Jeff Shearer

It’s not hyperbole to say that many video games today increasingly resemble a job, at least in terms of time commitment required and a task completion-based progression system. In World of Warcraft, you have endless quests to complete, all with clear objectives guiding you where you need to go on the map, telling you what needs to happen next, and what reward is in store for you if you complete the quest.

You could easily spend an entire work day completing virtual quests for artificial rewards, while neglecting your real work with real reward.

Why is it that a game can hold such sway over our motivations, while the motivation to tackle a tough project can elude us?

I think it boils down to clarity. Clarity in objectives – the steps that must be done to complete the task. And clarity in reward – what’s in it for us?

In a game, these are simply design considerations to display to the user. But in our own projects – we must do the work to both lay out the steps to the plan, and articulate the reward we expect.

Of course we’re more likely to complete a task if we’ve clearly identified all the steps and order of operations. Of course we’ll be motivated to do the work if we know what’s in it for us.

But even knowing this, chances are we all have tasks and projects on our plates that could do with some of this planning. We ought to think about how we can infuse some gameplay design into our productivity systems. Take the ambiguity away and replace it with clear next steps.

Too often the work that gets our attention is the urgent, rather than the important. Sometimes the urgent tasks can also be important, but too often we’re sidelining the truly crucial projects for the stuff that just seems like a fire drill today.

A useful exercise in priorities is laying out your possible projects side by side, and asking – “which of these, completed, will either make the others easier to complete or irrelevant?”

Doing this forces the important work to bubble to the top, while distractions and merely urgent tasks can be seen more plainly.

I recently got a chance to brew a batch of beer with the professional brewers at a local brewery by me. Beer brewing is a remarkably scientific, exacting process. There’s calculations and formulae to consider. Exact temperatures and volumes to adhere to. But invariably, things change as the brew day unfolds, and suddenly the plan set by the data has deviated. Instincts are needed to figure out what has to happen next.

In 2019, instincts get a bad rap. There’s a huge narrative around data driven decision making, and for good reason. We’ve got easier and deeper access to data than ever before, and with it we can move past subjective decision making and the errors it can cause, and instead trust in the data to guide us.

I think this is a fine sentiment in most cases. But when work truly goes off the rails, or when the data cannot be trusted yet, good instincts are uncommonly useful. Especially in marketing, a maddeningly complex blend of science and art, if it were simply a numbers game, we’d all be pursing the exact same strategy. And at times, it even looks and feels that way, given how much pursuit of “best practice” has homogenized many a company’s marketing strategy.

Yet it’s the deviations—the areas where companies take a chance, or try something despite the data not supporting it—where the interesting stuff really happens. We can’t be afraid to use our instincts, and shouldn’t dismiss solid experience in areas of crisis.

If you’re someone used to excelling at everything you try, it’s helpful to cut your ego down to size and pick hobbies you’re likely to suck at.

For me that’s been bread baking. Most of my attempts thus far have been too dense, over proofed, underbaked, or overbaked. But each try has taught me something.

I decided to up the challenge recently with sourdough baking. I think I finally figured out how to make and revive the starter, but I still can’t seem to get a good rise out of it. And the information available online is conflicting.

Baking has the reputation of a scientific endeavor, and it certainly does require precision for consistent results. But there isn’t always a perfect path each time. You’ve got to build an instinct for it rather than simply follow a recipe to the letter.

But that’s the beauty of it. After all, if it was just a matter of following the guide perfectly, what fun and challenge would there be in that?

An old boss of mine once gifted me a copy of Mastery, by George Leonard, a book about the pursuit and cultivation of skills over the long term. A key concept in this book is learning to recognize and embrace the plateaus inherent in learning something challenging and new. It made a big impression on me.

When we take up a new skill, it’s easy to get addicted to the constant improvements and milestones to reach. We learn to love the feeling of improvement every day. But this feeling invariably disappears as our strides slow, and we eventually hit a wall. It’s easy to see this as a barrier to further progress. But the trick is to recognize this is no wall, but simply a plateau to the next climb. Sometimes it even involves some backwards progress first.

Patience and persistence are how one truly pursues mastery over the long term. To weather through the plateaus, we’ve got to learn to love them as much as the growth. with the plateaus. After all, they’re just a sign that what we’re working towards is well worth the journey.

