Field notes from eight months of working, living, and leading this year. When to spend less time, why we’re all mental and emotional lefties right now, the unscratchable itch, and more.

I’ve had a memo hastily titled “Notes from the Edge of Panic” going on my phone for the past eight months. This week I sat down to reread it, filling in a few details. I kept the title because I still kind of like it. Those eight months gave me these eight meditative thoughts. I'm giving them to you now—we should give each other as much as we can, shouldn't we?

1. Taking the long view has a lot to do with faith and very little to do with a plan.

I’m not talking about capital-F "Faith". I mean the capacity for directing energy into the unknown, believing that it’s not lost. I still hustle for the businesses I help lead, those under my care, those in my household. I still cook dinner most nights because I trust that it’s good for my soul, not just my insides. It's easy to get lost in the middle distance between what I can do with what's before me and the horizon point. I have to look to the horizon a lot more often. My plan now might look a lot like not having a plan, but sometimes that’s just the right plan.

2. Everything takes longer than I expected (or than I’ve been allowing).

I used to work inside time boxes much more before. Now it’s okay if ideas take months to shape up because what even is time anymore? I should have been doing things this way for years. (But to be fair to my former self, my career hasn’t always given me months, or even weeks, or even days.) But like an excellent chili, the big ideas need a long simmer.

3. Some things just don’t need much time (and I’ve been overkilling it).

When I put on an outfit, packed a lunch, drove to the office, and put my head down to work, I brought much professional force to bear on whatever I pointed my attention at. Some jobs take all the brain muscle I have. But some require a light, possibly silly touch. Right now I don’t work in an office. It’s easier not to see every job as a nail requiring a smack from my professional sledgehammer. My coworkers are my three-year-old and two cats. I work with a view of my backyard or in my wife’s bakery. My mental feather duster is easier to reach for than the hammer these days.

4. We’re all mental and emotional lefties now.

In April I trimmed off the tip of my right thumb on accident (be more careful than me with a mandoline slicer). At urgent care they cleaned it up and wrapped a giant bandage around it. My right hand stayed mostly out of commission for the next month. I slowly became quasi-ambidextrous. We all had to live with being cut off from each other this year. We’ve been developing our intellectual-emotional shadow functions. We may never master them, but we’ll be able to do so much more than we could before because of our new mental ambidexterity. I think this is what the evolution of humanity feels like.

5. It's okay to have an unscratchable itch.

The idea you can’t get to the bottom of. Not being home for Christmas. Not understanding your politics/faith/budget right now. Things come back around, just wait and see.

I think you extract what you need from your experiences. Maybe it was always this way, but especially now: Everyone’s vantage point is really, really different. I think we more often need to remember that each other is a human being, same as us. Same feelings. Different experiences. Same ups and downs (though at different times), loneliness, wonder, regret, and joy from different vantage points. I’m trying to spend way less time telling other people how to get to those feelings the same way I did. Just that I have them, too. Yours and my sound waves need an echo, not to be told that we’re shouting in the wrong caves.

7. Spiraling isn’t always circling the drain.

No ideas (yet). Nothing’s working (yet). Nothing feels good (yet). But sometimes you’re being pulled through a wormhole to a new galaxy of new ideas. I know almost nothing about the future, but I do know it’s non-linear. I can’t draw a straight line to it. We get there with the spiral.

We don’t have to agree on everything. We can’t agree on everything. But when it comes to our collective fate, consensus is critical. What can we learn as a “we”? The future is what we’re making it, together, right now.

Those are my notes. I’m not at the edge of panic anymore, but stuff is still weird. After reading these, I'm curious: What else did you learn about lately? I'd love to hear the big stuff, small stuff, or anything in between. Drop us a line on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter or send me an email.

When it comes to creative work, why is it so hard to get down to business? In this blog post, Justin shares what he's learned about productivity in creative work over the last 10 or so years.

When it comes to creative work, why is it so hard to get down to business? You just have to outline the bare bones of the course, write the campaign strategy, or sketch a few logo ideas. You know: It won’t actually take very long. Just a few minutes! Maybe ten (fifteen tops). But you can’t seem to find that time.

