Conveyor Belt Optimization
I worked with a creative director once who was buried all the time. Hands-on creative, managing a team, wrangling freelancers, doing the doing on top of the managing. No strategy time to speak of. No rebrand with a countdown clock on it. Definitely no offsite where everyone stands around a whiteboard being serious about rethinking everything.
And somehow the work kept getting better.
A tweak here. A headline swapped out on a random Thursday because the old one was bugging him. A layout nobody approved in a meeting, because there was no meeting — he just shipped it.
I don't even know if anyone noticed half the time. None of those tweaks seemed like a big deal to anyone (maybe not even him?). But man, zoom out a few months later and the whole freaking brand had some massive glow up. It was inspiring to see, to realize that you can move mountains by a series of smaller steps. You dont have to tackle it all at once.
I think about him a lot, honestly.
Because we're all waiting on the same thing. The offsite. The blank day on the calendar that never shows up blank. Some pause button where the company stops spinning and says okay, let's actually rethink how we work. That day isn't coming, especially not at a startup. There's just more. More work, more requests, more fires, more quick asks that eat your whole afternoon. You get pulled onto the belt whether you signed up or not.
And once you're on it you can just ride it out — a year goes by, you look up, you've got a longer to-do list and not much else to show for it. Or you can nudge things forward on purpose while it's still moving, because it was never going to stop long enough for you to do it any other way.
Most of the good work I've seen came from people already underwater who gave it 10% more thought than they had time for. Asked one better question in the brief. Pushed back on a lazy headline and moved on before anyone could make it a whole meeting.
Not glamorous. Half the time nobody notices.
But that's the real point: things get better because someone keeps nudging them forward while the belt is moving. Not because it stops.
It doesn't stop.