Introducing Field Notes videos
About this time last year, I started recording what I thought at the time would be daily videos. I really enjoyed the process—it was a way to externalize a lot of the things I’ve been thinking for a long time. So I’m restarting that.
The thread I’ve been thinking about a lot lately is this: I want to build a healthy, non-anxious company.
On Friday I had coffee with a friend of mine who’s a leader at a big company here in Fort Worth. He was asking how you could help your team, and your stakeholders higher up the chain, begin to think about this idea of a non-anxious, unhurried kind of company. Could you even poll that information quantitatively?
We were drawing from The Ruthless Elimination of Hurry by John Mark Comer. I’ve been really trying to live that better in my life. I’m not great at it, but I’m trying.
After thinking for a bit over my bowl of overnight oats, I settled on this: If I were trying to build that, the one thing I would ask employees is to rate it on a one to five scale: How hurried or stressed did you feel this week? This month?
- Did you feel like you were under a very tight timeline?
- Did you feel like you didn’t have the creative space in your mind to get the work done?
- Did you feel like you had everything you needed to start the work?
- Did communication practices, project management practices, or some other part of the organization get in the way of you feeling unhurried and able to do your job?
At first glance, he thought I didn’t care about productivity or efficiency. I care very much about efficiency and productivity, believe you me. But I want to create a culture that is not in a hurry and not stressed.
If you can untangle that sense of urgency, as one of our teammates calls it, and help people feel relaxed and free—with enough space to get the most important work done in their day, their week, their month—I think the rest of our business issues start to become visible, and we can go fix those. Or they’ll start to decrease, because we’ll have to ask ourselves, “What is the most important thing I need to be getting done?”
Related to that is our AI FOMO. I read multiple AI-focused newsletters every single day to make sure I’m riding the “exponential” curve, as AI researchers call it. And I just don’t think it’s true that if I don’t have the latest AI tool figured out, in six months I’m going to lose my job, or we as a company are going to fall behind.
I don’t want people to feel this FOMO. I want people to feel peace. I want my team to feel peace. I want my clients to feel peace. I want us to do our jobs, and do a great job, at a pace that is human, that’s hopeful, that’s productive.
Why do these little videos? In the age of AI, it’s so easy to fake competence or insight—even vulnerability. So I want to share more freely the things I’m thinking and the things I’m doing, something like the old fireside chat. Open and honest and human. I think we need that more than ever.