Or is it you? Have you lost your edge? Usually the pressure works in your favor. The squeeze makes your best work emerge (are you toothpaste?). But not this time. And, really, not the last few times. What changed?

I’ll tell you the secret at the top. Creative work takes a really long time. You think fifteen minutes, but in truth you have to feed it hours. Wait, that can’t be right. Right?

Let’s start at the end and work backwards to tally up what actually goes into the “real work.” You know the to-do you’re thinking of takes fifteen minutes. But you had to write two bad drafts before this great one (it happens), so say forty-five minutes.

You managed your coworkers’ demands on your time today. Guarding your calendar kept interruptions away. As your mother wryly used to say, you don't need peace and quiet all the time, but a piece of quiet would work wonders. Making the space in your day took five minutes ten different times.

Maybe you took a walk too, which really helped you see today’s true priorities and get your metabolism going. Walk: fifteen minutes.

You had the energy because you ate breakfast, not just coffee. Even if breakfast came from a cereal box or a freezer, it took an extra ten minutes to prep and eat.

You felt clear-headed when you woke up today, which means you slept better last night. That took an extra hour of eyes-closed time. To get to sleep, you read in bed for thirty minutes instead of clearing your inbox for tomorrow. You made dinner a balanced, unwinding meal too—that cost another hour and a half, even if you left the dishes for later (they need to soak, right?).

The motivation for last night’s dinner came from the self-care you did before it. You squeezed in a short run, meditated, read a novel, or caught up with those friends you’ve been playing calendar tag with for weeks even though you really do like them (you do!). It only took an hour. These conscious actions told your inner kid—the one who’s coming up with these great ideas out of nowhere today—that you care for her or him, too. They paid it forward at crunch time.

So, the real work only took fifteen minutes. But making it possible required an additional five hours and forty-five minutes. Just for those fifteen minutes! The grand total comes to six hours.

Your creative work itself formed the tip of a ginormous temporal iceberg.

Knowing that this is how creative tasks work means the end of your guilt about not getting to that to-do before. Instead, acknowledge the hours of work and self-enriching time you must give to the true task of creating your own optimal conditions. Lay the groundwork. If the real work only took fifteen minutes, anyone could do it all the time, including you.

Going to yoga? Catching a matinee? Reading a book? Suddenly, that’s time very well spent. Give yourself credit for all those hours being part of the process, even part of the work itself.

We at Pathwright build our platform to be a clear, pleasant place to do your creative work when you’re ready. We can’t create more hours in your day, but we can make sure you don’t waste any of the ones you do have. We’re all in this together.

Coffee Walks is a new and ongoing interview show from the Pathwright team. Mark Johnson discusses the importance of side projects in his own life and the Pathwright team.

Coffee Walks is a new and ongoing interview show from the Pathwright team. We'll talk about technology and teaching through stories that connect them. In this episode, Mark Johnson discusses the importance of side projects in his own life and the Pathwright team. 

Host: Christian Shockley
Guest: Mark Johnson

More from Mark:

"How I Launched Six Side Projects in 2017" 

Have an idea for an interview topic? Send questions, comments, or topic suggestions our way on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram or email christian@pathwright.com. We'd love to hear from you!

coffee_walks_1-_mark_johnson_on_side_projects.mp3

You can probably design your way to any outcome. But let’s compare coffee and little kids to see.

Why I Believe in Design and Design Believes in Me

The 3 Phases of Design Every Project Encounters

Today it’ll be 85º. When I got to work this morning, I put fresh, hot coffee in a mason jar with a lid and put it in the fridge. Through the magic of good planning, after lunch, it’s a wake-making iced refreshment waiting for me. I’m certain of the outcome, barring power cuts or someone leaving the fridge door open. I’ve designed this care for myself.

Earlier this morning, I made breakfast for both my kids. I do this almost every morning. Sometimes they eat, sometimes they super don’t. They’re two and four years old—food moodiness is par for the pre-K course. I hope that, whether they eat or not, they learn how to care for themselves with a healthy breakfast. And that I love them. I’ve targeted these outcomes, though I’ll try many other tactics to solve for them, too.

