Clinton Bonner: That was kind of the catalyst for me. No pun intended, people.

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Chris LoSacco: Welcome to Catalyst, the Launch by NTT Data podcast. I am Chris LoSacco, VP at Launch, and I am joined by Clinton Bonner. Hey Clinton, how's it going?

Clinton: Chris, I am excited. It's been a bit since you and I got in the virtual studio together...

Chris: It's very true.

Clinton: ...at Catalyst. So it's been fun. We've been out interviewing different people, different topics, you and Gina rocking it, and we had this one, and we're like, you know what? This is a good idea. Why don't we get back, get the band back together, Chris? You and I. Gina can't be here today, and that's okay. We miss her, but we will celebrate her with this amazing topic, right?

Chris: Yes. It's a great, deep pool of things that we could explore. And I use that word, deep, very intentionally. Because you brought up this book that was written and published, the author is Cal Newport. The title is Deep Work. And it is all about how you stop focusing on being busy and start focusing on really achieving things, right? High quality, great things that matter to whatever you're doing, right? If you are employed, it's things that are furthering your company's vision. If you are doing a personal project, right? It is things that are moving the needle, moving things forward, as opposed to just checking things off your list. And I think this is really interesting and touches a nerve, because a lot of people struggle with this, right? A lot of people fall into the busy-ness trap. Where they're just going, I gotta check things off and ba-ba-ba, go through my email, make sure I respond to these messages... And then you get to the end of the day and you're like, what did I actually do? This thing that Newport puts forward about really focusing on deep work is interesting. So I'm curious, Clinton, like, what are your thoughts? Where do you see this challenge cropping up day to day, and how do you think we attack it?

‍Clinton: So for me, you touched a nerve with the term touch a nerve, right?

Chris: (Laughs)

Clinton: So, the thing that... I brought this to you and Gina saying, hey, I listened to a podcast recently where Cal was on and discussing this, and oh my gosh, was... His topic, just kind of getting me in all the feels.

Chris: Yeah.

Clinton: Being like, it me! You know, sometimes, right? So just being like, oh my gosh, do I know what this person is saying. And then I'm out on Twitter, I'm out on LinkedIn, and I just see more and more people, whether or not they've read the book or digested this, but just posting about this concept and this idea that, boy oh boy, would they love to be focused on more important stuff and really doing less things, per se.

Chris: Yeah.

Clinton: And just focused on deeper work. And then I started thinking about Nate's book, with Frictionless Enterprise.

Chris: Nate Berent-Spillson, our VP of Engineering.

Clinton: Yeah, exactly. And a lot of his Nate-isms that are kind of like these fun Yogi-isms, was like, don't mistake activities for progress.

Chris: Yes.

Clinton: Yeah. We use this vision of, like, a hamster wheel on that one, where you're just on this wheel, you think you're moving, you think you're busy, but then you get off and you're in the same exact spot, but you're exhausted.

Chris: Right.

Clinton: So, that's where it kind of came to for me, where I was like, wow, I don't think this is just a me thing. And clearly, from what I see out on LinkedIn, I think a lot of leaders are feeling this way, that between answering Slack, between walls of meetings and walls of Zooms and Teams, that they get to the end of the day, which, by the way, then becomes Thursday at 4:00, which then becomes Friday at 6, and you're like, crap, what did I actually get done? And then you turn the page and it's May 2nd and May 3rd. That really hit me in the feels and I'm like, ooh, I think this would be a fun topic to talk about together, and then dissect a little bit. Like, where are we seeing it and what's been useful for us tactically, individually? And then how do we bring these concepts to our teams as leaders as well?

Chris: Hundred percent. Yeah. I mean, if you go back to the Industrial revolution, we created factories, and it was all about, like, eking out optimization, right? We are producing physical products. We need to optimize what we are doing. We need to eke out maximum efficiency. And that means, you know, every part of the assembly line that we can tweak and change and make sure that we are getting, you know, 5% better, 2% better, 1% better, then we get to produce more stuff. Like physical products.

