Oct 24, 2020

Sunday Brief - Issue #5

By Kieran Glover • Issue #5 • View online

Hey,

Welcome back to Sunday Brief, this is issue 5 of my weekly email newsletter for creative professionals where I share my thoughts, inspiration, life lessons and interesting reads from that week.

This week has been a busy week with plenty of tight deadlines, but that in itself has made it a relatively productive week for me.

What I’m thinking about

So looking back, this reminded me of a pretty well known law known as Parkinson’s Law. Now Parkinson’s Law states that:

Work expands to fill the time available for its completion.

Or in a more concise and less academic tone you can say that too much work = wasted time and less time = effective use of time.

Image found on Martins IT Consultants

On the face of it this seems very simple, but I’ve found and observed in practice that us creative professionals have a tough time doing this in practice.

Now everyone is different and there are certainly a multitude of reasons why this could be, but I’m going to push the boat out here and suggest one main blockers that I’ve faced when trying to adopt Parkinson’ Law - perfectionism

Now it’s important to draw a clear distinction between pride in your work and attention to detail as these ‘go with the territory’ as creative professionals, but when either ourselves and/or clients become compulsive (perfectionists), Parkinson’s Law goes out the window leading to:

Wasting time on unnecessary details.
Not utilizing time wisely by concentrating on issues that don’t matter in the grand scheme of things.
Putting too much pressure and unwarranted stress if work doesn’t turn out exactly as I want.
Feeling like ideas are bad which ends up making me not explore those ideas in the future.
Never coming to a point where things feel finished.

My favorite things this week

So a fitting accompaniment to this is an awesome book I’ve been reading this week that perfectly aligns my pondering.

Getting Real: The Smarter, Faster, Easier Way to Build a Web Application - A book by 37 Signals (now Basecamp)

Quote of the week

Accept that mistakes will happen and realize it’s no big deal as long as you can correct them quickly

A quote by 37 Signals in Getting Real

So that’s it for issue #5 of Sunday Brief. I hope you enjoyed this and it brightened up your inbox ☀️Thanks again for taking the time to read and I hope you have a great week!

Kieran

Resources for creative

As a web designer / developer working on a creative agency, I’m always on the lookout for new tools to a) keep me more productive and b) help me do my job better. Check out some of my favorite tried and tested tools:

Notion - My all time favorite note taking/productivity app
Digital Ocean - My go-to tool for spinning up blogs, websites and more
Webflow - The tool I used most often at work to Build better business websites, faster. Without coding
Landbot.io - Used both personally and professionally, Landbot makes it intuitive and easy to make both simple and complex chat bot experiences. The best part is, it’s a no-code tool.

P.S - Some of these links are affiliate links that I get a kickback from.

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By Kieran Glover

Welcome to the Sunday Brief ☕️ My name is Kieran Glover and I'm a Senior Partner at a leading creative consultancy in Cambodia. Every Sunday I write a weekly email newsletter for creative professionals where I share my thoughts, inspiration, life lessons and interesting reads from that week.

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