I removed email and Telegram from my iPhone

Some asked me if I had updates on my workflows for 2021 (now 2022). Others asked me to do an episode of Vita da Millennial to tell what I am doing and how I am doing it, so that it can be useful and inspiring.

I don’t want to be an inspiration. I don’t want to be an example. I don’t think there is much to learn from me, as much as there is a need for active discussions on what I face.

The reason why I haven’t been able to express myself as often as in the past, this year, is because I have few active thoughts in mind besides those of workflows and goals for likely the Avascan project.

Yes, I actually feel poor in ideas in this sense. Recently, however, with the expansion of the team I talked about everywhere, I had to deal with themes that were very dear to me once, and that I had to review almost completely: the integration of workflows.

I often see guys on LinkedIn who tell that their company, their team, has grown quickly up to 20, 40, or even 50 people, and they say it as if it were the easiest thing in the world, a natural thing.

I have never found a harder thing than this in my life. It is such a complicated process. The goal is always to find the best person for a specific role, and not just laborers who do some activities a bit like that, when needed and that anyone can do. We looked for and are looking for extremely specialized people for some aspects, others very smart for others, and still others with zero specific competence but unparalleled field experience.

Every person who entered the team had a well-defined role, which is not necessarily described by his job description, but by the set of activities he performs. Everyone has a certain level of autonomy (tendentially very high), but everyone’s activities meet with those of others at some points, and therefore there is a need for a high level of internal coordination.

In a team of 5-10 people, internal coordination is quite easy to manage, especially if the business being developed is relatively simple: maybe a software project, or a business based on relationships or content. I define relatively simple a business that has few ramifications, but only activities of different types. By ramifications I mean that a business can have activities that can ‘explode’ and become real business units, which may not be directly related to the primary activity.

I’ll give an example: a company that develops online software (Software-as-a-Service) has a Finance unit that deals with managing all accounting, employee salaries and various cash flows. It is unlikely that a new business unit can stem from Finance, to manage a new financial product. The company makes online software, not financial instruments, so it would make no sense.

Here, this kind of simplicity does not exist at least in two types of companies: Corporates (where the quantity of business activities necessitates greater granularity in the organization of internal teams and activities), and crypto teams: the latter, basically, grow in complexity because their structure is not yet well defined, and therefore it is not known well what the limits are. A crypto team can be a DAO, or a Decentralised Autonomous Organisation: a collective of people who are united by the fact that they have the token of that project. A DAO can do many different things:

• Develop online software (a DEX, a Money Market or other types of platforms)
• Manage an investment fund (with treasury funds locked in the protocol)
• Develop another online software (from the list above)
• Create a collection of artworks (in the form of NFTs)
• Create a club for certain reasons (using NFTs as membership certification)
• And much more that I don’t even know. Basically, what I mean is that a crypto team can expand into activities of any kind and infinitely.

Even Avascan is becoming like this, being developed by a crypto team. It is expanding in an unpredictable way, and in doing so we are creating a database of information (tech as well as business) that must be coordinated and managed at best, to avoid it being lost. Many internal teams are also research teams, because so much is both to discover and above all to understand and analyze.

And all this complexity must be managed. For this reason, during the month of December we started a process that will end in January, with the aim of migrating all our information to a new system based on dedicated workflows by area of ​​expertise. Everything relies on Jira, which many know, with some additions and customizations.

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But the central issue, the reason why I started writing these lines, is not this: it is that my work has also changed, radically, in the last months. Now I deal more with managing changes and macro-goals than single activities. I tend to work less than before, but because I need much more concentration to do it, and therefore I cannot afford distractions in most moments of the day.

This change had to have some effects also on my personal workflows, and so I reflected on it during these Christmas holidays. I started acting as soon as I returned, on January 3:

• I subscribed to Setapp (here there is a free month if you subscribe), which allows me to have a store of more than 200 apps that would otherwise be paid by subscription, for a cost of about 170€/year;
• I am removing all the apps I was subscribed to that I can replace with apps available on Setapp (including Fantastical for BusyCal, Diarly for Day One and others);
• I thus had the opportunity to try other apps that otherwise I would never have bought, such as Paste, iStats Menu and Workspace (the latter really useful: implies creating configurations of apps, sites and actions to be done simultaneously using a single shortcut);

In this way I simplified the management of my subscriptions: instead of having n subscriptions to as many apps, I have only one subscription to everything I need.

Plus, only on the iPhone, I deleted Spark (my email app) and removed the work account from Telegram.

The reason is simple: every morning I woke up, looked at emails to read my newsletters (Good Morning Italia, Finimize, The Block and others), but together with those I also found work emails and all promotional newsletters or notifications from apps like Glovo, for orders made the day before. In short, a lot of confusion, and in 90% of cases I found myself at the time of the morning meeting without having read anything.

And for me it is a disaster if I start working without my daily briefing. I realized it a few weeks ago, when I hadn’t read the briefings yet and during the day events happened that I couldn’t understand (specifically, it was the collapse of financial markets by a few percentage points and a collapse of crypto). I was desperate, and only at the end of the day I realized that, if I had read the briefing, I would have known that statements were expected from the Central European Bank and the American Reserve, and it was this situation that had created uncertainty in the markets.

To prevent this from happening again, I looked for some app or service that would allow separating work emails from newsletters and I found Matter, an iOS app that is used to read exclusively newsletters and articles taken from various sources, including Pocket, email and other.

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Telegram instead I removed it because it created continuous stress especially outside working hours: more than half of the messages I receive come from people who write from time zones completely different from mine, and so often I receive messages at 8, 9 or 10 PM that seem urgent to me, but in reality they are not. Actually all messages that arrive to me, now, are non-critical: if the site goes down or there are serious problems, there are those who immediately get to work to bring everything back online, and there are also those who send a communication to our users.

And in any case, for urgent and critical things, I needed to use a protocol to filter everything else. For this reason, Telegram with my work account/number is no longer on iPhone, but there is only Signal, to which colleagues can write to me if there is something serious or urgent. All conversations towards the outside remain on Telegram and the internal ‘normal’ ones in our chat server (whose notifications I have active on the iPhone) but are filtered through an extensive configuration of iOS concentration states, of which however I will talk another time.

In general, email and Telegram, thinking about it coldly and with hindsight, are two factors that led me to the burnout of a few weeks ago, in which I had a generalized state of anxiety.

We are still in a pandemic, which is causing us many psychological problems: we feel safer at home, with few people around us, we have social anxiety (I have a lot when I enter crowded shopping centers). Information overload, especially in the crypto world where in a day you can miss dozens of important events, is a serious problem. After trying what it means to ‘be at a thousand’, I decided to do everything with more calm, concentration and serenity.

And let’s see what happens.

Buy me a coffee @ home