Most of the changes we've made to the studio this year haven't been about new things we started. They've been about old things we stopped. Some were rituals we inherited from agencies we used to work at, some were habits we built ourselves and never questioned. None of them survived contact with a calendar audit at the start of the year.
Weekly status calls with no agenda
For years, the default rhythm was a thirty-minute call every Monday with each account. We've replaced most of those with a written note delivered first thing on Monday morning, and a call only when there's something that needs a conversation. The clients we tested it with all preferred it. The team got a couple of hours back. Nobody has asked to switch the calls back on.
Slide decks for in-flight reporting
Decks made sense when the read on an account was a story you told once a quarter to a stakeholder who didn't otherwise see the data. They make no sense when the read on the account is something we want everyone looking at every week. We swapped the monthly deck for a live dashboard plus a short written commentary. The commentary takes half the time the deck used to. The dashboard is more honest because nobody is choosing which numbers to feature.
The "kickoff workshop"
We used to start every project with a full-day workshop. The day usually produced one good insight and seven hours of post-its that never got read again. This year we replaced it with two focused 45-minute calls and a written brief. The first insight still comes out. The other seven hours go back into the actual work.
Long onboarding documents
The polished, 30-page studio handbook we used to send new clients has been replaced by a short Notion page with the things they actually need to know. Half of the old handbook was reassurance dressed up as process. The new version takes ten minutes to read and is the thing the team actually keeps open.
Sending "we're working on it" updates
If there's nothing to say, we don't say it. The check-in-just-to-show-we're-still-here email turned out to be the lowest-value piece of communication we sent. We replaced it with a clear scope and timeline at the start, a hard deadline on responses, and a single bright-red flag in the channel if anything is at risk.
Pretending to be busy
This is the meta one. A lot of the things above existed because they made the work look more substantial than it was. A weekly call signalled commitment. A long deck signalled rigour. A workshop signalled depth. None of them did, actually. The work signals the work. Everything else is theatre, and at this stage of the studio we'd rather not be a theatre company.
What we're doing instead
The replacements are unglamorous. Written updates, live dashboards, sharper briefs, faster feedback. None of them would survive the description "innovative". All of them have made the studio meaningfully easier to work with, and the work itself meaningfully better. That trade is the one we're trying to make more of.