Clinton: Sure.

Chris: More things come out of our factory. And so there was this emphasis on, like, how do we make sure that we are, you know, ruthlessly looking at every single minute, about how things move through our pipeline? Our work, you know, in our sphere now, sitting here in the 21st century, is knowledge work, right? And it is fundamentally a different kind of, like, flow. Work function. And it can't be looked at and it can't be optimized in the same way. And I think if you, when you try to do that, you end up with these proxy optimizations that may relate to productivity, right? What you actually produce. But they may not. They may actually be like, an abstraction that is not directly related to what you're actually getting done. And so, I think that's what leads to this feeling where it's like, wow, I was really... Like, I was really busy today. I did a lot of things. I wrote a lot of email. I attended a lot of meetings. You know, I was on Slack responding to things. I had a couple of texts from clients. And, you know, it just felt like there was a lot going on. And yet it's 5:30 p.m. I look back and I'm like, what did I do, right? What did I accomplish? And what I think is so interesting about what Newport puts forward in Deep Work is, you have to consciously push against that. You have to say, I'm not just going to go from thing to thing to thing. I'm going to be really intentional about my focus, so that I'm aligned and honed in on what I actually want to move forward. And then I think you made an amazing point before, which is that once you do it for yourself, you then have to do it for your team and for your organization, so that you get everybody aligned and moving in the same direction. It's called slow productivity for a reason.

Clinton: Right.

Chris: Because you can't measure it the same way, right? You then can't say, okay, well, how did I, you know, move the needle forward in this particular hour or this particular minute? It's a different style. It's a different pace of work. It's a different way to look at efficiency and optimization, which I think is... It runs counter to how a lot of people think. And let's be honest, how a lot of managers think. Because managers are looking at, what did you put in your time sheet?

Clinton: In the book, Cal also talks about this natural pace of working. And that certainly, at times, you are over boiling with things that you have to get done.

Chris: Yeah.

Clinton: That's just the way it goes. And he shares a couple of things that I thought were interesting. First he talks about, look, the greatest authors of all time, they weren't going in and going through, like, task by task by task by task. They... If they were doing their next novel, they took their time with it. Even in the Oppenheimer movie, he's out there doing what he's doing, you know, creating the nuclear weapon. And he's taking his breaks on the ranch. He's off in like... He's got his time away that's like, it is dedicated time, not just focused on this thing. So this idea of... It's not about like, being lazy or not going fast.

Chris: No.

Clinton: It's just about when you are focused on it, know what the heck you're focused on, be deeply focused on it, and then give yourself the permission to step away and not crowd your plate. And I think the other piece of that, too, was, hey, if you are burning hot, and that's all... You're going to have these fluctuations. We just got done with our major events, right? So my team, we hosted an event called Nexus for Launch by NTT Data...

Chris: Which was amazing, by the way.

Clinton: Thank you. So fun. So great for our clients to get together. Loved every second of it. With that, though, I told my team, I was like, look, when we get done with this, I said, the week, and a week or two after, I was like, we still got to execute because there's things to still execute that are tied to the events. Like, now the curtains are down and there's still things to go do. I was like, however, understand what those two or three things are that are most critical for post-event, in this case, post-event execution, block out the rest, and do them slowly and carefully. And allow yourself that time, and reject the concept of more stuff being jammed on your plate, because all of a sudden you quote-unquote "have time."

Chris: Yep.

Clinton: And, as a leader of that team, I've had to curb some of my things and ambitions. Like, oh, we got this next idea. Oh, I've got this next idea. And I literally... (Laughs) I literally have some sticky notes that are like, save that for June. You know, 'cause...

Chris: Yeah, yeah. That's exactly it. I think there were three concrete takeaways that you just put forward that I want to tease apart. The first one was, you have to set aside time to be in a different context.

Clinton: Yeah.

