Author: chris

On Workantile’s 10th Birthday

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A Message on Jan. 31st 2011

“oh, btw: I’m working at the workantile exchange today…seems to be very nice”

But Why

I showed up to Workantile after a year of working from home. To say I was feeling isolated is an understatement. I’d moved to be closer to my then-girlfriend now-wife who was in the midst of a PhD program. She was tremendously busy. I was tremendously not. Days would pass where I didn’t leave the apartment or, honestly, talk to anyone. It was a bad scene.

Eventually she convinced me to get out there and try working from anywhere other than my apartment. I did, and it helped. Even going to a coffeeshop for an hour a day was a breath of fresh air. On a whim one day I poked my head into Workantile and it was like coming home.

I sent her the following message the next day:

“Working at the workantile exchange makes me feel like I’m not alone. “

Loneliness in Remote Work

Being in your 20s in a new place, unmoored and rootless is tough.

In 2019, most people at least get the general idea of “remote work”. In 2011 you had to explain it whenever it came up in conversation, and your choices for getting out of the house were either: rent an office, or huddle at tables in coffee shops or the library. Be sure to pack everything up when you have to use the bathroom or make a call! And good luck with the wifi situation. I didn’t even know what coworking was until I wandered in the door, but quickly realized that it needed to be part of my daily routine.

On day 2 I sent this message to a friend:

“everyone here understands what it’s like to telecommute…they’ve created a telecommuters paradise”

A Note to Workantile

I sent this note to our email list at the end of my first week. I spent far too time worrying about sending it.

Was it coming across too strongly? Too eager? Will they kick me out for being honest?

Reading it 8 years later I’m extremely glad I clicked send:

Everyone’s willingness to [invite] some guy who wandered in off the street was incredibly refreshing. Quite a different experience than working from a too-quiet isolating house. You all know this already, but the Workantile Exchange is a pretty special place.

We’re thankfully more diverse than in 2011; however, the aspects that attracted me to Workantile are still the same. Everyone here is still curious and friendly. Our coffee comes from Hyperion instead of Zingerman’s now. We have a different name, new chairs, more monitors, people have different laptops. We’ve weathered budget crises and are working towards becoming a non-profit. For my part, in 2013 I changed jobs, but stayed at workantile. My boss and I met at Workantile and still keep memberships here along with our ever increasing number of coworkers.

It’s good, it’s constant, it’s foundational to so many of our lives.

The Future

The physical space on main street is ancillary to Workantile’s purpose of bringing remote workers together. Heck, most of my friends in Ann Arbor are former or current members. And it’s not an overstatement to say that without the community here my wife and I wouldn’t have chosen to settle down here. It’s made opportunities and decisions possible for us that flat out wouldn’t have been the case if it didn’t exist.

10 years is an extremely long time in business years and no matter what happens in the future we should celebrate that it made it that long. I’m personally hopeful we make it another 10 (and another 50 after that). For now though I’m just proud and excited.

As I type this we have two folks doing trial memberships with us this week. There’s also a social lunch going on downstairs (pizza and salad), and later on this week we’ll have an open house and a party to celebrate.

Here’s to Workantile’s 10th birthday! I’m going to go downstairs and talk to one of the new members and see if there’s any pizza left.

The E-Myth Revisited Quick Review

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A few days ago I finished The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don’t Work and What to Do About It by Michael E. Gerber. Here’s a quick review:

If you’ve ever wondered why your boss is the way they are, or why you feel like your job is confusing, or that you’re being pulled in all sorts of directions at work you should read this. Even if you have no desire to start a business it’d be worth reading to understand how a successful small business could be setup and run.

Heck, if you’re the sort of person who doesn’t read business books (hi, this was me until recently) I’d still recommend it. If you read it and still don’t want to run a business it will help you understand why someone might want to start, run, and sell their business. Plus, chances are there’s advice in here that if you implement would bring clarity and purpose to your current role even if you’re at the bottom of the org chart.

