Squad Tips

Invest in Your Resources and Use the Pomodoro Technique

Your most valuable resource is time, and to reap time you need to invest some. 

The creative team has a shared resource led by contractor Monika. Josh had some extra assets he had to work on this week and was struggling to imagine how he could get it done. Time management is key to making sure you meet those project deadlines. 

You can also use something called the Pomodoro Technique. This is where you set a timer for an amount of time that works for you and the project you are working on. When the timer goes off you take a break and then reset it again. 

Try Blocking Off a “No Meetings” Work Day

It can be very helpful to take a day to organize priorities and get your work done. If you are constantly in meetings, you won’t have time to work on projects. 

Panagiota is in meetings or on Slack most of the time, and then often doesn’t have time to execute on all the great things we talk about in meetings. A solution to this is to try to block off an entire day just for deep, focused work. Give it a try if you don’t feel like you have time to execute on the regular.

Front-load your Planning

Morgan has found that scheduling blocks of time to plan on Monday, and planning work blocks for later in the week sets her up for success. Taking that time to get clear on what needs to get accomplished each day ahead of time clears up a ton of headspace. 

3 Cheers for 5 Voices

 Everyone at CTC has identified their 5 Voices and put that information into their Bob profiles for you to view. This information will help you understand your teammates communication style and how you can work together. 

Be Selfish with Group Meetings

For meetings like CRTV Studio, Whack-an-Ad, or other meetings that cut across teams, bring your accounts and ask other people to work on your stuff!

Count on Each Other to Break Foam Walls

Jon learned something about breaking foam walls this week.

Foam walls can change, there can be many of them in a row, especially as roles and tasks become more complex. They’re still all just foam walls. The bigger they get, the more you just have to poke on them and have others poke for you. Bring people together to tackle larger foam walls together and anything’s possible

Count on Us

Teamwork makes the dreamwork. In a new creative work in progress channel on Slack, the ADs have been sharing work as they’re developing it. It’s very easy to get siloed in our roles, but it’s invaluable to get input and see other people’s work.

On one of Josh’s recent submissions, he got tons of amazing feedback. He didn’t necessarily implement all of it directly, but even in those cases it pushed him to new choices.

In order to deliver the best work we can, it’s a best practice to work as a team, and we can do that even though we’re not co-located.

Record Zoom Meetings

The Zoom meetings we’re having and recording are gold for sharing on social and with our clients. If you have even a suspicion that something good is about to go down, hit record and send the good stuff to Reilly and AO.

AO accidentally fell ass-backwards into an unlock of learning. In an impromptu meeting about paid advertising where Trent presented actual data, AO hit record about 5 minutes in. We caught everyone’s reactions to thoughts about the data in real time.

Intentionally Connect

We’re more isolated than ever before, therefore, connecting is more important than ever. The Buyer’s weekly meeting is a great example of how we do this well. So are the meetings between Growth Guides and Department Heads. Third, the outpouring of support and engagement in ADmission has doubled our membership overnight.

Leverage Technology

During this time, working from home we’re diving into technology more. These are the same tools that make feature films or send things into space, they’re powerful. We have a KPI for $40 cost per ad deliverable which requires us to count every deliverable. 

Michael found a terminal command to automatically go through and count all those deliverables to make his job more efficient, faster, and easier. Technology is only limited by your education about it. If you think something can get done faster or better, it probably can. 

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