So, two cases of design. Two cases of self-care.

If you're solving things with design, you could divide your approaches into short-, mid-, and long-term design. Putting coffee in the fridge? Short-term design. Breakfast with love? Long-term design.

But I think you’ll be walking into the mouth of madness if you try to plan mid-term design. Why? Let me explain with another example.

Let’s say you’re going for a walk. Short-term design is you deciding how to take the next hundred steps. Quick pace? Slowly, so you don’t arrive sweaty? Which path works most efficiently for you?

Long-term design is what point on the horizon you’re aiming for, be it self-care or the building across campus.

Mid-term design happens after your first hundred steps, but before you’ve reached your horizon point. Running late, better pick up the pace. Are you tiring too quickly? Does your friend Sarita want to join you? You pick a direction that intersects with her while still moving toward your destination.

You design the short-term; you design the long-term. But the mid-term designs you. When you arrive in the mid-term zone, suddenly you possess performance data on the first hundred steps, new stakeholder input from Sarita, budget feedback from your tired legs, etc.

Now that your walk is telling you some information, you’re prepared to do another round of short-term design in response. You might walk quickly, but take the stairs to Sarita instead of the long way around. You still have the time (and the legs) to reach your destination. All’s well, though you might try new approaches after reaching your friend.

This is why we at Pathwright work in six-week project cycles. We’ve written about that before. Among other things, focusing on short-term and long-term design at work keeps us from neurotically obsessing over things like quarterly profits or overcommitting at the expense of adaptability.

We know our long-term mission. We design our slate of new projects. We wait for mid-term design to kick in in-between.

Great designers of all kinds welcome mid-term feedback. Mid-term exams? Tweaking the curriculum for next semester? Having the team try a different kind of book for the next company book club? Reframing launch instructions for the next conference? All cases of allowing in mid-term design to collaborate with you.

You could call my fridge coffee trick a “life hack”. I’d just call it good design—figuring out what you’ll want and how to get it before you have to have it.

In four hours, I’ll need cold coffee (long-term). So right now, this hot coffee needs a cold fridge (short-term). If it’s still hot in an hour, I’ll move it to the freezer to cool faster (mid-term). I can’t know what the coffee will need in an hour. I could go crazy theorizing or overcomplicate things (or both, yikes).

The coffee will tell me. Design happens between my needing coffee and what the coffee needs from me.

Please, set yourself a moonshot long-term design goal. And take the next hundred well-designed steps to get there. But don’t obsess over what might happen after that. Embrace the mid-term design coming to you. It’ll tell you what to do.

We couldn't get away from the feeling that we were running on a treadmill we had no way of switching off or even slowing down. Recovering a more natural rhythm of work and rest humans are wired for, here are five benefits of working in 6-week cycles that we can't do without.

During the summer after I graduated from college a sinking feeling began to creep up on me. While I'd readily said "goodbye" to school for good, now I was looking at a seemingly-endless expanse of time ahead of me with no new semesters, long breaks, advancements or graduations to look forward to... just work and whatever I made of it. I like work and making my own path through it, but something about this horizon of unstructured sameness unsettled me enough that I got very close to signing up for more school.

Over the following decade, I got used to the never-ending stretch of time, and we began to build Pathwright as a never-ending series of projects. (Software is never "done".) We'd start and finish projects and then pick up the next. We hit (and missed) plenty of launch dates in no particular rhythm. We tried out many project management tools and methods from kanban boards to project management software to sticky notes and saw marginal improvements.

In other words, we worked pretty much the same way as every other company. But no matter how hard we tried, we couldn't get away from the feeling that we were running on a treadmill that we couldn't switch off or slow down. As the product and team grew and projects stacked up, we ran into frequent periods of intense work and subsequent burnout. After a particularly rough stretch of time leading up to launching Pathwright 2, we knew we had to get off the treadmill. That's when we stumbled across this article about how Basecamp works in six week cycles. We've learned a lot from Basecamp over the years and had nothing to lose by giving this method a try in the new year of 2017.

