I had a hard time early in my career adjusting to office life. It’s so prone to distraction and interruption that it can drive anyone a little crazy sometimes. I spent most of my early career in office jobs, later getting to work a day or two remote on rare occasions. Now I work entirely remote, and I’d have a hard time ever looking back.

The reason, I think, is because remote work allows you to dictate the terms of interaction with the rest of your team. In an office, anyone can “stop by” and interrupt what you’re doing at any time. Since you’re visible in the office, most people take that as an open door policy.

But when you’re remote, digital tools are needed for this stop by – and while you’ve still got to be present and available in a remote environment, the asynchronous nature of communication means you can finish what you’re doing before you shift your attention to a request.

It’s a small difference—after all, you still have to deal with those interruptions, you just get to choose when—but it’s made all the difference for me. I still feel present and involved with my team throughout the day, and feel like anyone is accessible when I need them. We’ve just managed to cut out instant interruptions in favor of handling requests on our own terms.

I’ve always been drawn to DIY in both work and personal life. I like the self reliance that comes with learning a skill, even to just a novice level, and solving a problem myself.

But at some point, especially in my career, I started seeing DIY as a negative trait. As if my roles should instead revolve around hiring the work out to outside agencies and consultants rather than tackling it within my team. As if DIY was holding me back. The reasoning was time, efficiency, and leveraging existing expertise rather than building it internally.

I used to do habitat for humanity every summer in high school. I learned how to do all sorts of home construction work, including drywall installation. Even now, years later, I roughly remember how to install and mud dry wall. And I never want to do it again. It’s so tedious. If I ever need drywall work done, you can bet I’ll hire that work out.

I could take this same attitude with any home improvement project, but as I’ve tried it myself first, I know, for instance, that I really like to paint. I like small woodworking projects. I like yard and garden work. If I hadn’t first done it myself, I’d have never known these truths.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with contracting out the work. Sometimes you need it done quick, you need it done to a certain level that your team isn’t currently equipped to reach, or the work is not meaningful enough to distract you from other projects.

But I think this becomes a problem when it’s our default approach. When we’re too quick to take the shortcut solution rather than first learning a bit about it ourselves. When you go DIY, it informs your later decisions . After all, if you know how it’s done, you can decide if you want to do it yourself again next time.

Multitouch attribution is pitched as a nirvana for most B2B marketing teams. Yet there are a few problems with allowing these systems to reach their full potential. In fact, some of these can make an attribution model downright unreliable.

Accounting for unconverted leads

This is, of course, Salesforce specific, but most attribution models deal only in contacts when it comes to opportunity influence. Leads that should belong on the account, but have yet to be converted rarely are considered in this model. The issue here is that you may have relevant, recent activity that is left unconsidered when viewing your opportunity influence.

All Contacts vs Only Contact Roles

An early limitation of attribution tools (and the campaign influence reporting of Salesforce) was that they only looked at contacts that were marked with a contact role on the opportunity. This was problematic because by default, contact roles would only get associated if consciously added by the opp creator. At best you’d get one contact role, being the person who was converted from a lead into an opp, but you couldn’t hope for much more than that. This is the specific limitation that makes the built in Salesforce influence reporting so useless.

Nowadays most of the tools allow you to consider any contacts on the account for attribution weighting, but this creates a new problem – you may be pulling in activity and contacts that aren’t relevant to this opp, and diluting the real influencing touchpoints.

Attribution models are blind to certain touchpoints

Attribution tools come in a couple flavors, and often the differences between the tools come down to how well they track certain touchpoints over others. But bottom line, no out of the box tool is equally effective at tracking all touchpoints, despite their claims. Bizible, for instance, is most focused on tracking digital touchpoints, and it does it well – better than anyone else I’d argue. But their offline tracking leaves a lot to be desired, and requires manual configuration for every touchpoint type.

Bottom line, the value proposition of attribution models is to weigh all meaningful interactions related to the sale – but it turns out it’s tricky to actually pull in all those interactions for consideration.

What about add on and upgrade opportunities?

