Andy: Emma, it’s January again! We didn’t hop on the New Year, New You train last year and I certainly am not hopping on it now.
Emma: Right? I stand by last year’s newsletter! Scheduling a few three-day weekends between now and Memorial Day remains some of the best advice I’ve given anyone about anything, ever. And even as 2020 swamps its way into 2021, a “January re-set” can still be as simple as making sure we know what we’re doing. It’s enough.
Andy: It’s plenty.
Emma: We’re including the same 10 questions for you and your teams to ask and answer this year because they are good and clear and stabilizing when lots of stuff isn’t.
10 Questions Everyone on Your Team Should Be Able to Answer in January
Work through these questions together in an all-team meeting, in small groups, or individually during this week’s 1-on-1s. Listen closely. Are there any gaps in knowledge? Patterns in the answers? Barriers you need to remove? If no, your team is in great shape to cruise right along. If yes: getting everyone’s feet on the ground is your priority.
1. What am I working on?
2. When is it due?
3. What does success look like?
4. Why am I working on it / why is it important? What problems are we trying to solve?
5. What’s at risk?
6. What is everyone else doing? How does it fit into our/my work and goals?
7. How did we do in Q4 and what was our impact on that?
8. Where can I go for help? Answers? Feedback?
9. What struggles is our team facing?
10. As a team, what is everyone most excited about?
Bonus! A motto that’ll help get you through this:
Andy: Answering these 10 questions — and making sure everyone on your team can answer them — can cut through the post-holiday fog, and give you speed when you’re making decisions. That’s a really wonderful thing if you, like me, are feeling a major brain slow-down so far this year.
Emma: Fair warning: I found the questions harder to answer this year. My first scan nearly knocked me on my ass: Why is what I’m working on important? What struggles is the team facing? Those questions are so much more complex than I knew to consider when we wrote them a year ago. (I also feel like it could be worse: It’s Friday morning right now as I’m writing this sentence, and just saw a marketing email hit my inbox with a subject line that says Sitting Down with Matthew McConaughey and that’s all good and fine, but I’m also glad I don’t have that copywriter on my team asking “Wait, so why is this important?”)
Andy: If you answered these questions last year, pull up your answers and take a look. We did and wow, it’s like looking into a portal of a different era — back when they used an old belt to hold school books together.
Emma: I’d love a glimpse through the wormhole at the alternate universe where you and I are running a online niche hobbyist magazine. Are wormhole Andy and Emma living the dream? Maybe. But I bet they didn’t create a 14-part course on how to write a better resume and cover letter…
Andy: Nope! They lived in a different time, one in which I still believed work was a water-tight vessel that couldn’t get contaminated by the outside world. I always knew on some level that wasn’t be true, but now I really feel it: work is more like a sandwich packed in a paper towel than one in a hermetically sealed container. If a water bottle spills in your lunch bag, that sandwich is getting soggy.
Emma: Right? Separating work from life is an option pretty much everyone lost this year. How do you compartmentalize from your kitchen table? Should we even try?
Andy: I kind of love that we can’t compartmentalize anymore — was it ever that healthy? Was it ever really possible? — but I think there will be times I miss the delusion. It was nice to believe that there was a place I could go that didn’t come into contact with Real Life.
Last year wasn’t the first year I’ve felt tired, but it’s the first year I couldn’t shove it away and work through it. I’m glad for the change, but it was shocking almost every time I started to work on something and immediately needed to break it up into 10,000 tinier steps.
Emma: Me too, and it’s still taking me off guard. Which: of course. Lots of stuff has been new and different, and that’s always slow-going. There were so many other things to think about — basic tasks like going to the grocery store got extra complicated.
Andy: Pandemic or not, everyone has complications in their lives, all the time. This year, we happened to all board a giant cruise ship of complications together. We’re all slower, I think. I certainly am.
Emma: Maybe this year I will get faster than I was in 2020, but I have a hunch this is just the pace I go now. It’s feeling important to be careful and smart about the work I’m putting out. That kind of psychological pressure might not be bad, but it definitely isn’t helping with speed. It feels kind of the same as when I size up in jeans. This is just the way it is. And the new jeans actually fit. What a relief.
Andy: Yeah, doing a set of these questions can feel like a closet clean-out. Get rid of anything that’s used to fit or is “supposed” to fit so you’re not sorting through it every day under a low hum of crappy feelings. It’s a new year, and we do deserve new answers. We’ve included ours, with a bit of commentary below.
Emma: We’d love to hear from you about your answers this year. Email us: hello@thebent.co or drop a note in Ask Us Anything.
The January Questionnaire — Our Answers, 2021 Version
Last year, our answers weren’t about The Bent. This year, they are. They have a lot of heart woven into them. It’s clear that this year, we’re out to confirm our sense of purpose. And, we’re willing to be vulnerable. (Lol not that we were all that guarded before…) All of the questions feel much more consequential — and what we do with our lives does, too.
1. What am I working on?
Marketing our new resume and cover letter course — our first real big push to turning The Bent into a profitable business.
2. When is it due?
One first deadline is in 4 months, when our course software subscription is up for renewal.
3. What does success look like?
We’d like to make $100,000 this year from The Bent. Putting that to paper feels weird and daunting and audacious, but it’s true. That’s our goal: for The Bent to support us both, salary-wise, into the future. We’d like to be able to make this our main thing, no side gigs needed.
4. Why am I working on it / why is it important? What problems are we trying to solve?
It’s important because no one should feel trapped in a job when they don’t need to be. We’ve both been stuck before, not knowing how to get out or dreading the endless cycle of job applications. Writing a great resume and cover letter is like writing your own ticket to freedom. We want to share everything we know to make it easier and more effective.
And more generally, The Bent is addressing loneliness in the workplace — the feeling that there’s a stash of secret answers that, once you find it, everything is easy, fun, and easy. There’s no such thing. There’s just finding some folks (hello!) to connect with as you learn your way through it all.
5. What’s at risk?
It’s so painful to think about: If we don’t make money and get to a place where The Bent is self-sustaining, we’d have to put the course to its grave — and risk having to fold altogether.
6. What is everyone else doing? How does it fit into our work and goals?
It’s just the two of us — right now, there’s no one else to keep track of. The Bent fits into both of our goals to do meaningful work with a team we love. We’ve got that. Now, we just need to make it sustainable.
7. How did we do in Q4 and what was our impact on that?
We finished the course and launched it, which was the essential first step. We thought we’d be done much sooner, but see above re: slowness. That delay meant we punted some other things, like updating the site, and we need to pull that back as a priority.
8. Where can I go for help? Answers? Feedback?
Each other. Our journals and therapists. Friends, family, and colleagues — especially those who know how to sell things and make money. We actually don’t have a great answer for this. So far we’ve relied exclusively on trying things out on our own and muddling our way through. Maybe this year we find a mentor? That’s an exciting possibility to explore.
9. What struggles is our team facing?
This is totally new unexplored territory for us. It involves asking for people to pay for something — and to be very successful at it. Neither of us has ever done that before.
10. As a team, what is everyone most excited about?
Lol, we feel mostly tired and intimidated. Beneath that, though, we’re excited about the possibility of doing what we love for the long haul.
Bonus! A motto that’ll help get you through this:
Make it last!
