&yet

You’ve made it to the final part in our lead generation self-assessment series. High five!

To recap, we’re defining lead generation as the strategic application of a deep understanding of your customer that allows you to show up in the right place, at the right time with a welcome solution to a pressing need.

Effective lead generation is a system you have control over, with outcomes that become increasingly predictable and repeatable over time.

Ready to continue assessing your lead generation? Awesome.

To recap from our first post, we’re defining lead generation as the strategic application of a deep understanding of your customer that allows you to show up in the right place, at the right time with a welcome solution to a pressing need.

Effective lead generation is a system you have control over, with outcomes that become increasingly predictable and repeatable over time.

One of the ways we use creative technology to help our clients strengthen their customer relationships is by assessing their lead generation system. Once we can see where their strengths and areas of growth are, we can apply our creativity where it will be most effective.

As useful as it is to have third-party come in and give insight on what they see (which we’re happy to do when you’re at that point), self-inquiry and reflection are also powerful.

On a personal level, knowing yourself is the first step to noticing and then changing ingrained behaviors that give you less-than-desirable results. It’s no different on an organizational level. Every day, you make choices based on a number of factors, many driven by how your organization operates by default. In order to make different choices, you need to recognize those default patterns and how they affect your results.

Helloooo! Over the past eight months or so, we’ve been doing a lot of pontificating over the meaning of life (and &yet). We now know the secrets of the universe and are ready to share them with you.

Just kidding. But we are ready to share our thoughts on an interesting problem we’ve been focused on.

“Thanks so much for this bag of trash”

We don’t always remember much from the talks we’ve attended, but this past year one of the conferences we went to taught us at least one important lesson—most swag is terrible.

Have you heard? Personal blogs are back in a big way.

The industry is seeing people and teams moving away from centralized platforms and back to publishing on personal sites and blogs. Brad Frost wrote about it, Andy Bell created personalsit.es, and Signal v Noise moved away from Medium, to name a few.

There’s been a resurgence of RSS which warms our little web hearts.

(We know a great many of you stayed with and maintained your personal blogs over the years and that warms our hearts too!)

Have you had some work done?

Hitting certain age milestones has a tendency to inspire reflection. Sometimes that includes the very literal reflection of staring deeply at our faces in a mirror, questioning: does the person staring back really show the world who we are now?

2018 marked 10 years of existence for &yet. Suddenly we found ourselves reflectively daydreaming about ways we might spruce up this older, wiser double-digit version of ourselves. Why not give our decade old logo a mini-facelift?

In the middle of 2018, I took a 3-month sabbatical from work. It was something I’d been wanting to do for over a year, while I was experiencing pretty severe burnout. I’ve previously shared a bit of what that felt like. I was able to stabilize myself for a while with significant help from my personal and professional support system. But extended leave was still calling me.

There were logistical decisions to be made and questions to answer. How long would I need? What kind of financial place would I need to be in? Would &yet hold my job for me? That all felt easy compared to the more nebulous and philosophical questions on my mind. In hindsight, three months isn’t that long, but our country’s culture has a way of punishing those who step away from work. And it encourages us to punish ourselves.

I had a lot of thoughts. What if taking time off doesn’t help? What if this time away damages my career in some way? What if I forget things, fall behind?

What if I lose a part of myself?

&yet has been remote-friendly for a long time, but right now we’re the most remote we’ve ever been. We have team members in Seattle, Portland, Folsom, Phoenix, Pennsylvania, and Germany. The folks in Tri-Cities, Washington (a sort of “HQ”) work remotely too from co-working spaces, coffee shops, and home offices.

We love gathering together, but sometimes it’s just not an option. So this past December we decided to try an all-remote holiday party. Some activities worked really well and others not as much. Here’s a rundown of what we did!

👍 Recommendations

In December the &yet team had an all-day, all-remote holiday party. One of our activities was live-collaborating on a Recommendations doc for all the things we enjoyed throughout 2018 (and earlier years too). There’s some good stuff in here so we figured we’d share it with you!

(Things are organized in the order they were added and include some comments that were left in the document, too.)

Books (nonfiction)

• One From Many by Dee Hock
• Principles by Ray Dalio
• Let Your Life Speak by Parker Palmer
• The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals by Michael Pollan
• Hello World: Being Human in the Age of Algorithms by Dr. Hannah Fry
• The Untethered Soul: The Journey Beyond Yourself by Michael Singer
• The Art of Gathering: How we meet and why it matters by Priya Parker
• The Folded Clock by Heidi Julavitz
• Ask Baba Yaga: Otherworldly Advice for Everyday Troubles by Taisa Kitaiskaia
• A Hidden Wholeness: The Journey Toward an Undivided Life by Parker Palmer
• The Dance of Intimacy by Harriet Lerner
• A Soprano on Her Head by Eloise Ristad
• The Chairs Are Where the People Go: How to Live, Work, and Play in the City by Misha Glouberman
• Teaching a Stone to Talk by Annie Dillard
• The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron
• The Creative Habit by Twyla Tharp
• The Courage to be Diskliked by Ichiro Kishimi and Fumitake Koga
• Positive Intelligence by Shirzad Chamine
  📝 +1
• The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck by Mark Manson
• The Seven Day Weekend by Ricardo Semler
• How To Change Your Mind by Michael Pollan
• Born a Crime by Trevor Noah

Ever wonder what other people’s home office setups are like? Well my friend, wonder no more. (Okay, you can wonder a little. These are only the setups of a couple of people on our team, which probably do not represent the entirety of the human experience. But anyway. Enjoy.)

Where do you work?

Luke Karrys, Senior developer