The tools available today are almost exclusively focused on prospecting scenarios – that is, the initial opportunity for an account. What they’re poor at handling is future buying cycles at an account. Existing customer upsell/cross sell, renewals, and more. They tend to lump all touchpoints into all opps, meaning you’re counting influence for activities that have nothing to do with the current opportunity. This is exacerbated when you have multiple buying groups or business units within the same account – your influence wires will get crossed.

Artificial limits from the attribution providers

Frustratingly, attribution vendors often market themselves as a tool to consider every interaction, yet in reality they place hard limits on the amount of touchpoints they even allow you visibility to. This means you’re looking at only a subset of the interactions that occurred, once again affecting the weighting of your attribution model.

This makes one wonder if attribution is even worth it. These are all solvable scenarios, either with the right mix of vendors, and likely some custom work on top of it. But even with a perfectly humming system, you still have challenges, namely in conveying understanding and buy in from the rest of the organization. Which is arguably even harder to solve. Not to say it isn’t worth solving – but it’s important to recognize attribution is not simply solved by activating a third party solution.

It’s easy to throw your hands up in frustrating when you encounter bad data and broken systems. As an ops guy, I’m frequently exposed to these sorts of situations, and I used to get despondent over it. It can make you feel as if nothing is working, and there isn’t time in the day to fix everything that needs fixing.

Of course, the solution to this is to just fix one thing. And then the next thing. One by one. And what’s interesting is as you solve one problem, other problems tend to fade away in significance, or solve themselves when you remove other barriers.

Theres this great puzzle game called The Witness that works a bit like this. All over an island are line puzzles, each similar but containing some new element with no guidance on what they mean, or how they work. I think there’s at least 12-15 distinct systems to learn, each containing dozens of puzzles increasing in complexity. You could view each as an insurmountable task to solve. And solving just one puzzle doesn’t feel like much progress at all. But interestingly, as you solve one segment, you learn clues to help mastering another segment easier. By the end, the speed at which you can solve segments dramatically increases, because the earlier work built on itself.

It’s worth a reminder when it seems like there’s just too much to do. The best thing you can do is start. You may be surprised what fades away from importance once you get going.

I’ve been reading Cal Newport’s “Digital Minimalism”, and I’ve decided to try out the “digital declutter” exercise he describes in the first half of the book. Basically it’s an elimination diet of optional apps & entertainment on your devices. The goal being to get back to a baseline, and giving yourself the perspective to consider whether a certain app is creating true value in your life, or is just another distraction worth cutting out from your life permanently.

I’ve built a list of the technology I want to eliminate during this 30 day period. Mostly distracting apps and websites, but I’m also limiting entertainment like streaming services and video games.

I already consider myself someone with a healthy relationship with technology, but I’ve no doubt the transition and adjustment period of having to find new ways to fill idle time will be tough. I’ve already identified reading, writing, and exercise as good substitutes during this period, but also a chance to get reacquainted with my hobbies.

This is day 1.

“Jean-Louis Gassee, who used to run Apple France, describes this situation as the choice between two tokens. When you deal with people who have trouble, you can either choose to take the token that says ‘It’s no big deal’ or the token that says ‘It’s the end of the world.’ Whichever token you pick, they’ll take the other.”

This is one of my favorite stories from It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy at Work. And I was reminded of the value of this lesson recently on tax day. I’ve always done my taxes myself. But we finally decided to work with a professional this year. It was just getting too complicated. And even though I had all my paperwork set up months beforehand, the accounting firm was way behind schedule. Maybe they were busy, maybe new regulations slowed them down. But it was bad enough that on tax day, we still weren’t filed, and we ended up having to file an extension instead.

I could have done the logical thing and chewed out the accountants for letting this happen. For not prioritizing our return. For not communicating enough. But once we were at April 15, I recognized that sort of reaction probably wasn’t going to do much to fix the situation. Instead, I could learn from the situation, move forward, and deal with the extension afterward. So I decided to treat the situation like it was no big deal, and let the firm take the “it’s the end of the world” token.

