Sarah's

I recently watched a video of Seth Godin called “Quieting the Lizard Brain.” He stressed the creativity is important but that being creative is not our job – our job is to ship. Many of us come up with lots of ideas and then thrash at the end of our process where we come up with reasons why things need to be tweaked or changed or something isn’t good enough. Then that causes us not to be on time or budget. He suggests that we need to “thrash” at the beginning of the process and then it will all be downhill from there so that we can complete our projects on time and on budget.

I’ve had an experience like this last year. We decided to create a microsite for donors so that we could show them what was going on at our school. My supervisor had several ideas that he wanted added into the design/functionality. I designed the layout, it was approved, then I had a web developer create the layout. After all of this then my supervisor came back and had a ton of tweaks and changes that could have been easily made in the initial phases of design or even before I passed on the information to the web developer. These changes, like Mr. Godin suggested, cost us more money and more time and we had to push back our launch date. This has helped me to re-focus on all projects that if you get the trashing done at the beginning everything really should be easier after that.

“Seth Godin: Quieting the Lizard Brain.” CRINID. Web. 19 February 2013.