Show the speed of a process by comparing different solutions

Episode #15 of the Tiny Graphics Advent Calendar, published by Marius Popescu for De Amicis.

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Is your company a rabbit or a turtle?

We are attracted by the startup stories, announcing rounds and rounds of funding and million dollars evaluations. There is a lot of money, a lot of buzz on the internet, and unfortunately not so much value in their products.

At the same time, quite a few smaller companies do their work every day and help their customers. 

The rabbit is fast, but it doesn’t achieve its goal, because it gets distracted.

The turtle is slowly building its product by delivering value. And it most often reaches its goal because it helps the customer. Let’s take the example of marketing.

How can you consistently publish every week, 52 weeks per year

The biggest issue is the time it takes, every week, to write the articles, which means:

• come up with an Outline
• write the Draft
• add a Story
• Edit the result before publication

To add consistency to this method, you need to do one step each day.

	Mo	Tue	Wed	Th	Fri	Weekend
Article	Outline	Draft	Story	Edit

Having one task per day is already easier than taking the whole day to write an article. However, work tends to fill up the available time. So if you say you’ll write a part of the article each day, one hour each day, you will spend at least 5 hours each week to finish an article.

All year long, that’s hard to follow, and consistency will suffer. And you won’t even dream of creating graphics and adding images to your content.

What happens if you write TWO articles in parallel, each week? You still try to spend no more than an hour each day, but now you have TWO articles at the end of the week.

	Mo	Tue	Wed	Th	Fri	Weekend
Article 1	Outline	Draft	Story	Edit
Article 2	Outline		Draft	Story	Edit

What can parallel work do to your timeline?

Unbundle your task and go methodically over each part to find how to better solve the problem, over and over again. If you are part of a rabbit company, I mean high-growth startup, what can you do the turtle way?

PS

I am quite methodic about my work, and from the outside, while building a system, it looks slow. But when the turtle pushes a fine-tuned flywheel, watch it take off!