The Brain Jar’s Heartbeat

I’ve been reading ReWork and It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work over the weekend, processing the business advice of the 37 Signals/Basecamp founders who have rejected the notion of building a growth-at-all-costs business. The former is very philosophy focused, while the latter is a ore process-oriented approach which implements that philosophy.

One of the ideas that intrigued me in It Doesn’t Have to Be Crazy At Work is the discussion of heartbeats–a way of overcoming communication challenges in a decentralised workspace without devolving into meetings and reports. There’s a more detailed discussion of it over on their blog (and another discussion here), but at it’s core its a system of automated check-ins where folks list what they’ve worked on with their day, coupled with a system for discussion and requests for updates.

It’s a really intriguing idea, but not terribly useful in a company of one (which, essentially, most writers are regardless of whether they self-publish or not).

With that in mind, I did what I often do when encountering group-based management systems that seem like useful ideas: I figured out a way to deploy it online. The last time I did this it launched the Sunday Circle, which has been rolling on for a bout three years now and continues to be useful to me. This time around, I’ve been doing analog heartbeat updates on pen and paper then posting them up on Instagram.

The first one turned out a little rough:

But I got a lot happier with the idea once I realised that block caps and the occasional nice background helped frame the content:

Of course, starting this process right as you go on holidays for the weekend tends to skew the content a little.

I’m interested in this logging process because it’s easy to get locked into a mindset with writing that word count=progress. Admittedly, this mindset is frequently useful, because you cannot finish anything unless it’s actually written, but getting the book done and out (whether submitted to a traditional publishing venue or starting the process of self-publishing) is where the work actually starts earning money. Sometimes it’s useful to step back and look at what else is involved in the process.

I don’t have to manage a team of people with Brian Jar, but writers have stakeholders who have a vested interest in what’s going on. We just call them readers, and have spent the last twenty years being slightly bewildered by the level of access the internet has given us to them, instead of leaving it to be mediated by publishers and periodicles.

But I digress.

ReWork and It Doesn’t Have To Be Crazy At Work. Both are really good reads, both as someone who has worked a dayjobs with not terribly functional management structures and as someone involved in indie publishing where the bulk of the conversations are predicated on a bulk inventory, growth-at-all-costs mindset. The ideology of working calm and limiting growth to focus on what really drives you strikes me as a useful one, if only because it’s easy to slip into oh-god, do-more-do-more when you’re in charge of your own schedule.