I am always focused on solving current problems and creating systems that prevent future ones.
Where I work, we keep a very steady pulse. In Traction lingo, we’re a 90-day company. That means we set detailed, quarterly goals and monitor them in weekly departmental meetings that everyone attends. Each person on team, including me, is responsible for these goals; they’re documented and understood by all.
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As usual, last quarter was very busy. I got the following things done:
- launched Newfangled’s podcast, Agency Marketing Matters. We’ve published seven episodes so far, and have new ones coming out every two weeks.
- completed my sixteenth design consulting engagement for the year. I’ve got a few more scheduled before the end of 2016, but I’d say they’re going well.
- wrote a white paper detailing my methodology for auditing applied interaction design called Better than Beautiful: Keeping Your Website Design Accountable.
- also wrote a five-part series on a concept I’ve been calling purposeful user flow and how it applies to website design.
- co-hosted a webinar with three of my colleagues on The Design of Marketing
- redesigned this website
- got much closer to my fitness goal of 12% body fat with no weight loss. Just 1% left to go!
- My wife and I made a baby, due in February, 2017
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I’ve got a few specific professional goals this quarter. They include:
- updating Newfangled.com to reflect our most current capabilities
- completely revamping our internal resourcing system and production processes. I and the rest of our client services and development team have this as our biggest goal for this year. We believe our system needs to be deconstructed and simplified; that there are only two rules we must follow in doing our work: (1) Keeping to a project’s budget, which determines the number of hours may spend working on it, and (2) Keeping to our company’s utilization “budget,” which determines the number of hours an employee may work each week. Outside of those rules, we believe that we are a group of competent professionals able to leverage our expertise in whatever way will best solve the problem.
- designing interfaces for our marketing data engine
- documenting all new processes introduced in 2016
- finishing three consulting engagements
- writing a few articles
- planning and executing an invite-only event for agencies running on the Traction model with Mark
- beginning the planning for the 2017 Newfangled Seminar
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I also have a few personal goals that I’m working on, some of which I’m carrying over from last quarter:
- maintaining my newsletter
- “spring cleaning” my media intake (I need new voices in my head, so that means finding new podcasts and writing that help to broaden my thinking around the things I care about, and letting go of some old ones that no longer make sense to spend attention on)
- keeping up with a daily journal that I started this year (it’s not a deep habit yet, but will be, I hope)
- getting our house in order for the newest member of our family
— Updated on Tuesday, November 1, 2016.