It’s worth distinguishing this lesson is all about emotions and how you react in the moment. Once you get past the drama and are able to look at the situation with a clear head, you can decide what to do next. I could decide to take my taxes elsewhere next year. Or I could give them another shot. But in the moment, it’s usually worth taking the “it’s no big deal” token.

I made a big breakthrough solving a tricky data problem, and suddenly a barrier I had been stuck on for weeks was gone. It was one of those days where I was completely in the zone, and had lost track of the time as a result.

I was due to go on a run that day, just my usual, modest distance. But as I started, I noticed I was feeling especially great. And when the point came to turn around, I just blew past it. I ended running nearly twice the distance I usually do.

What’s interesting here is the sequence of events. Usually exercise is pitched as a way to improve focus and clarity for your work. But I discovered that the opposite is true too. A great day at work can lead the way to achievements outside of work. You can chain your breakthroughs together.

Running is as much of a mental exercise as a physical one. At a certain point of fitness, the issue is less whether you can physically run the distance, but if you are mentally able to stick with it. And this is the same mental endurance that comes into play when you’re presented with any problem in life that requires effort to work through.

And since we’re talking about endurance, it’s important to recognize that there’s a recovery period before you’re at full capacity. So don’t expect every day will be a monumental breakthrough. Give yourself time between those efforts.

It’s quite easy to let yourself get distracted by less-than-urgent projects, or time sink requests. That’s all before you factor in outside distractions. Social media, entertainment, and more are all vying for your clicks and time. I keep pretty strict standards for my work life to remain productive and focused, but some days it’s hard to stay disciplined.

So I’ve been experimenting with a productivity app called Freedom that I original heard about from Craig Mod. You install it on your devices, set up the sites and apps you want suppress, and then set a schedule you want to abide by. Anytime you try and visit one of those sites while the app is active,Freedom shows a simple message instead, and refocusing you back on the work.

Initially it’s a little jarring to see how often I idly was checking certain sites for updates, only to be presented with a blocked message each time. But now a week or so into the process, I’m getting used to it. And I now find most of the temptation to visit the distracting sites is gone. Of course you have to maintain some balance—I build in breaks where the app pauses. In doing this, taking some time to visit a favorite blog or catch up on social media feels more like a treat than the idle, mindless scrolling exercise it once was for me.

It’s well worth a try.

When they start a new job, the smart worker spends most of their time listening. Listening to what happened before. To “why we do it this way”. Not as a substitute for action, but as research. After all, it would be foolish to start making decisions without any context of the situation.

It’s tempting to view points of friction or problems in the system as the problems of the people who created them. It’s natural to believe that your responsibility is looking forward, not backward. Yet a problem that was created “before your time” is still your problem. And to solve it, you’ve got to be willing to own it completely.

Some of those inherited problems are bigger than others. Some you need to address sooner rather than later. But the moment you step into the shoes of the person responsible, you’re on the hook for finding solutions. Being the new person is like a tax return extension. You may get a bit more time, but your taxes are still owed.

When I started the altMBA last year, they mailed me a big box of books and some random supplies. In it were a few postcards with Seth Godin-isms like “Make a Ruckus”. And another that says “Money is a story.” Seth can be a little cryptic in his meaning at times. And I never really understood his meaning behind this particular phrase, until this week.

With Avengers: Endgame just hitting theaters, the speculation is higher than ever on which characters will live and who will die. It’s interesting to go down rabbit holes of fan theories, but I’ve found it’s actually pretty easy to figure out what will happen purely by what’s planned next for the series.

And for Marvel, that means more Spiderman, Guardians of the Galaxy, and more. In short – they spoiled their own ending simply by showing off what’s next in the pipeline. What their next moneymakers will be. And in that, I realized what Seth means by “money is a story”. By following the money – who’s pursuing it, and the means with which they pursue it, it can say a lot of about the motivations and the story for why. You can reverse engineer the path someone is taking simply by looking at the money.

We can see it in ourselves too – why we chose the career we’re on. Why we happily fork over hundreds of dollars towards a hobby, yet balk at paying for a parking spot. You can learn a lot about yourself by following the money. But remember others are trying to figure out your money story too – and it may not always be a narrative you’re excited to reveal.