Using 'Show and Tell' to regain and maintain focus

Around eight weeks ago, at 3:30 in the afternoon on a Tuesday, I nervously checked and rechecked my list of things to cover on my first ‘Show and Tell’. If you’ve never heard of this phrase before - outside of schoolchildren showing off pet rocks - this is an increasingly common activity in creative and digital industries, allowing colleagues or peers to share what they’ve been working on in a presentation. Having this scheduled event means that the act of sharing what you’ve been doing becomes prioritised and not merely swept aside for more ‘critical’ deadlines. Often, these events offer more than simple updates - they facilitate sharing ideas and collaborating on solving problems. As an independent designer who works from home (even outside of the context of a pandemic), what I was really in desperate need of was some objective viewpoints.

Unlike an agency of colleagues or a university module, my Show and Tell would be staged online, via video chat, to only one other person. Gemma is an illustrator and we originally met at university. She was studying Graphic Design and I was originally studying Film and Video (later, English and Creative Writing). The really positive thing about this small university’s creative school was that it was very easy to mix with lots of students from various other disciplines (I also mean that literally - the art building attached to the student bar area via a few corridors and a staircase). After we left university, we all struggled to maintain these connections and this feeling of collaborative opportunity that we had enjoyed. Gemma and I talked about a ‘Show and Tell’ type activity for a couple of years before we finally agreed that now was the time to do it.

I think we both assumed it would be a lot of fun but that it would probably also do us a lot of good. We were right, on both counts.

The structure was simple enough at the beginning and we knew we could add rules or more specific agendas if we needed to later on. In fact, we’ve maintained most of the simplicity as it allows us to be more flexible on the day. We agreed to the same weekday and start time for a weekly video chat. There was no fixed duration and we’ve found some weeks run longer than others. We never planned if we would have ‘chatty’ chat or focus exclusively on work stuff but it seems that the chat bookends either side of the work stuff in a way that feels comfortable and natural. Each week, we alternate who will go first; Gemma is on the odd week numbers and I’m on the even ones. We started out by both sharing our screens but we’ve allowed ourselves to fall into whatever seems comfortable for our own presentation. For example, Gemma does a great deal of work on her iPad and will often simply raise the iPad towards the camera to show me what she’s been working on. I mostly live inside Adobe Illustrator so I find it easier to share my screen and show her a folder of prepared screenshots or simply walk through the original files in development. There was an amusing moment of teething pains when we discovered that I disliked not being able to see Gemma’s face when I was presenting to her, as it basically felt a little bit like I was talking to myself. We found ways around this and the other unusual blips that come from communicating online.

The original intention of doing Show and Tell was to share what we’ve been creating, outside of the monotonous vacuum of independent work from home. We’re comfortable enough with one another that it was easy to share feedback and suggestions for improvements without overstepping or causing offence. By week 2, we realised that we’d gained something else from Show and Tell and that was accountability. On the morning of week 2, I glanced down at a text from Gemma saying that she felt the strange need to rush together as much work as possible, as though she was preparing for an actual deadline or a homework assignment. We’d done the very obvious thing of sharing what we’d been working on for the last month in the first week of Show and Tell. Now, in comparison to a month’s worth of work, our current pile for sharing at week 2 felt rather lacking. As the weeks would go on, we’d learn to be more comfortable having less work to show that the week before. On occasion, a Show and Tell would start with one person admitting, ‘I’ve barely done anything this week - it’s been rubbish.” Half the beauty was being able to admit that to another person and then discuss why it happened and how we were hoping to do better before next week’s meeting. The weekly reoccurrence meant that we always had an upcoming milestone to aim toward for a better week but without any pressure around the consequences of not actually having a better week.

By week 6, I was sold for life and thought I’d learned all I could from the experience. I assumed I would just be repeating the motions in a tireless machinery of productivity. However, it was from here that my brain really started to make the most of this session and I began talking about screw ups, regrets, frustrations and past disappointments. We’d gone from talking about weekly design plans to bigger goals and intentions. This naturally led to the conversations on how things had gone wrong or were currently struggling. Gemma is very good at prioritising and focusing on one thing at a time. While I can’t speak to what she started to gain from this point onwards, I definitely felt that she was helping me to vent my frustrations and then pick up some objectivity and clarity about each obstacle in my way.

We just finished our eighth week of Show and Tell. This week, I spent more time talking about future ideas for my prints and products and trying to unpick some knots around my priorities. I’m glad that we talked through the previous frustrations because it has provided useful context to more hopeful conversations about the future. It seems as though we started by scratching the surface of the present work, only to regress into discussions about the past. Now, I’m looking towards future planned work with far more optimism and focus.

We’ve also found ways to extend our accountability to other areas, such as waking up earlier. I’ll share another mini post soon all about this bizarre co-streaking, as we’ve come to call it. In my next post, I’ll be covering the process we’ve used to get each other up at our goal wake up times, in lieu of the more tangible forms of accountability that come from working for a company. With more of us working from home than ever, you might find our simple solution helpful.