Most new ideas we try on for size work to a degree, and we adapt them a bit for marginal overall improvement. But this idea was not like that: It worked immediately. It worked amazingly. And it's still working.

Now, it's hard for us to imagine not working in six-week cycles that we refer to as "Trails." In addition to recovering the more natural rhythm of work and rest we humans are wired for, here are five benefits we can't do without:

1. Time-boxing projects into six-weeks helps us plan smaller & smarter.

It's notoriously impossible to predict accurate timelines or costs for software projects (and that's true of any multifaceted, creative project). Humans are simply no good at predicting the future. Once we finally accepted our finite planning powers, we gained a tremendous amount of mental clarity and focus from simply limiting our time horizon for projects to "what can we realistically accomplish in just six weeks?"

As for how many projects we plan during one trail, we followed Basecamp's lead and commit to:

⛰ Expeditions: A few bigger projects that will take four to six weeks.

🏞 Hikes: Seven to ten smaller projects that take anywhere from a couple of days to a couple of weeks.

After the first few trails of taking on quite a bit too much, we added a "Notch Day" smack in the middle of the six weeks that acts as a checkpoint to review project progress, share feedback, and help each other edit down projects to even smaller sizes when we can.

2. We get to hit the reset button every six weeks.

While we try to keep projects within the six weeks, we don't stress out if we don't quite make it. Instead, we hit the "reset" button during the two weeks in-between trails.

We call these two in-between weeks 🏕 "Camp weeks" which are a break from focused projects to focus instead on review, exploration, and planning at a slower pace.

Any projects not finished in the previous trail are reframed and reshaped as a new project for the next trail or put on a waiting list for a future trail.

3. There's time to look back, think, and plan.

Our 🏕Camp Weeks in-between each Trail are a welcome respite. We take a slower pace, re-orient ourselves towards our goals and mission, and begin to map out the next six-weeks of work.

Camp weeks not only provide us with a nice break, but also help us zoom out from periods of detailed focus to reflect on our mission, strategy, and goals. This big picture review every six weeks helps us avoid the common pitfall of prioritizing the urgent over long term impact.

4. We have a rhyme and reason for saying "later."

Before we worked in trails, it was more difficult to tell team members and partners with a great idea or pressing need that we'd have to get to it "later." While later is necessary 93% of the time, it could come across as subjective and arbitrary when our only framework for planning was whatever we decided was next in line. Additionally, we spent a lot of time and energy attempting to synthesize all this new feedback with current plans as it came in (which was all the time).

Now that we work in Trails, we can simply share that we'll consider the idea during an upcoming Camp Week and get back with them — and then forget about it until then. While we still have to say "later" to most requests, at least there's a rhyme and reason behind it and our team and customers have all generally found knowing the rhythm of our work reassuring.

5. We get to share more of what we've accomplished.

🏕 Camp Weeks carve out enough time to share what we accomplished in the previous trail with our team and customers every seven weeks. We call this 👩🏼‍🏫 "Show & Tell" and it's become a something we look forward to. It's a bit like a mini-graduation we get to experience together six times a year. We're twelve trails in now, and I'm still amazed by how much our team accomplishes in just six weeks.

If you feel like you're running on a treadmill, experiencing bouts of "sprints" and burnout,  then  it's time for you to try something new as well. We unequivocally recommend giving some form of this work & rest rhythm a try and would love to hear how it works for you.

Let us know on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram or email lydia@pathwright.com with thoughts, questions, or topic suggestions.

I’m a graphic designer. That’s why it’s weird for me to say that, when you use Pathwright, you probably won’t have to pay someone like me.

5 Design Settings That Transform Your School in Seconds

What If You Didn't Have to Pay a Designer?

In my heart (and based on two degrees), I’m a graphic designer. That’s why it’s weird for me to say that, when you use Pathwright, you probably won’t have to pay someone like me.

For years, I’ve worked with our team to make Pathwright pretty from your first login. But you may not know that you can take your school to the next level totally on your own.

