he is aptly known inside the family tree, calls out what AI can do to not just make meetings easier, but better.

The main squeeze: using note taking software can take PM’s from facilitators to moderators.

Ever since I’ve been using Meetgeek Team* to be our least expensive, but eternally valuable employee, I’ve been able to do what no one else on our team is uniquely wired to do: moderate the discussion.

  • Chew gum and walk.
  • Execute and analyze.
  • Notetake and moderate.

Those three have the same core tenet: multi-tasking is impossible. I don’t know about you, but I despise taking notes. Not because it’s arduous, but because it takes away from my giftings. It splits my attention. The greatest value I bring to the team as a PM, is my ability to guide everything along. That includes timelines, attentions, discussions and conclusions.

What Trey is saying in this pod, AI is a wee bit scary, sure. But it will open up your time, attention and capacity to a place that we haven’t seen since agriculture took hold, industrial revolution and more.

So hop on the AI notetaking train and watch your value skyrocket.

*totally integrates with Asana like a treat.

ps: is there an AI tool that lets you know if you’re using a word correctly? I slung “aptly” out there pretty fearlessly, but I’m resisting seeing if I used it correctly just for the sake of this example.

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