Keep In Touch #

This is not about the cliché of asking “How you doing?” before asking for a thing in an email, chat, message or in person. It is about being up to date with what is going on while you are heads down in your own work.

In order to produce the best result we have to use most of our brain capacity to focus on that one thing we are working towards to because we have to keep in our head all the things we have said no, all the things we have said yes to, the current problems, the current roadblocks, the next milestone, the distilling feedback we are getting among many other things that go into building something new.

While we are heads down into building mode is easy to get lose track and get consumed by it and by the time we are done building maybe something changed around us in the world that makes obsolete the thing that we have built or maybe it makes it even more useful but since we have been so ignorant to the external changes it has been impossible to react to those changes.

There are many circles of varying proximity around us that is good to stay in touch with: ask your colleagues what they have been working on, show your work to others and ask for feedback, subscribe to a few newsletters that distill information relevant to your main activity, dig down in some posts in social media to check the temperature on the things that are going on. 

Those are just a few ways that I personally stay updated and the methods are irrelevant, what matters is to get your head out of your own little world you are working on and see what is happening around you.