I like to grow a vegetable garden in my backyard during the summer, and with it already midsummer, now’s a good chance to see where I’m at. The answer is…not so exciting.

I’ve got some tomato plants doing pretty well, some green beans, some arugula and radishes, and four hop bines. I spent some time in the yard this past weekend tending to these plants, and realized some of the plants were a little overgrown, and all the garden beds were overrun with weeds.

In spring there’s a big exciting day where I get to plan out the garden beds and plant everything. And I always seem to tell myself that’s all there is to it. Yet with no tending, my vegetable garden doesn’t get far. And if you wait too long to deal with the maintenance of weeding and pruning, it changes from a quick few minutes of work once a week to a pretty huge cleanup effort. Which was exactly what I was stuck with this past weekend

Sticking with any project over the long haul is more about the regular maintenance chipping away at the work, rather than some huge up-front effort. It’s the continued, methodical routine that gets us across the finish line.

In a throwaway line during his interview with Eddie Murphy on Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee, Jerry Seinfeld said something to the effect of “Today we all have a lack of focus. And that’s why we have a lack of greatness.”

There are endless choices and options for us to take in careers, hobbies, and pure diversions. The mere choice available is enough to overwhelm, and too often rather than carefully choosing from our options, we instead try to do it all. We half ass many things instead of focusing our attention in one place at once.

And then we wonder why greatness in our work eludes us. The underrated skill of this age is focus. We have more opportunity than ever, but we’re far worse off if we can’t learn to choose.

Ten years ago when I first got my start in social media, the blog was seeing as this magical tool to build an audience. You’d post, and see comments from strangers and friends alike. People would share it just because they could.

But as social media has consolidated, the blog has fallen a bit out of favor. To be fair, there are probably more blogs than ever, but the focus and effort has undeniably shifted towards strategies on social sites, advertising, and other channels.

The practice of maintaining a personal blog has dwindled in the same way. More and more of our time is spent consuming social media feeds rather than reading an RSS feed. What’s the point maintaining a blog like this one if no one is likely to read it?

That’s all missing the point though. The primary motivation for maintaining a blog like this must be for the writer, not some imagined reader. If an audience shows up, great, but that’s secondary. When we lose sight of that, we start focusing on clicks, conversions, and likes. These can be benchmarks, but they’re not the point. A guy like Seth Godin have built his business and fame around his blog, but he’s probably a rarity. And I’d be willing to bet even if there were no external value to his blog, he’d probably still keep writing there.

A good test of your motivations is to ask yourself the question “If I was the last person on earth, would I keep doing this work anyway?”

When thinking about documentation, it’s easy to go overboard with detail. The trick is to maintain the right balance of thoroughness and accessibility.

It starts with recognizing what documentation should not be. If you’re the owner of a piece of martech, you probably don’t need to be documenting every detail about how to use the application. That can be left for the user guides and docs the vendor themselves produce.

Your job instead is to document what’s different for your company. How a specific program works. The steps needed to execute this process. Link to the user guides of relevance, but focus on documenting the knowledge only you could know.

Too many people try to boil the ocean with their docs, and get overwhelmed doing it. Yet when you view this process as just the essentials, you may find documentation to be a lot lighter weight of a project than it first seems.

One of the breakout features of the Google apps suite (docs, sheets, slides, etc) is the live collaboration features. Anyone can edit, comment, and suggest in real time.

This works beautifully, but when it comes to checking a past version, Google docs weirdly… sucks. To be fair, it has version history that captures every edit, all the way back to the creation of the document. That’s admirable. But the interface for checking version history is sluggish, confusing, and often more trouble than it’s worth.

I’m reminded that Google already solved this a better way with Google Wave nearly a decade ago. It was essentially a timeline that let you replay the changes as if you were watching a recording of them as they happened.

Instead, Google seems focused with generating named versions of a doc, I guess the idea being that you can see that the document was edited on July 21st by Jane Doe. The problem is that many docs could have dozens of edits over time – and just seeing a big list of them isn’t much help. It also doesn’t help that the loading of the past versions is painfully slow. Most of the time, I just don’t bother.

It all just gets in the way of, what I imagine is many users’ desire, to simply scrub through the past changes as they happen to find the specific moment an edit was made (and by whom).

I’d feel a lot better about clearing out old notes and fully committing to real time editing if I could rely on version history. But for now at least, that’s not in the cards.