The book does present a platonic ideal of a business that will rarely match reality; however, in reading it you’ll wonder why more businesses don’t at least try. The core idea is that every business, no matter the size, should be organizing itself to work as a franchise. Or, to put it another way, if you’re the boss, you should organize your business so that it can work without you there. Same for every position in the company. Systematize everything and continually test those systems to maximize their effectiveness. Write down actual scripts and standard operating procedures for how to handle everything and train people on how to stick to them so they can be successful.

This approach requires making a billion decisions and writing them down rather than relying on information that can so often be trapped inside of people’s heads. In the rosy view of the book what you’re left with is a company where everyone understands what they’re doing and why and has all the tools available to them to do it well and efficiently.

It’s an intoxicating thought: imagine if you had perfect clarity of purpose–and the support to execute on that purpose–for your daily tasks? What if everyone in your company had that too?

English majors be warned

This is edited to be appeal broadly to business-y business people. It repeats itself often and is full of anecdotes. The executive summary of it could fit in 10 pages. I think you’d miss some of the impact of it if you did that version, but do know that if you’re a reader of literature you will likely start rewriting sentences in your head on the fly.

Inspiration is Fickle. Do The Work Instead.

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Rely on inspiration for creative work at your own peril.

In this case, inspiration means one or more of the following:

  • The Idea
  • The Spark
  • The Vision
  • The Muse

Inspiration, if it comes, will come in fits and starts and rarely completely. Instead of waiting for it do the following foundational and structural work instead: clean the shop, organize your desk, purchase supplies, sharpen the pencil or the saw, set up your website, turn off your phone.

Prepare and show up.

And then?

What if inspiration doesn’t arrive whipping you into a creative frenzy and drawing brilliance from a deepness within that shocks with raw powerful realness and Truth?

Then you do what you should have been doing all along: you practice. Your art–your craft–requires practice. In plucking out a scale your fingers might wander. In sawing a dovetail you might wonder about trying a different angle. In copying a sentence you might tweak the syntax. Produce something and you’ll find that somewhere in there an iota of inspiration snuck in.

Others say it better

Matt, who is wise, refered to the above as perspiration. To get the result you must show up and do the work. This is extremely difficult. Secreting time and mustering energy is nothing to be trifled with. And in many stages of life will be impossible. Fight for it though! It’s necessary.

Vinh Khoi says it like this:

“I think you’ve just got to do it consistently, repeatedly, and you’ve got to be undeterred by the time it requires and the inconvenience in your life that it generates. But mostly you have to do it in a way that continually stirs your personal passion.”

Do the thing to do the thing

6 months ago I did not have a 6 month old podcast. Not every minute of it is good. In fact, most are mediocre although listenable and sometimes there’s a spark of there that could be called inspired.

3 years ago I did not have a blog that was 3 years old. Not every sentence on it is good. In fact, most are mediocre although readable and sometimes there’s a spark there that could be called inspired.

etc.

Show up, do the work, practice, and produce. Enjoy the flashes of inspiration although never rely on them.

Repeat and repeat.

This post started as a tootstorm. That Tootstorm was inspired by Austin Kleon who is one of the clearest thinkers about creativity out there.

The Temptation of Analytics

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This post started as a tootstorm

Computers excel at logging statistics. The upshot is that it makes it trivial (for certain values of “trivial”) to get numbers about how many people are accessing your projects and products and blog posts. This is, on the whole, considered a good thing; however, I’m not so sure it is.

Recently, whenever I start a project I’ve been trying to define why I’m doing the project and what are my measures for success. That makes me sound like the world’s bro-iest business guy, but hear me out! I do this because I’ve found that if I don’t I’ll default to The Numbers. And, friends, numbers are pernicious when trusted without skepticism. Measuring the “success” of a project based on charts without other goals in mind leads to poor decision-making. You quickly forget why you started your thing in the first place. Worst of all, if you’re not disciplined the numbers can leads you down the path of “monetization!” even if that was never the primary intent.

