• Personal Productivity

  Published on Dec 6th, 2018 by Ryan McKay-Fleming

  Personal productivity is a vast topic. There’s a multitude of systems for managing tasks, plans, and what not. This year has been interesting for me in that regard since I’ve spent a fair bit of time thinking about planning. People have so much to do, they look for ways to optimize getting it all done. The truth is there’s no perfect system, and even if you adopt one, you likely won’t keep up with it. More likely than not you’re also doing it for the wrong reasons.

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• How we failed at setting goals

  Published on Nov 28th, 2018 by Ryan McKay-Fleming

  As we’re putting together our plan for Chalk for the year, I’ve been thinking a lot about goal setting. We’ve been building Chalk for over six years now. In that time we’ve tried to formalize company-wide goals twice. The problem is, we never continued after a single quarter of using them.

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• How to approach organizational issues

  Published on Nov 7th, 2018 by Ryan McKay-Fleming

  Chalk just wrapped up its 2018 fiscal year, and what a year it’s been. We started the year by completely changing our management structure by bringing on three seasoned executives. This helped to build team confidence as they brought in structure and improved processes. But, as we developed our first real budget (mid-way through the year mind you), it became evident that our burn was a lot higher than we thought it was. In the end, we had to say goodbye to some really great people. This – of course – shattered the confidence that the team had in our ability to lead.