At Paperight we really do believe in nurturing each other wherever we can. We assist each other projects, brainstorm as a team, motivate and challenge each other on various projects. Training each other was great fun and we were eager to share our skill sets.
We shared our achievements and our plans over Skype on a daily basis, checking in with each other on our progress and keeping the team informed about what were busy with. Meetings take place on a weekly basis to go over what we have shipped and planned to achieve in the next week. Monthly meetings with our mentors are an opportunity to see how we have progressed, make sure that we share the same focus and plan ahead.
We each have our own areas of functional authority which we use as a guideline for planning ahead. Generally though, our workload overlaps and we split the tasks according to who is available and most suited to the task.
Training workshops have included:
- WordPress site building workshops (Arthur)
- Basic business finance training (Arthur and Dezre)
- HTML training (Arthur)
- CSS training (Arthur)
- SEO and social media training (Nick)
- Spreadsheet training (Arthur)
- An introduction to SA Publishing (Tarryn)
- An introduction to Copyright (Tarryn)
- InDesign/Photoshop (Nick)
- Metadata management (Tarryn)
- Productivity (Arthur)
- Customer service (Yazeed)
- Negotiation and sales (Arthur)
- How paperight.com works (Arthur)
- Defining your target market (Yazeed)
- Google Analytics (Tarryn)
- Managing personal tax (Arthur, Dezre)
- Screencast videos (Philippa, Marie, Tarryn)
- Mail merging (Arthur)
- Base CRM (Tarryn)
- URL shortening (Arthur)
Other crazy things we have done as a team:
- The Shuttleworth Foundation behaviour questionnaire
- Entering into writing competitions
- Competing against Random House Struik in a soccer match
Most of the team were given code names:
- Nick otherwise known as Nighthawk
- Tarryn otherwise known as Terrorwolf
- Dezre otherwise known as Deathray or Kim Possible
- Marie otherwise known as Captain
- Philippa otherwise known as Dr. Phil
- Emma otherwise known as M
- Arthur otherwise known as Arthvader or Arthur of the roundtable
Our favourite video links include:
- Seth Godin “Lizard brain”
- Jack Dorsey, Creator of Twitter on leadership
- TOC 2013, Brian David Johnson “How to change the future”
- Banana movie
- Build the future
- Derek Sivers: “How to start a movement”
Often-shared links and resources included:
- Copy-pasting special characters
- Emergency compliments
- Find free wifi connections
- Researchers say
- Tim O’Reilly: How I failed article
- Free personality test
- Another Free personality test
- Paul Graham: Do things that don’t scale article
- Very cool tool for design
- This lean startup article
- Gizoogle
- ‘Why I never want to have a for profit business‘
- Excel formulas
- Automation webcomic
Some favourite office games:
Favourite foods:
- Bananas
- Cake
- Macaroni and cheese
Fun times.