Truly intuitive? So beautiful it blows your hair back? Tweak five simple settings to throw just the right mood in seconds.

When you create online courses with Pathwright, each course is automatically given one of 72 different colorful course covers. These course covers act like book or album covers. They give learners and staff alike a visual cue by which to remember the topic or content.

That’s a great start. But when you’re ready to really make courses your own, adding custom covers makes a big impact on how learners perceive them. You may have brand assets already at your fingertips, or you may want to turn to resources like Flickr Commons or Unsplash for great, free images.

We wrote detailed guidelines for adding custom covers here. Here’s the 5 second version:

You’ve got two great options. First, reusing your course cover with blur turned on makes the most sense for course backgrounds. Most course designers do this. But second, if you turn blur off, you’ll see a nice banner appear across the top of the path where the general info is.

Going the banner route takes a bit more planning not to render the course title unreadable. In most cases, you likely won’t encounter that problem. But think of it as more of a pro move.

To me, the best course backgrounds share three qualities:

Use mostly midtones, not bright highlights or deep shadows that create too much contrast

Don’t contain an overwhelming amount of detail

On the left, we've used an image with one main color. On the right, we've gone with an image that really runs the gamut.

On the left, the image is way too extreme in highlights and shadows. On the right, we've maintained reasonable contrast.

Here’s how to add a course background like that:

Your account icon is what most of your people will think of as the school itself. It’s like a social media avatar mixed with an app icon.

Often, using your logo makes the most sense here. If you don’t have a logo or don’t want to use it, anything memorable will do. Keep in mind that this will be seen during login and in discussions, so it’ll be small but important.

If you’re not sure what to do for an account icon, a memorable solid color or shape (or both!) works nicely. Here’s how to add an account icon:

Account backgrounds show at login for everyone. But if you're staff, you'll also see these special backgrounds on your dashboard. In both places, they fill the entire background, making this a simple way to set the right branded tone.

The most effective account backgrounds are a lot like course backgrounds—mostly midtones, limited detail. But in contrast to course backgrounds, choosing an image with a single dominant color can be an effective unifier.

Here’s how to add an account background:

This is one of those “cherry atop the sundae” settings. Whatever color you choose for your account’s primary color will instantly be applied to almost every link and button. It’s a quick way to really make Pathwright your own.

Brands typically have a main color. Usually, that’s the right color to use for this setting. But watch out: Black, red, and very light colors don’t work best.

Black doesn’t read as a clickable link very well.

Red makes every clickable option look dangerous.

Very light colors won’t even show up on lower-end screens or may look strange on mobile devices.

In these cases, reach for your brand’s secondary color. Using this as an opportunity to carve out a sub-brand for your Pathwright account can be an interesting direction, too.

That’s it! These five simple settings turn Pathwright into your own custom-branded app. We’re always working on more ways to make our platform the perfect canvas for your team, so let us know what we’re missing! Tweet at us or send us messages through Support with any ideas.

If you're keen to explore more, check out our Support article on everything you can brand with your Pathwright account.

We sometimes get asked if Pathwright plays friendly with other apps. The answer is a resounding "yes" because of a really cool tool called Zapier...

How Zapier Connects Your Pathwright Account with Hundreds of Apps and Actions

Multiply the Power of Your Pathwright Account With Zapier

We sometimes get asked if Pathwright plays friendly with other apps. The answer is a resounding "yes" because of a really cool tool called Zapier. If the service you want to use integrates with Zapier, then it should be pretty easy to create an integration with Pathwright without any custom code.

Search for the app you want to integrate with Pathwright to see if is supported here: The Zapbook.

Don't see what you need? You can contact the app creators and see if they can add the needed action, or you could look into Webhooks from Zapier. The Zapier Platform is open to anyone to connect their own privately owned API or connect to a public API for their own private use.

If you're unfamiliar with Zapier, here's how it works: https://zapier.com/how-it-works/.

When you're on your Zapier dashboard, you can do the following:

Select your Trigger & Action and add Filters to further refine the actions.

Create a Zapier account and link it to your Pathwright account

To get started, log into your Pathwright account, open Settings from the main menu, open Connect other apps, and then select the Zapier integration.

