Come Up for Air: How Teams Can Leverage Systems and Tools to Stop Drowning in Work

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To begin, it’s important to understand that no turtle can breathe underwater. Even though turtles often swim and hunt in the water, they are land creatures. They require air for breathing, much like us. Even sea turtles cannot breathe underwater. Andrew: No, that’s the win I was looking for. I wanted to get a real business benefit for doing this, not just you enjoy your work more, but because of that, and I could understand that you’re saying you showed them how to organize when they presented to a client, they said, we’re not just going to do the work. Striking research showing the immense complexity of ordinary thought and revealing the identities of the gatekeepers in our minds. Andrew: I know it. So what were you doing in it? It seemed like you at the time had software that wasn’t working very well. Right. That’s why you were able to cut it and switch o over to this. You didn’t really know how to do something, and then after a few times you figured it out. Once it’s repeatable and you have a set way of doing something, it moves to being a process. And there’s different tools for managing projects versus process. But one sign of maturity I f I feel as a company is the ratio of, of projects versus processes.

And the reason they can’t is what do you teach and who do you teach it to? Do you teach notion it, it may not be around you switch to Koda it. Mm-hmm.

How do you, what’s our best practices for delivering this service to a client? Right? So processes and SOPs are everywhere in a business from how to do payroll, how to onboard a client, how to onboard a team member, how to deliver a business efficiency roadmap. And the more you can systematize things and have a structured way of doing things, the more consistent the client experiences, the fewer errors there are. George Bowling begins to remind himself of how good things used to be as a child. There is a overwhelming sense of longing; a grasp for something out of reach; a straining to recapture some of that lost idyllic time. And we find now that we are reading a completely different sort of book from that first hilarious section. But then from there, so then we knew there’s, there’s dozens of similar mastermind groups. So then we just started going to all these groups doing the same kind of talk. And before you knew it, we just grew, we, we got ahead of our skis and we were growing at 20% a month, new clients, but we had 15% churn.

Andrew: Okay. Is this something that you did as a service first and then you started adding this online courses? And lastly, I wanted to share this book with all of you because I know you are the change-makers in the workplace. I truly think many of you will resonate with the information in this book. I’m envisioning Asana forum members reading it and thinking, “this is what I’ve been saying for years!” Ultimately this is a story about running away, or at least the desire to run away, and it includes some of Orwell's best comic writing. There's a particularly inspired moment when George, in the process of trying to escape for the weekend without letting anyone know, glances at the road behind him and imagines everyone in his life in hot pursuit, including Hitler and Stalin on a tandem bicycle: "There's the chap who's trying to get away! After him!" But it’s just not, and honestly, frankly, I’m not gonna mention the names of these soft, some softwares, but some of these software companies that we’re talking about, , we’re in talks with a lot of them to train their teams on how to use their own software properly. Because even at those companies, they’re not following any kind of guidelines of best practices. Um, people are able to work on things that give them joy or tap into their unique ability. Which is my ultimate mission. And culture goes up because you can start trusting that the, that you ask someone to do something and it’s actually going to get done and you don’t have to waste all that time and energy and frustration, you know, chasing people.This actually makes breathing easier for turtles than it is for us. Since breathing is easier for turtles, they don’t require as much oxygen to keep up the respiratory function. Cloacal Respiration Image Credit: Elmer Geissler, Pixabay It’s all of the above, right? And so the name of the game with all of this stuff for efficiency is aligning your team on not just how to use tools, but when to use tools and where different information should live so that you’re optimizing to be able to retrieve whatever you’re looking for as fast as possible. Researchers are unsure of whether or not whales swallow large amounts of water when they engulf their food due to the high concentration of salt in the salt water, however some species are known to expel the excess water by pushing it out of their mouth with their tongue, while simultaneously keeping their food trapped inside the baleen plates, so it quite possible that much of the water whales engulf comes from the water contents of the food they swallow rather than being consumed directly, since much of their food contains water within its body. At the end of the day, turtles need to breathe air like us. However, the methods through which they breathe are slightly different. All turtles come up for air and breathe through their nares. Some also have the ability to breathe through their cloaca, which is why turtles can stay underwater for a long time. Andrew: and why you taught Excel and then they taught a, the whatever Microsoft database, uh, software was going on at the time. But you are saying now we have this whole other level and layer of software that we need to be teaching people and companies. Uh, I don’t think the companies are going to be able, or schools are gonna be able to teach.