Chris: That means you've got to walk away. You've got to walk away from meetings. You probably have to walk away from your computer. Go out of the office, go out of your home, right? Take a walk, go in a completely different environment, to allow your brain to wander and to get different stimuli, which will trigger different things. And again, it runs counter, right? If I'm a programmer, I should be sitting at my keyboard and writing code eight hours a day. And we're here to tell you, and I think what Newport argues in his book is, no, it doesn't work that way.

Clinton: Right.

Chris: Like, you actually have to be conscious about being in a different context. So that's takeaway number one. Takeaway number two is, block your time. Right?

Clinton: Yes.

Chris: And you said this. You did a wonderful thing by giving your team permission to say, hey, after we get back from this event, set aside time. And you can do this literally on your calendar, right? In Google Calendar or in Outlook. Put a block where you say "no meetings." Or "focus time." Or "deep work." And that's for other people to see, right? So that they can't steal your time from you. But it's also for yourself. So that you know, hey, I'm setting aside a couple hours where, if I need to just scribble some ideas or, you know, be at a whiteboard, and maybe it doesn't actually contribute to a specific deliverable that is right ahead of me. That's okay. I'm going to allow myself this time to brainstorm and to be free a little bit. That is extremely important. And then the third thing was, deferring. Right? Which, again, can feel awkward, right? To say, oh, I know that this thing has to be done, but I'm going to consciously say it's next month, or it's next quarter. And everybody sort of agrees implicitly, oh, you know, yes, we should do this. We should have a clearer roadmap or backlog or whatever. But in practice, we've seen it in so many organizations, right? So many of our clients, when they come to us, they have a list of, a long list of priorities, and everything's urgent. (Laughs) 

Clinton: Yeah.

Chris: Everything is, like... Has to be done right now. And so, it really takes, it's a practice. It really takes discipline to say, yes, I know these things are important. Yes, I know we want to do them. This has to be later. We are pushing this off. We are scheduling it for a different time. Again, to protect yourself and to protect your team.

Clinton: Love that you were able to parse those into three really smart parts that quickly. I want to add a secondary or maybe even a tertiary layer into, that's been really useful for me as an individual, and I began sharing with my team, is... Alright. I've been working from home for 14-plus years now, so I am not new to it. It's going to take a lot to drag me back to a quote-unquote "office job," and frankly I don't need to. With all that, you do have to earn and get disciplined about that, putting those DNBs, the Do Not Books on your calendar. And then the next step for me that's been really useful is, I've divvied them up into more, into categories. So, some of my Do Not Books, I make them time for my microtasks. I will take my to-do list. I'm in Asana with that, that's what I use, that's fine. Whatever. It could be a piece of paper, who cares? But I will take my to-do list and I will map it back into my calendar. And say, okay, 30 minutes, 15 minutes, 45, 30. And I'll give myself whatever. Half my to-do list or maybe three quarters of it, I will transition it into my calendar as little blocks of time. That, I know in my brain is, hey, that is my task time. I'm also not doing other things during that time. I'm not checking Slack, I'm not checking email. I'm getting my task work done. So my productivity, that are my things I need to churn through, I make time for them.

Chris: Yeah.

Clinton: The other piece of it, the other DNBs, are the more free space.

Chris: Yes.

Clinton: I want to give them a little... For me personally, I want to give them a little bit of guardrails.

Chris: Yes.

Clinton: To say, okay, I'm working on a seller certification program. Cool. I want to get through the one or two chapters of what I need to write down, or two slides' worth, that I need to get through. But that is focused and intent. I'm going to spend maybe two hours on that, because I know it's critical.

Chris: Yeah.

Clinton: So I try to give it guardrails without it being too constrictive. But for me, it really works well to say, here's my task time. I'm going to dedicate myself to that. I'm going to churn, I'm going to get through it. So I get that kind of buzz of like, okay, I am being productive. Those are things I still have to get done as a leader and still, and just as a professional.

