K's Weekly # 4

Karthi Subbaraman -

Welcome to the fourth edition of K's Weekly. If you are new to this weekly newsletter, I share learnings from week-in-a-life of a maker (i.e: me).

Here are a bunch of learnings from being curious, doing experiments, reflecting deeply, launching stuff, meeting new people, getting excited about things, and absorbing information around me. So far there has never been a dull week in 15500+ days of my life. I am positive it is gonna be exciting forever.

Let's dig in.

Hiatus 21

I took a 21 day reflective vacation after a gruelling 18 months of 100 hour weeks. A vacation like never before, I must say. I didn't travel anywhere. I didn't plan anything. I didn't stop anything. I didn't even keep track of anything. A vacation which is free of calendars, plans, productivity and more. A truly reflective vacation where I just allowed me to eat, sleep, laugh, lull and reflect. For once I slowed down. I allowed time to flow and allowed me to BE in that flow. All I did was watch me as a third person and reflect upon the thoughts. I paused many activities to reflect on the path so far.

21 days of reflection and no agenda was the best vacation in all these years. It gave me a lot silence inside and outside. Above all it gave me immense clarity and courage to keep what matters and say no to everything else.

I'm back to a new and improved reality as of April 6th 2021. I can't ask for more.

Weekly check 1-2-3

This week of mine was significant as Xperian all reals started. The fearless, audacious 1.87 crore experimental moratorium is over as of April 1, 2021. Now as a team we know what to focus on to make our lives meaningful. The 30,000ft of Xperian is set. I am sure the 3ft details will be figured out on the go. The 1000 days moratorium gave us immense strength to pursue our passion. As a team we are grateful for everything we have learnt in this period.

Happenings from this week:

Here is a post and the poem that went viral on social media: https://blog.xperian.xyz/1000-days-to-day-1/

We kickstarted our Xperian Podcast in a Gimlet style. One series at a time. Checkout here: https://anchor.fm/teamxperian/

We launched our Maker Community to the world: https://guild.xperian.org

We also launched a special Women Maker's community as a part of the guild.

I also got back to my LinkedIn routine after a 13 month break. I took this time off to learn about all the social media platforms out there including Twitter, Youtube, Clubhouse and Insta. No kidding.

That sounds like a super packed week isn't it? In all honesty it was and I am throughly enjoying the all reals.

The next 27 years sums up like this: 4M of Xperian. In other words we will live at the intersection of design, product and no-code.

Setting Team Routines

With the new Xperian here, we gave ourselves 30 days to adjust to the new routines and systems. Change is hard and being empathetic to it will make it easier.

A few decisions we took as a team are

  • We changed our work hours to [8 am -11 am & 2 pm - 6 pm]
  • We created a (sort of) healthy langar for ourselves. We cook and clean together. We eat together. We take ample rest during the day.
  • We are recovering from workaholic past into a decent schedule. Our creative productivity is surely getting better. We stopped working late hours and burning midnight oils.
  • Our 8 month long effort of building a home studio has finally completed (what a timing). We kickstarted our all reals work in our new studio. Gosh, it is so much better. A separate Audio-Visual room, a separate acoustic studio, a large brainstorming space and a lovely cafe setup with Aeropress and more. Everything we missed in our previous studio is here.
  • As a team we are using our homegrown conduce system for productivity and we are seeing instant results in the way we approach work.
  • We are in the process of creating our internal tools using no-code and set the routines using our team calendar. This is still work-in-progress.
  • We finalised our dates for Inaugural Webflow Intensive Cohort this week. Checkout this space for more info.

Staying true to who we are

A few things we did right during the moratorium period.

In the 1000 days of moratorium we focused on building ourselves as individuals (we didn't care about the brand or the team), we believed a good environment design will boost us better (we didn't care about fancy addresses), we created spaces to express ourselves (we didn't care about follows and likes), we worked on our intent to create great products and services (we didn't care much about the marketing), we focused on continuous learning (we didn't care much about the shiny objects) and above all we focused on our strengths (we didn't worry about what we don't know).

Now that we have taken care of the inputs, we strongly believe that output will be far better. As we are a small team we could bring all our ideas to life in a short period of time. I am glad we did what we did.

With all the above, this week has been amazing for me! All said and done, I am still scratching my head around how to do all the amazing projects we want to do as a team.

I didn't focus on consuming information this week. So didn't read much books or blogs. I was entrenched in creating more. I changed the style of writing the daily blogs as well. Even the topics are now around makers and their lives based on qualitative studies I did in February 2021.

Creation of the week

The reverse poem as an idea was unexpected. Our tribute to our profession in our own cheeky ways.

https://www.linkedin.com/feed/update/urn:li:activity:6783971936037855232/

How has yours been my friends?

Until next week,

K 🎉