Moving Higher: From Productivity to Creativity

Yes!

That is how my Evernote Calendar looked on 14^th July.

I watched TV, read a few pages from Sapiens, went for a long leisurely walk with a neighbor, chatted with my mother for hours, dozed off in the afternoon (which is very unusual), prepared dinner (which I do every day though) – You need to feel the power of doing nothing, once in a while. That does not happen. This is the closest I could get.

I checked Watsapp just once or twice throughout the day to see if our tenant had sent a copy of the agreement for us to review before he takes a printout. Later, I realized I should not have done that and should have just kept my phone away too. They would have called me after sending the draft for me to check. So you see - habitual thinking patterns and a nagging old habit that continued for many years, just do not fade way, one fine Saturday. 

It takes time.

Though I was away from my laptop I had a mental plan what I will be doing once I open my laptop just before going to sleep. I had sent sample of our work to a prospect and wondered if it will look unprofessional if there was no response from our end, in case they had sought some clarification pertaining to the sample.

I immediately put that thought to rest remembering it was a Saturday and they better get the message right from us at the very outset - what to expect during weekends:

No response; No work; No assignments: No Delivery Deadlines.

Recently in response to our pitch to a prospect from India, he proposed to have a call late in the evening, around 8 PM. We proposed 5 PM and snap it went - there was no response after that.

Did we follow up? Well, we are notoriously famous for never doing that with anyone. Here goes our simple logic and rationale.

When you move a call to fag end of the day, it isn’t important either ways, why have it then?

Dude, it is your startup. Feel free to work 20 hours a day, we don’t care. 

We care about our creativity big time. 

We do deep work just for a few hours a week not because we look up to Tim Ferris or Cal New Port but because we cannot produce creativity at factory or industry level - just yet. That requires focus and fresh state of mind.

If a prospect can move an introductory call to discuss a possible business engagement to late evening, almost dinner time, we draw our tested, sure shot conclusions - This is not his priority.

Those days are gone when the service providers will accommodate prospect's time just to be in the game.

We are not half as smart as the others are who do what we do. We are just more disciplined and we like it that way to keep our creativity intact.

The world is moving towards Gig economy. We work for global clients, we work as a virtual team, we work in different time zones, we work specific hours, we work on different assignments, we utilize our bandwidth across industries and we have over 45 skills sets in our growing team. 

We care to be creative, effective and measure outcomes.

We as a team, know and believe - it is not enough to be just productive by squeezing in another quick call just to feel good and to make calendars and Evernote look super nice.

"On_the_way_back_home" call is not our way of working.