You'll find the app ID for your account that you need to integrate your Pathwright account with Zapier, and you'll find private invitation links to use the Pathwright Zapier app.

Send an email when a new member joins your school.

Send yourself a notification when a learner completes a course.

Send an invitation to join a private course when someone pays you with Shopify, PayPal, or Moonclerk.

Send a unique invitation code to join a course when you enter an email address to a Google Spreadsheet or other form.

Send a customized welcome email when a learner enrolls in a particular course or group.

Auto-create new member logins for users that you already have in another app.

With Zapier, you can do more with Pathwright for yourself and your learners. If you have any questions as you explore this new tool, don't hesitate to contact us at hello@pathwright.com.

Part three of our three part Guidance series from Laurie. Integrate your account with other powerful tools...

From the Editor: This is part three of a three part series in which Laurie, our Guidance Expert, shares Pathwright’s subtle superpowers and hidden features you might have missed. You can read part one here and part two here.

1. Integrate your account with other powerful tools

Make your Pathwright account even more powerful by integrating with other great apps. We have custom integrations for Intercom, Google Analytics, and Stripe. 

We can also integrate with 1000+ plus apps through Zapier and more custom integrations are available through Webhooks by Zapier. 

Here’s what you might create through app integrations . . .

Send a custom email when a new member joins your school. 

Send an invitation to join a private course when someone pays you with Shopify, PayPal, or Moonclerk. 

Send a custom email when a learner enrolls in a particular course or group. 

Send yourself a notification when a learner completes a course.  

2. Add custom pages to your Pathwright account or connect it with your external website

Another little-known fact is that you can iframe external web pages into your Pathwright account. If your page meets our specifications, we can add it to your account for free. Custom landing page? Blog page? Gift subscription promo page? Yes, you can.

Allrecipes’ Free Trial promo page: 
https://cookingschool.allrecipes.com/p/free-trial/ 

The Lamppostguild’s landing page: 
https://www.lamppostguild.com/p/the-lamp-post-guild/

Ligonier Connect’s gift subscriptions page: 
https://connect.ligonier.org/p/gift-subscriptions/ 

3. Export data to use outside of Pathwright

Pathwright tracks tons of data for you. Much of this data is visible in the interface, but we've also provided downloadable spreadsheet reports, so you can do more with it. Export your learners' emails, so you can message them from your favorite email service. Or download your gradebook. 

Thanks for reading this series. Don’t forget to check out parts one and two, and sign up for our blog to get updates on new features and posts from our Education and Guidance teams. 

To discover more about Pathwright, find all of our FAQs here.

Part two of our three part Guidance series from Laurie. Make your best course pitch page...

3 Ways to Market Your Course that You May Be Missing

From the Editor: This is part two of a three part series in which Laurie, our Guidance Expert, shares Pathwright’s subtle superpowers and hidden features you might have missed. You can read part one here. Get notified on part three’s release by signing up for our blog below.

Your course may be fantastic, but without an About page, potential learners might miss out. The About page showcases the wonderful features of your course, engaging learners before they click “start.”

Minimally, you can add an attractive course cover and brief description on your About page. But it may be worth your time to add a trailer video, author bio, and more. 

(Bonus: Use multiple rotating banners in your school’s Library to call out specific courses and deals from your Library page.)

2. Give anyone a free preview of your course

One of the best ways to show your potential learners your course is to let them preview a free sample. We automatically allow anyone to preview the course "Path" as an outline on public courses. 

But did you know that you can make the content in selected steps previewable for people who are not enrolled? Try making the intro and first lesson or first few steps available for preview. You can call attention to this on the "About" page as part of your pitch. 

3. Offer special pricing, promotions, and scholarships with coupon codes

You can obtain coupon codes for your courses anytime, on any plan. Here are some ways you can use coupon codes: 

To attract interest by offering a promo deal

To offer scholarships or special access to reviewers, sponsors, or pilot students

To offer school credit instead of a refund

To give discounted or free access to someone who has paid outside of Pathwright

To allow someone to purchase courses or subscriptions as a gift

You can request coupon codes for individual courses, specific groups of courses, and subscription plans. 

