This Week I Learned: 2020 bulk upload [2021–12–03]
Here are some TWILs from 2020, before I started posting them here. It’s a real mixed bag of sweets, so don’t be afraid to rifle through it for your favourites.
🎯 Dropbox found in an EU study that having a firewall that blocks non work-related websites made no difference to focus, while scheduling blocks of meeting-free time made workers three times more likely to be highly focused. Read more in their virtual-first toolkit.
🚀 Every customer wants to buy convenience with predictable pricing.
Also, if you allow customers to destructure your package and buy only bits of it then they will not experience its full potential as you intended it.
👩🔬 Coding in Vue seems to involve a lot of trial and error. Is there no good IDE support for just telling you when your code isn’t going to fire an event or pass the data to where you think it’s going to go?
🗣 A trick from Pauliina Jamsa as part of Women in Tech @ Teamwork that everyone can use for showing their boss that they learned something — offer to teach it to peers. If the boss says yes then everyone wins. Even if the boss says no, now they know that you learned that thing and will remember.
🚀 Listen for what feels like everything about starting a product in a way that makes it more likely to succeed with less work, especially founder-market fit in SaaStr 391 “bootstrapping”.
😱 We humans instinctively incentivise the creation of emergencies.
🗣 I worked from the office 1 day, for the first time in months, and immediately had some good conversations in the corridor that were quick & easy. They could not have happened without being face-to-face and they were so much faster than video calls. It was a reminder that while WFH is a necessity and good for solo work, some things are just better in person.
😱 The concept of being promoted to your level of incompetence has my name.
📈 You can use live data to set your sprint (or other time-bound goal) to “spend” or conserve error budgets. It’s so simple but powerful, and good for customers.
😎 Holidays are great. It takes about a week to get into holiday mode and start being really mentally present “in” the holiday, though! It’s not just me: 8 to 11 days is apparently the peak time for enjoyng a holiday.
I hope that there was something interesting in there for you.
