As I've said before on my personal blog, it pays to get started. No one ever looks back and wishes they waited longer to launch their business, invest in their career growth, find fulfilling volunteer opportunities. The sooner you get started, the sooner you can test, fail and learn, gather feedback, and optimize your efforts toward success.
When I founded 360ops, my ambition was to address an unfilled need in the market and control my own destiny. I noticed that existing outsourcing companies in the monetization and operations space felt cold, distant, disconnected. They did not feel like part of the publishers' team. I wanted to turn this on its head by creating deep relationships built on expertise and trust where publishers felt the same way about us as they did about their own teams.
We are currently undergoing a period of tremendous change both in the media landscape and the workforce in general. More people are working remotely. There are more opportunities outside of the traditional high school + extracurriculars > college > grad school > corporate job route. An increasing number of kids are turning those extracurriculars into brands and businesses. Side hustles will soon be an expectation rather than a surprise. I for one plan on juggling multiple projects at any given time for the rest of my working life.
Thats not to say I will lose focus or become distracted by being "busy." If there is one lesson I have learned over the past few years, through my own experience and in reading books like The One Thing and Essentialism, its that being busy is not the same as being effective. It is all too easy to jump from fire drill to fire drill, filling each day with meetings and emails that lead to more meetings and more emails. Being productive and effective means knowing what things that you could do today that will make everything else in the future easier or unnecessary. Its an ability to separate the urgent from the important and prioritize accordingly.
Redesigning this website was one of those projects that I had on my to-do list for a very long time. A few weeks ago, I made the decision to prioritize it, ignore many other tasks and get it done. A company blog as a place to discuss efficiency and best practices in the digital media world has been on my wish list for years. Now, after some consistent focus and follow-through, we've started.