Work Today: Tools, Community, People

Today is just a constant stream of improvements to the suite of resources available to us. With each of these areas, our capacity grows drastically, and we create an extension of ourselves that creates leverage for the work that each of us does.

1. Tools –

Imagine sewing by hand, when the person down the road has a sewing machine. You work for 5 hours and they work for 1 for the same output.

We have to constantly be reminded that the tool stack is changing every day. When we get stuck in our own projects, we forget about the larger shifts available.

Power – Thanks to Moore’s law, some tools today are giving us 10-100x improvements in speed and efficiency.

Access – Thanks to UI designers, almost all of today's tools are built for a general use consumer. We can all learn them with a bit of time and effort.

Deflationary Pricing – The SAAS model has made these products low cost, meaning most have a free trial or a low monthly fee.

Templates – When people create replicable templates we get more modular parts that we can use off the shelf to build our projects: Think, stock media or cloneable designs. Use the pre-built pieces.

AI will be the next step –  increasing this leverage as we have a digital assistant to search for us as well as complete tasks, some of which we could never do on our own.

You don’t think about it, but the search function in your inbox is an algorithm traversing thousands of emails to find a single word mentioned.

Now imagine doing that with physical mail.

K.K. was right, "We’re all newbies all of the time" now.

Keep testing, if not just to understand the landscape and then upgrade when necessary.

2. Community –

The next phase of the web is where information and communities go private.

This improves the quality of information greatly. You can subscribe to journalists on Substack, or support someone independent on Patreon. Access to these information streams is crucial when you're looking for specific insights. Mass information is no longer that useful.

Instead, community is a resource that serves up specialized support, from job opportunities, new tools, information and Q&A.

It’s no longer about top-down institutions feeding us information.

The web is a giant hive of pockets of conversations, and you want an approach that dips into many of them so that you can source information from a cross-section of the crowd.

3. People –

The first phase of outsourcing was factory work. Literally outsourcing the supply chain.

The next phase will be creative work.

For the last 5+ years at Death to Stock, we’ve worked with artists and creators from around the globe. Our development agency is in New Zealand and we’ve produced photo shoots from South Korea to Berlin.

I haven’t met them in person, I wasn’t there for the production, and yet the results were… Amazing.

Pretty much every time.

Not only do we have access to a whole new suite of tools, but we have access to a talent pool of creative people from around the globe.

And yes, everyone is creative. This goes for VA’s, accountants and designers. You’re looking for people who are passionate and like to creatively problem solve in their area of expertise.

No matter where you live, you’re still going to show up on the same Zoom screen as anyone else, so why should I care if you’re 100 miles away or 1,000?

These contributors to your projects are aligned not physically but mentally.

Remember that the things you dislike doing, someone else finds joy in.

To find great people, test out working with them, and built a relationship where you don’t often have to check on their work.

Reliable creative people in your life will make work more rewarding and incredibly high leverage.

You can pass off much more work than you realize right now, but it’s going to take a mindset shift.

Work today is different than work yesterday and that is now a constant cycle.

But we have more leverage than ever.

We have tools that 100x our output, communities that support us and serve us specific knowledge in a curated way, and we have access to all of the best creative talents around the globe.

What will you do with it?

‍xx David