Recently, I did a small talk for my colleagues and thought it might be useful to share with you, too - along with some additional comments that came up in the discussion.

We were talking about productivity.

It all started with a campaign we have been working on for the last few weeks. It was a classic case of an idea turning into a full-scale project. Sometimes that’s just how things go :)

Now, even though we had little time to organize it, I still needed to prepare a plan of some kind. I came up with a spreadsheet listing around 40 activities across 16 weeks, involving 12 or so different people.

Question: how long did it take me to plan it?

An hour, 4 hours, a day?

Nope.

45 minutes.

In less than an hour I had a plan ready to go and could start dividing up responsibilities.

Seems quick? Yup. And this is where the secret comes in.

I used a template.

I know, not rediscovering the wheel here. But this is what helps my team and myself work faster.

Process = Shortcut

What do I mean by a process? Any technique that allows you to build upon something that’s already been done. It can be a template, a checklist, a to-do list, or anything else that means you don’t have to start from nothing.

This is the biggest upside of using a process. You don’t have to figure it out from scratch. You already have a reference point and some basic steps to follow that will guide you to the outcome you’re (hopefully) looking for.

This also applies to creative work. For graphic design, you might have templates. For painting, you’ll have guides. For writing, you have structure. These are some simple examples. But you can also make them more advanced. For a campaign, you may have a schedule template. For a project, it might be a framework.

A process can be as simple or as complex as you need it to be. But its main function is always the same - it should save time and effort.

Why do we resist processes?

As I’m writing this, I’m wondering if there’s actually any research on it. If you come across anything interesting - let me know in the comments. Here, I’ll share my thoughts on it.

I think there may be two main reasons why we don’t trust processes:

1. Boredom - the fear that repetitiveness will stifle creativity

2. Fear of replacement - i.e. “if everything is repeatable, a script/robot can replace me”.

Here I will use one of my favorite quotes:

Repetitiveness doesn’t have to be boring

One problem we might have with processes is that they are boring. If something is repeatable, it will be the same every time, right?

Sure, there is that. Practice makes perfect but there are few things as boring as repeating the same thing over and over, just so your brain will finally remember it.

But it doesn’t have to be the same with creative works. Think about memes - how many different ideas can come from a single format?

It’s the same in the business world. If you’ve been in marketing for a while, no doubt you will have come across loads of templates: for press releases, landing pages, case studies, emails…

Generally, there’s plenty of creativity with templates themselves, as it’s quite hard to find two which would be the same :) But even so, thousands of professionals like you and me use them to create things on a daily basis. And each result is completely different, because even though we’ve got the same templates, we have completely different stories to tell, viewed from completely different perspectives.

You can work on the same thing over and over and still come up with new ways to do it. When it comes to creativity, constraints can be a useful tool, instead of a problem.

Side note: here’s a short piece on how constraints can actually improve your productivity by removing wasted effort. Trying to find some research on it I came across this meta-analysis that looks at the relationship between constraints and productivity and whether one is affected by the other. Long story short: it depends :) But I’ll leave that for another time.

The robots won’t rise up… yet

Ok, so no surprise that I’m not exactly the world’s foremost authority on artificial intelligence. But speaking to the people who know something about it I learned that we’re quite safe and will be for some time yet :)

From a user’s point of view though: I sometimes use AI-based tools to help with my writing. They can help with getting the ideas flowing. Sometimes they allow me to see the topic from a different perspective.

But honestly? A good 90% of the time the results these tools give me are complete nonsense. The messaging either makes no sense or doesn’t communicate what I’m trying to say at all.

You may have seen some text like that on various websites. It's stuffed with keywords, so Google bots and crawlers can feed on them and push the pages to the top of the rankings. Which is fine for its purpose, but a nightmare to read.

This is exactly the kind of stuff AI is great for. Making content for other AIs. But as long as AIs don’t do the actual buying for us, we’ll still need human-made content.

The bottom line is, it will take some time before the algorithms can do our jobs for us. And when they do, I for one will be all the happier for it - they’ll give me more time for the more complex stuff, like, say, dealing with other people.

When I first gave this little presentation, my teammate brought up a third aspect at this point - stagnation.

Eventually, we might end up going through the motions without giving any thought as to why we came up with the process in the first place.

I figured this observation needs its own section, so here we go:

Process =/= Excuse

Having a process is just a starting point. It allows you to skip over the effort that has been made previously and begin at a more advanced stage.

But there’s an important point to remember here: some processes suck. Maybe they worked at first, but times have moved on, teams have grown, needs have changed, and what is still there no longer fits into the new reality.

Maybe they were bad from the beginning but no one bothered with anything better.

Which is why it’s not enough to just take whatever’s there and run with it. You need to look at it critically.

It does not mean criticising.

It means taking a step back, evaluating something objectively, without making any assumptions. Does this process work? Is it effective? Repeatable? Transparent? Fair? (You can add more features here as you need.)

And, most importantly: How can I make it better?

If nothing else, do this part: Take what’s there and make it better.

Continuous iterations? That’s just fancy talk for continuous improvement.

That’s how you move forward.

Speaking of which: I need to go practice. See you next time.

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