Chris: Sure.

Clinton: Got to do 'em. And I give myself enough time of the deep focus stuff, with enough guardrail to say, okay, Clint, this was the two or three things you said were really important this month or quarter, so of those things, can we atomize that into a chunk today, this week, and get that done? That seems to work really well for me and I wonder if... Wonder what you think about, like, the atomization of some of those chunks.

Chris: I mean, I think you're saying a lot of really good things. My question, though, to you, and I don't know the answer, but do you ever have time where you don't have guardrails? Where it's just, there are no expectations about what you're going to get done? It is just like, I'm setting aside this time to think about my... Man, I'm not even sure what word to use. It's vision. It's strategy. It is the longer-term stuff, right?

Clinton: Yeah.

Chris: I have done this in the past when I have a particular thorny problem that I am trying to sort out in a software product that we are building. I set aside time, but the goal is not to solve the problem. The goal is just to put thought and energy against it. You know? If I solve it, cool. But if I don't, that's also okay. And I've seen programmers do this too, like very smart programmers, who say, I am going to allow myself the sort of freedom to go explore. And if I hit on a solution, great. But it's not the explicit goal. And I think that that's an interesting way to frame it, you know, for yourself. And again, for your teams. To say, part of the time here is exploration, and you have to just... Trust. (Laughs) Is the word that's coming to mind. You have to just trust that the exploration time is in service of moving things forward. And frankly, moving things forward in a more, like, impactful way over the long haul. Because if you don't have those periods where you look with a longer view, then you get very focused on the micro. And it looks a lot like the first thing you said, which is...

Clinton: Yeah.

Chris: ...A block where you're churning through a bunch of tasks. 

Clinton: Right. Great points. And I think, I'll call back to something you said earlier, too, about changing your environment. And so for me, something that's worked very well for me personally is, get outside with my dog.

Chris: I love it.

Clinton: Yeah. Take the... Because I've got a nice little loop that I do... I actually have three little loops that I do. And I kind of know their timing. Like, one is about a 15-20 minute walk, one's about a 40 minute walk, and one is about an hour long walk, depending on the time, the weather and things of that nature. I will do that then. And that, to me, is time just to do that thinking.

Chris: Yes.

Clinton: To do that level of, I'm not writing, I'm not in writing mode. Because very often that's what I'm doing as part of my job. I'm creating some sort of content and I'm writing. This is that other level, that abstraction up, if you will, Chris, that you're getting at.

‍Chris: Yep.

Clinton: Where I could just think about, okay, I like to think and put things into systems. It, first of all, helps me think. But I also believe that if you can create the smallest, most effective system to do things and do them at scale, well, that's how you actually get scale. So you could repeat them, it's not some one-off bespoke thing. So a lot of my time with the dog, besides staring at her because she's absolutely gorgeous and beautiful and I love her so much, is thinking through, what's the orchestration that gets me a system where I could do this really well?

Chris: Yes.

Clinton: And then I start to think, who are the partners I need to pull in? What and where are my skills? What's on my team? And okay, what's the cross-collaboration that, it's just not sitting in my corner of the organization yet? And I start to make those kinds of lists. Like, oh, I'm going to have to call Lisa on that one. You know, whatever, whoever it might be.

Chris: Right.

Clinton: And so I start to compile these little, like, dream teams of, like, how would I go about achieving that thing? And that's kind of a bit of a process that I work through to, just to get at those bigger things that you're talking about. 

Chris: Yeah. But it's, but you get there because you weren't focused on, I just got to knock this out. Right?

Clinton: Absolutely. I couldn't do it. I could not do it then. And that, I think, is the brilliance of your question and point. I couldn't even probably do it at the computer, you know? Like, maybe I could, but it would be more like, am I truly offline? Am I in, like, airplane mode, or am I on like a Remarkable type device where I could just... Or, I still love pen and paper. I actually use graphing...

Chris: With the dot paper? Yeah.