I recently started a podcast with a close friend and I’m intentionally not looking at analytics for at least 10 episodes (although it’s so tempting!). When we talked about our goals “maximizing the listenership number” didn’t even come up in the original list.

It’s been freeing not chasing metrics and instead focusing on my actual goals, which are:

  • An excuse to regularly talk with my cohost, Andy!
  • Formalize our conversations around tabletop gaming
  • Gain real world experience with podcast production and audio editing
  • Secretly invent a way to talk to interesting people!

When it comes time to glance at the analytics my hope is that it’ll be because there’s a specific question about a goal that statistics can help answer. Everything else is noise.

This is a tangential quotation, but one that I think is worth sharing from Molly Conway’s The Modern Trap of Turning Hobbies into Hustles:

“You don’t have to monetize your joy.”

Don’t let statistics lead you directly into that trap. Never let a number without an attached goal shape why you do something.

An Enthusastic Critical Framework

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Kyle tweeted the following recently:

all text is hyper-text

all canon is head canon

In response I made a bad joke and then mentioned:

I think I subscribe to authorial intent way more than you do. Not like there’s one true canon, but there are some that are interpretations we can and should agree on.

To expand on that somewhat the questions I use to interrogate media (and art) are as follows:

  • What was it trying to do?
  • Did it successfully do it?
  • Did you like how it did it?

What I’ve found is that this helps me approach the work on the author’s terms. Afterward I can decide if that approach and result was something I subjectively liked. If I don’t ask these questions it’s easy to default to simple descriptors like “terrible” or “awesome”. This also has the advantage of helping me appreciate work I might otherwise choose to interact with and find that, yeah, I did like how it accomplished its goals!

A Further Question

A subset of the first question is “Who was the audience this work was created for?” If you’re not the target audience then it can be helpful to understand that up front. You might not have the capacity to understand what the work was trying to do because it relies on shorthand experiences you don’t have. Alternatively–and this is most of my life right now–you might not be a toddler so the repetition or low stakes just don’t work for you, but would work for your toddler.

Games for 2018

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Donut County

This is my clear game of the year. My wife and I both tore through it and then our toddler got surprisingly into it. For a few months she would ask to “play the donut county one?!” and was able to complete a few of the leves herself (“snake” and “rabbit”).

Horizon Zero Dawn

In our household this became known as the robot dinosaurs game. I put this down at some point in 2018 and wish I hadn’t. I no longer remember where I was or what I was doing; however, while playing it I was enjoying it quite a bit. Super fun stealth combat and a beautiful world to run around in.

Dark Souls Remastered

I am a sucker for Dark Souls and really enjoyed replaying this on more modern hardware than the Xbox 360. They added nothing to the game other than making it look prettier and run at 60fps, which is honestly fine by me. Praise the sun!

Gorogoa

Take a saturday afternoon and play this in one sitting. It’ll take you 3ish hours and it’s very worthwhile. It’s an extremely inventive puzzle game with gorgeous art made–somehow!–by one person. It’s stuck with me even though I played it very early in 2018.

Destiny 2

I played a few hours a day of Destiny 2 for about a month straight when it was a free game on ps+. On paper this is a game I shouldn’t like at all, but turns out that Halo-like first person shooter mixed with diablo-style loot grinding is very fun.

I was surprised how little the game asked me to spend money up until I needed to buy expansions to do more story stuff. And this is where it went off the rails for me. I bought Curse of Osiris because it went on sale. It wasn’t good, which I’ve since learned was a near-universal opinion. Then about a week after buying it they started including all the expansions in a bundle and it felt like I was being penalized for buying expansions at the wrong time. it was enough annoyance to kill my momentum and I stopped playing. That said, monetization issues aside, it’s an amazing game that also happens to be not super compatiable with my dad-of-a-toddler lifestyle.

Parasite Eve

Parasite Eve still rules and Aya Breya is still great! It’s painfully 90s and really does deserve a remaster. Square put out just a shocking amount of good games between 1997-1999: List of Square Games