7 in 7 is now a fond memory, so the participants got together and did a little post-mortem evaluation on the scheme. The week was clearly an overall success. Everyone felt that 7 in 7 got their creative juices moving and provided motivation to attack projects that in some cases had sat on the to-do list for months or even years. Things got done.
Even so, there’s room for improvement. The universal feeling was that seven days is an unwieldy length of time. It was impractical to put everything else in our lives on hold for that long. Five days, or as little as three would be much easier to manage, and improve our ability to focus on the creative tasks at hand. A shorter timeframe would also create a more cohesive group, so that everyone could attend kick-off meetings, sanity breaks and a celebratory completion party. Managing the pressure to produce came up several times. Several people commented that while the social motivation was excellent, they sometimes felt intimidated by the visibility. Keeping things inspirational and stimulating while maintaining a supportive and informal environment is clearly the balance to strike for success.
Other advice was to avoid embarking on a big project or doing too many things you didn’t know how to do already. Reserving some minimal time each day for attending to other tasks, remembering that documentation can take a significant chunk of time at the end and making sure that you’re comfortable making the project public were all suggested.
Some great ideas came out of our wrap-up meeting including:
- doing a swap where everyone works on someone else’s project for an hour or two
- having a common creative warm-up exercise each day
- planning for documentation, and having extra help around to accomplish it
- having help running the event from people who aren’t currently busy participating
- keeping fresh by repeating this event on a regular basis
We’ll definitely keep these ideas in mind for next time, which might be a 3 in 3 sometime in August or September. In the meantime, several of the one-day projects have inspired interesting larger ventures. I’m personally excited about trying this all again, with fresh new faces added to the mix.
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