Clinton: Yeah. I use graphing paper as my notebooks, because I like to sketch still.

Chris: Yes.

Clinton: You know, so that could be cool on the couch with a cup of coffee or on the porch. But to your point, the change in environment was also part of that liberty to be like, okay, I'm in this kind of zone right now and I'm allowing for it.

Chris: Yeah.

Clinton: And it takes a while. Because you... The weird part, Chris, is like, I don't know about you. You get pangs of odd guilt.

Chris: Oh, I totally feel that. 

‍Clinton: You know? It's like, why? Why am I feeling guilty about this time? It's still... It's, actually might be the most productive. But you get these odd pangs of guilt. So how the heck do you balance those and battle those, if they hit you as well?

Chris: The only way out is through. The only way to balance them is to acknowledge for yourself that, like, even though this is hard and uncomfortable and doesn't feel right and I have guilt coming up, or I have this weird sense that I'm like, you know, not doing my job. You have to just work through all of those things and let them go. And this is why, again, I love what you said at the beginning, which is that you have to do it for yourself, but you also have to do it for your team. Because this is what great leaders can do, is they can give their teams the freedom to say, hey, I'm explicitly acknowledging that we are going to build in these kinds of periods, these slow productivity periods, into our regular cycle. So that it's not just churning through sprint after sprint, iteration after iteration, churn out more designs or more software or more whatever. We as a team are going to adopt, or we as a company are going to adopt, this idea that we have these periods of slowness. And again, even saying the word slow has a negative connotation. But we have to reframe it. We have to say that there's actually tremendous value in this slowing down. And the, I'm putting productivity in scare quotes, but the "productivity" that you actually unlock that is at a much more fundamental level than the “I'm checking the tasks off the list” level. There was something you said I wanted to come back to...

Clinton: Sure.

Chris: Which is going airplane mode, because I think this is another, again, it's, you know, clear takeaway number four, is that sometimes you've got to silence things. You've got to put on Do Not Disturb on your Mac, or you've got to put on Do Not Disturb on Slack. Something Newport says is put on an email autoresponder. Say I'm not responding to email. Which, again, is like... It's like anathema to how people work today. But it's really important, actually, to give yourself some space. And if that means you have to say, hey, I'm not responding to this note just to make sure that, you know, expectations are clear. Again, that won't work in every context. But I think in areas where it does, it can be tremendously valuable. Because in a similar way to blocking your calendar, you are blocking out the things that will suck your energy and attention. Just by their nature, right? When you see that notification come in, there is a tremendous pull to say, I gotta go respond to that. And so, giving yourself the calm and quiet to say, hold on a second, I'm going to make this a lot more simpler because I just don't even want it. I don't want to see it in my peripheral vision, I just want it blocked out. That can be a gift to yourself, and again, to your teams, to say, we're not going to do this to each other. We are not going to be demanding of our collective energy, you know, as we interact and work with each other. Something along the same lines is, there are, you know, there are companies, I think Shopify is one, that will like, you know, ban meetings or have a no-meetings day or something. This is along the same lines, right? It's about saying, hold on a second. Let's not get caught in the trap of... The busy-ness trap.

Clinton: Yep.

‍Chris: Like, let's make sure that we are being thoughtful about how we're spending our time.

Clinton: And I think... Really, it's not a leader thing. I think leaders are feeling it, but I think individual contributors and just teammates, I think everyone is feeling this same way. And, you gotta remember, individual contributors. Most, a lot of them, have aspirations.

Chris: Yes.

Clinton: They want to do the deeper stuff because they know it's more focused. They know it's, hey, if I could just carve out more time, if I could just concentrate on this thing for two months without too much distraction, I could bring this to life. And I think it could be game changing. It could be game changing for the company. It could be game changing for their momentum as an individual within the organization. So one of the tactical things that I've said to my team fairly recently, and... We have a weekly, and I encourage them every week, I say, look, I was like, go to your calendar and do two things. Number one, cancel a meeting that you're hosting next week. And number two, find a meeting to go say no to.