This is part one of a three part series in which Laurie, our Guidance Expert, shares Pathwright’s subtle superpowers and hidden features you might have missed.

3 Things You Didn't Know Pathwright Could Do

From the Editor: This is part one of a three part series in which Laurie, our Guidance Expert, shares Pathwright’s subtle superpowers and hidden features you might have missed. Stay tuned for parts two and three in the coming weeks by signing up for our blog below.

1. Open your Pathwright account like a mobile app

Ever wish your learners had their own app for your courses? Pathwright is designed for mobile devices and looks great on any screen, including the one in your pocket. 

If you save your account's URL to your Home screen, it will open exactly like a unique app. Try it!

2. Let anyone teach your content to their own private group

"Create Your Own Group" is one of our most unique features. 

If you create courses that other educators could teach, you've got to check this out. Set it up once for your course and you can have hundreds of private groups taking your course. Better yet, the group creator is set as the group moderator, so you don't need to do any grading or facilitation. 

We recently released the ability to change your account’s default currency from USD to virtually any other currency. Just contact us, let us know your currency, and we’ll change it. 

As always, you can accept payments in all currencies, but your account will display prices only in the single currency of your choice. 

There are – and always will be – hundreds of features that we could build but haven't. If you’ve ever wondered about how we prioritize what to build, well…

Pathwright has many features already, and we launch new features or enhancements every 6 weeks. Even so, there are—and always will be—hundreds more features that we could build but haven't yet. 

If you’ve ever wondered about how we prioritize what to build, well . . . read on:

We love to hear suggestions for new features, so if you have one, please let us know. And just so you know what to expect, we'll respond in 1 of 3 ways:

1) That's on the roadmap. If your feature request is already on our roadmap, we'll confirm with two important qualifications: 

We usually can't confirm when a feature will be available (see "how we work").

Our roadmap is always subject to change (see "how we prioritize").

2) That's not on the roadmap. If we don't have plans to build it, we'll be up front about that.

3) That's an interesting suggestion! If we're not sure about it, we'll likely ask a few more questions and catalog the feature requests to consider later.

We work in 6-week cycles to complete 1-2 big features and a batch of smaller enhancements that are completable within 6 weeks.

We plan what to build next in between cycles. After each cycle, we have 2 planning weeks where we decide what roadmap features we’ll commit to for the next 6 weeks.

We pick which of the hundreds of features we could or should do at some point by . . . 

Selecting the highest impact features for all our educators that fit within our strategy and are within reach of our design and development resources during the next 6 weeks.

Prioritizing features that a partner funds and provides feedback and testing on when we can do so without impacting #1 significantly.

Running often is not a comfortable choice. Yet almost every day, I find myself hitting the trail for a run even though it’s much easier to do practically anything else.

How to use “creative endorphins” to foster a healthy habit of making

Running often is not a comfortable choice. Yet almost every day, I find myself hitting the trail for a run even though it’s much easier to do practically anything else. One reason I keep doing this is that I’m chasing that “runners high” (a.k.a. endorphins). I’m literally addicted to running. So if I don’t run for a few days, I start to feel mild withdrawal symptoms.

I find that this dynamic overlaps a lot with fostering creative habits. Great creative work can also be painful and time consuming, but that feeling of making something and putting it out there gives an endorphin-like kick to your brain. Once you’ve done it enough times, you’re hooked. It’s no longer nearly as appealing to spend most of your time on consumption activities when the lure of creating something new is right there.

Quick aside: I believe creative work is any effort that produces something new to increase efficiency in or enjoyment of life. That could be art, spreadsheets, code, etc…

So how do you foster this kind of creative addiction? It’s pretty similar to how you become a runner.

⏱ Put in the time. When it comes to learning new things or creating new habits, there simply is no shortcut for time invested. Don’t believe anyone who tells you otherwise (especially if they’re selling something). I don’t get my endorphin hit until mile eight of a run. Similarly, it takes some hours for creative work to give you that same satisfaction.

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