What's one thing - product, technique, strategy that has changed the way you work in the last year?
Sharath Kuruganty
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Bonus points if you discovered it on Product Hunt!
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ᗰᗩ᙭ ᒍ.@maxjacobs
Notion Organization!
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Product: Notion, it replaced Google Doc, Google Drive, Trello/Asana as an all-in-one for small/ early stage team.
Technique: the book "Mom Test", talk to user is key and knowing how to talk to them is gold.
Strategy: Act fast, more fast, keeping the momentum > planning everything out and not doing.
Bonus: A lot of networking and meeting great people. You can learn whole lot from a 2-hour conversation with a price of coffee.
just realised how much could be learnt n changed in a year!
@tszhoi_19 Great strategy point. It's a hard one to wrestle with sometimes.
Sounds too simple, but just working on a project consistently has changed everything.
I know what is happening, I solve problems when I am doing other things.
Just programming on it an hour a day has changed the way I work - https://twitter.com/JoshDance/st...
@joshdance hmm I like the idea of just doing an hour a day. Sometimes I feel that overwhelmed with all I have to do for my business - As I know it will take me hours and hours to do it all, so sometimes it really puts me off after already doing a day job and having a long work day. However, maybe telling myself to just do an hour per evening could work.
@joshdance Absolutely! Funnily enough just came across these article which reaffirm what we've said: https://typesense.org/blog/the-u...
https://oliur.substack.com/p/the...
Product: Notion.
While I've been using it for. couple of years, the past year has seen me get serious about how I use it and how I can use it better. Now I'm at the point where I'm helping others. This is turn has generated new clients for my Graphic Design business.
Strategy: Helping others
It wasn't a strategic decision, but it seems the more good stuff you put out in the world, the more open you are to seeing it.
@peter_costello Would you say Notion is able to replace Jira in productivity analytics?
@between_team I think so. But it requires set up and integrations to do so. I think with the recent purchase of automate.io this will open up significant opportunities for this sort of thing.
Having use JIRA and Confluence in the past I know that there is definitely less friction in getting the team to use notion.
One integration we use id toggl time tracking on a per task basis. This allows push time tracking that's super easy for the team.
Strategy - A mindset to produce work that adds to my strengths, to produce content that feeds my optimism. This has helped me create work that is appreciated.
Technique - Change the perspective such that I can learn/benefit from mistakes, failures or shortcomings.
Product - Revue, it has saved a lot of effort in terms of organizing the newsletter.. Now I'm on the verge of switching to Ghost.
I hid my bookmarks tab in Chrome.
Bookmarks are meant to save you time.
But me, it just made me go on useless websites all the time.
Now I actually have to think for 30 seconds to find something useful to do.
Technique/ Strategy: Define tasks by hours. Knowing where my time is going (and how much of it) is key to evaluating bandwidth and avoiding burnout.
In my context, I make sure the number of task hours doesn't exceed 35. In a 40-hour week, that gives me wiggle room for meetings and unforeseen requests from the team.
I start by writing down all my tasks and assigning hours to them (always erring on the higher side). Then, I divide these into higher-level categories and choose 2-3 categories to focus on for the week. It stops me from jumping between categories and losing my train of thought. At the same time, having 2-3 categories means I can move to something else if one task is too overwhelming.
If anyone's interested, I documented a few more techniques in this Twitter thread: https://twitter.com/sindhusprasa...
Sports in the morning. Early morning. Every morning.
Clears the head.
Focuses on key points.
Makes ideas surge.
Only pain point: hard to take notes when running.
@integromat @vincentguittet Yes... I was thinking of starting with that as well ... currently building forms on bubble... once its over the next project would be on webflow and would require Integromat
Okay, that's not "self-promoted" but the product is definitely Sembly Personal — because I use it at work every day and it reduces stress on working meetings. I can text search from past meetings, using it mostly with Google Meet, it feels like a part of everyday instruments (Gmail, GA, GWorkspace, Notion, and Sembly)
For Product: Listening to customers a lot, hearing their suggestions and talking to a lot of customers has enabled me to find a right Product Market fit. I was working with a company before who rather focused on delivering some features based on hypothesis rather than actually solving customer problems. I think running hypothesis is good, but not adapting and sticking to old versions is very bad! This resulted in negative customer feedback too. But now, the new product is skyrocketing!
Technique: My works were quite messy before and unstructured in the beginning. I think, that's a perk of working with startups. But, now with the passage of time, the works are now more streamlined and structured.
Strategy: I used to look out for solutions after identifying a problem before. But now, I think I understand we need to dig deep into the problems. Rather than moving fast, moving cautiously is important.
I'm replacing more and more of my traditional tools by building them myself. I don't get all the features but I get all the control. Coding = Super powers.
Product:
Notion I have my whole life on there. Both business and personal. Plus, it inspired me to set up my business no-code consultancy in the first place.
Strategy/Technique:
Theming my days. So only doing certain projects/tasks on certain days. I've also joined quite a few communities/groups this year which has proven to be very beneficial. So I now understand why so many entrepreneurs/IndieHackers tout the benefit and power of communities.
Product: Migrated my freelance workflow fully into Notion (very much regret not doing it sooner)
Technique: Habit stacking + journaling—recording progress creates accountability
Strategy: Practicing mindfulness + gratitude—much less work-related stress, much more clarity
Not sure where this fits in, but I've also made it a point to grow my network this year—it's resulted in 3 contract roles, 2 small client projects, a full-time position, a new income stream, and a lot of opportunities in the last six months.
Hey @hayleyjolliffe 👋🏾 As an entrepreneur/fellow notion nerd, I'm curious what your freelance workflow includes? Also, completely agree with you re growing your network as, as I mentioned in my comment I can see the benefits of doing so too.
Hey @janinah ! 👋🏻 Awesome to see another Notion nerd interested in workflow stacks! Here's a link to my current setup: https://twitter.com/hayleyjollif... — I like keeping everything as minimal as possible :)))
Product: Notion for professional/personal life task management and Teal HQ for providing amazing career planning resources.
I think the strategy I followed for about six months in my business and the constant learning of new information led me to success, and I ,made a lot of changes this year in terms of business. By the way here https://sageseller.com/blog/complete-guide-how-to-integrate-amazon-fba-with-shopify/ you can find a lot of useful infofmatsii, which deals with sales, maybe someone will also be useful.
My mindset of building products has completely changed in the last year. Earlier I used to pay huge attention to my original ideas for the product I am building. Over the past two years, I've learned to pay more attention and weightage to what the users are saying. More importance to the organic search intent and finding/improving the unique value proposition of the product.
I've learned to realistically evaluate my product in the market. And course correct to make the product a success.
Over the past year, the advancement in natural language processing (NLP) models, like GPT-3.5, has significantly changed the way I work. These models have improved the quality and efficiency of text generation and understanding, making it easier to provide more accurate and context-aware responses to a wide range of questions and tasks. This has broad implications for content generation, customer support, research assistance, and more.