Chris: Yes.

Clinton: And it's okay. Because why? Very often the meeting may or may not be necessary. The ones you can't skip you can't skip.

Chris: Yeah.

Clinton: That's life, and too bad. (Laughs) There's some meetings you can't skip. But you can begin.

Chris: Yes.

Clinton: You could give yourself the gift of one and one. I'm going to take away a meeting, and I'm going to say no to one that I just, I don't think I need to be in, and we could solve this through Slack or Teams. One of the things I love that Tammy, who's the president of Launch, initiated for our team, Chris, is the end of week thing that we do together, right?

‍Chris: Yes, the recap.

Clinton: So at the end of the week, yeah, the weekly recap where we get these great emojis going. And we put in, what were the wins, what were the challenges, what were the kudos and what are we focused on next week? Cool. Number one, it replaces the status check-in. Which is maybe another half hour or hour, right? The, hey, what'd you do? What are you focused on this week? It replaces that. And number two, by the way, it's better.

Chris: Yeah.

Clinton: Because you're not sitting in a meeting nobody wants to be on. You could read through things in a forum that's much more snackable and bite-size. And for me, I don't know about you, every time I read one of our teammates' things for the week, their recap, at least one or two ideas starts going. Like, oh, what do they mean by this? Hey, what client specifically was that? Hey, what did that acronym mean? I don't know that acronym yet. Right?

Chris: Yeah.

Clinton: So... How did that go with client Y? And then you get a little bit of discussion, right there in real time. And it's such a more digestible and more efficient way to do something that was a meeting. Which, by the way, then can clear up another hour for the deeper stuff.

Chris: Right. Because then the things you're doing in the meeting are  actually, you know, that was hopefully what the meeting is necessary for.

Clinton: Right.

Chris: The thing that I like about, what you're talking about, this weekly recap that we do in Slack, there can also be discussions that get threaded. So...

Clinton: Absolutely. Yes.

Chris: In a meeting, if there's a discussion that gets kicked off, everybody in the meeting has to sit there and listen to the discussion. And there can be times when that is valuable. There can also be times, maybe the majority of times, where not everybody in that room needs to listen to that discussion.

Clinton: Great point.

Chris: You know?

Clinton: I'm guilty of doing that with my team. That's a really good point you're making.

Chris: We all are!

Clinton: Yeah.

Chris: The beauty of it being in Slack is that, if you want to dive in, if that thread is relevant to you and you want to dive in, great, it's there for you. If not, you can skip the whole thing. And you can say, you know, I don't need to spend my time and energy there. There's a couple more points I want to make sure we touch on before we close.

Clinton: Sure.

Chris: One is this idea of quality over quantity, which I think makes sense when you read it, but I think in practice is very hard. Right? How do you coach your team to say it's not about the number of things we are doing, it is about the quality of the things we are doing. Going off of our clients' organizations, and frankly, our own organization, I think that is a very hard thing to internalize. And I'm curious your thoughts over, you know, how can you shift the focus to quality over number of things completed?

Clinton: So, I think I have the benefit, because I'm in marketing... And maybe this translates to everyone's world, but I'll give you my perception, my point of view. In the marketing realm, a lot of times you're creating content. That's one of the major jobs.

‍Chris: Yep.

Clinton: So, in that way it could become fairly obvious as to, okay, what if this instead was video-based? What if this was more motion graphics? And, you know, things that are, I would say, appealing and, like, you know it when you see it type things. And so for my team, I think it becomes a little bit easier to say, hey, what if we did a little bit of, less of the SEO, keep the lights on things? And instead of that... We still gotta do it because there are reasons to do SEO blogs that really hit keywords you're trying to promote, makes all the sense in the world that that's just kind of best practice. However, what if we find a way to more automate that, or get that off our plates, so we could do more of, let's put out... Let's take an e-book or let's take a book we did, and let's put out a really great audiobook version of that. And make an amazing social around that to get more eyes to that, that is more compelling, more visual, more video-focused.

