Working with anyone new presents a huge amount of challenge — whether it’s a client, a business, an employee, or a teacher. I want to make sure you have a feeling for how we do things around here so that your learning curve can be more of a learning line.
A lot of work is, unfortunately, work about work: the status reports, the meetings, the confusion of priorities. When we’re already working together, I make sure everything about our work is in one place. That place of choice is Trello.
By cutting down on all the time wasted in useless communication, we have more time for results.
The ability for multiple parties to collaborate on documents in real time is huge. When you combine that with the benefits of access from anywhere, a low learning curve (if you’ve ever written a document on a computer, you’ll be right at home), and automatic saving with version control, it doesn’t make sense to use anything else. I use Docs and Sheets and link to them inside Trello cards.
I initially reach out to people by email. (Gmail, in particular, helps me automate things with filters and connecting to other products.) When there needs to be a lot of back and forth, a phone call or a face-to-face meeting helps, reconnecting us to the big picture more effectively. But, this is always a last resort: a meeting’s true time is multiplied by the number of people. (To make scheduling painless, I use Calendly.)
Projects can be huge, encompassing a number of people across a number of skill sets. But, if nobody knows what they’re doing, why they’re doing it, or what their constraints are, things get messy.