Citizen Agency

2006 was a pretty awesome year…launching CA in June, filling up our client roster in July, expanding to a team of 3 in October, getting our first office in November, with all sorts of little amazing things weaved in between all of that: travel, presentations, events, revelations, etc.

Of course, there are also the hard parts that come with a business: clients who don’t pay and make you feel crappy, all of the paperwork and accounting stuff, the IP legal threats, the insanely long hours and melting away of free time, etc. But these things are the exception, not the rule and we are learning to deal with these as they come, and, really, the downs only make the ups seem that much uppier.

Looking over the horizon of 2007, we got really introspective. During xmas and right before NYE, Chris and I spent some time on the east coast at his parents place in New Hampshire. We were offline and had lots of time to talk and hear ourselves think. And, I’ll tell you what:

It was amazing.

At one point, we were sitting back, taking in the quiet and I thought to myself, “I want more of this.”

Getting back to San Francisco was good. We were ready to come home and missed the energy here, but as the plane neared the city, we started stressing again: “Did you get those mockups done for so-and-so?” “We need to finish that research on blah!” “We should schedule a conference call to deal with yadda yadda.” I could feel my stomache getting tight and that feeling of open-aired creativity was gone. I was forcing square pegs into round holes again just to get things done.

So, when Chris said to me on New Years Day, “Lets get off of our computers and go down to the coffee shop…with books and magazines…no computer,” it all melted away again. I grabbed my copy of The Economist and the book I’m enjoying right now, Small Giants, and we spent 3 delicious hours just reading and talking about what we are reading.

Consequently, The Economist this month is all about Happiness. Maybe that should be part of my predictions for 2007 as well. Happiness is going to be re-examined. TED looked at it last year. The Economist has a whole issue looking into it. Economists around the world are starting to measure happiness itself, since they have found:

Happiness, as measured by national surveys, has hardly changed over 50 years. The rich are generally happier than the poor, but rich countries do not get happier as they get richer. The Japanese are much better off now than in 1950, but the proportion who say they are “very happy� has not budged. Americans too have remained much as Alexis de Tocqueville found them in the 19th century: “So many lucky men, restless in the midst of abundance.� from Economics Discovers its Feelings in Dec 19, 2006 Economist

Which made me think of our good friend, Evelyn Rodriguez, and the day she came into our office and drew for us this amazing diagram of how happiness plateaus…something like this (sorry Ev if I butchered it):

…and she talked about the need to reconnect to amazing offline things like art and salons…and we loved her ideas, but kept fretting about how darn busy we are…

But are we getting happier? We have more money. We travel more. We have total freedom. We have loads of choice (we still have more people wanting to work with us than we can take on, so we get to choose our clients)…but where do I find myself happiest?

When I’m doing my research. When I’m brainstorming one on one with a client. When I’m talking to people about their passions and getting their ideas for the future. When I’m talking to an incredibly passionate developer or designer or the like who wants to change the world.

Do we need to expand? Take on more work? Make more money? Grow the business? Save more money? Buy more stuff? Travel more?

No.

We need to make more time for our community projects. We need to read more blog posts and articles and amazing books on and around these subjects. We need to be talking to brilliant people who have been part of this and write about them. I want to have more time to blog again and carry on more conversations online and offline. I want to take weekends off and go to events and spend more time with the people I love (including my son).

So…as a promise to ourselves in this new year, Citizen Agency will:

1. Follow the lead of our good friends at Carson Systems and work shorter weeks. We’ll start out with 5 days – 8 hour days only. We will work towards the 4 day work week by June. “Work” being client stuff…not our community stuff
2. Pay ourselves a decent wage. This wisdom came from Lane, who told us one of the first questions they asked themselves when forming Adaptive Path: “What do we want to make?” Pay yourself that. Don’t sacrifice your comfort for your company.
3. Always put people before $$. We mostly always do this…but we fail in the area of counting ourselves as people.
4. Say NO more so we have time to say YES to the things we care about.
5. Work exact and specific hours allotted to projects…and stop ‘overgiving’. Our time is valuable. If we don’t remember that, nobody else will.
6. Allot time to do research – that means reading, recording, testing, surveying, interviewing, understanding, crunching, exploring, discovering, thinking, etc. I need to talk to Austin more about this. He has some ideas on how this part of our work can be funded so we can put more time into this.
7. Hire an accountant so we can ignore that stuff.

I’m really excited about the year ahead. We are thinking about bringing on others to CA, but we know we aren’t totally ready for the big leap into hiring…it would mean growth faster than we are organically meant to grow.

Ah…work/life balance. Seems like a cliché, don’t it?