Chris: But... So, Clinton, but if I... Because I want to unpack... There's some good decision making here that I just want to, like, unpack for our listeners.

Clinton: Yeah.

Chris: Because, I think the point you made is a good one, right? If you can automate things that free up your time to essentially automate the quantity away, I think that that is true in some cases.

Clinton: If you can. Yeah.

Chris: Right. But also, like, the book that our VP of Engineering published, Frictionless Enterprise, is a great example. Because you could have said, let's spend that time creating a lot of stuff. Let's spend that time creating a lot of articles, right? On our website? Or a lot of LinkedIn posts. And we're just going to get a lot of volume around those things. But instead, we spent the energy writing the book and recording the audiobook, and it's been tremendously valuable to us. Right? Like, it paid off. Because having this high-quality asset is generating conversations with our clients and with prospects that we never would have gotten from a one-off article. And so, like, I just want to probe a little bit, like, how did you make that decision? How did you come to quality of this one really important thing versus quantity of a lot of little things?

Clinton: First of all, thank you. That's nice words. And I agree that it's had the kind of impact we wanted. One of my favorite movies of all time is The Cannonball Run. So... Dating myself a little here, but you know, Burt Reynolds, Dom DeLouise, the Rat Pack, early young Jackie Chan, Farrah Fawcett. It's an amazing piece of Americana cinema. There's a scene at the very beginning of the race, and I forget the gentlemen's names, but they're about to start the race. And they click the thingy to, you know, they gotta do the punch card thing, and they look at each other, and the one guy goes, if you're going to be a bear, be a grizzly.

Chris: (Laughs)

Clinton: (Laughs) And they both kind of like, you know, yell at each other, like, moan, and they peel out. So I think philosophically it's the... A little bit of the spidey sense. When you think you've got something good, can you push to the more adventurous?

Chris: Yes.

Clinton: Can you push and say, you know, alright. Yes. That could have been an ebook, a digital ebook only. It could have been a series of blog posts, et cetera et cetera. And then the other part of it, the inverse of it, too, Chris, which is really the most rewarding... Again, maybe just the marketing thing, but my sense is no, it will show out really for anything beyond content, is that if you go and do the more adventurous, higher-value thing, you take that risk, you actually end up with all these components anyway.

Chris: Yes.

Clinton: These little pieces fly off from it that become much, much more easy to create, because you went and did the deep thing first.

Chris: It's such a good point. It's absolutely also applicable to software products, right?

Clinton: Right.

Chris: When people think about their digital ecosystem and they get one important thing right, a lot of the other pieces fall into place in their platform. And we've seen it time and time again with our clients, where they tackle, rather than tackling the little things, right?

Clinton: Yeah.

Chris: They tackle the big thing. It's incredibly impactful for their customers. And then a lot of, like, downstream stuff falls out of it. So I think that's a great, widely applicable piece of advice, and maybe a great place to leave it. If you're listening to this and there's something that you can go tackle and go spend your team's energy on that's going to have a big impact, even if it means your efficiency and the number of story points you complete in a given sprint is going to go down, embrace it. Go for it. We are here to give you permission to say, take a big swing. Go for something that is high quality, and it will pay off in your business. And if you need help doing it, reach out to us. We'd love to talk to you to figure out how you can operationalize your organization and your team to make those bigger swings possible. We love doing that kind of work, and we are here to back up what Cal Newport is saying in Deep Work, which is, you gotta go for quality over quantity. Clinton, this was great. Thank you for doing it with me. We should do this more often. This was fun. And there's more to say on this topic, so if people are interested, maybe we'll do a sequel episode.

Clinton: I had a blast. It was fun. And I'm with you, Chris. Let's do this again.

Chris: Alright. Take care, y'all.

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