The Process Got Hustled

The “hustle harder” social movement might have started with- (the following is purely speculative) one guy in SF wearing a puffy Patagonia vest drinking a cortado who instagrammed himself in front of a gray brick office building he just leased for his new start up app venture which he named Volume but without all the vowels so it’s just VLM, with the caption #hustleharder when it was still a thing to put hashtags in your captions sincerely.

But it blew up into something much bigger.

It became a rallying cry for “scrappy and hungry” millennials to side gig, side hustle, to Monday mantra their feeds to death, to eat dream and never sleep on the start up movement. Which in turn birthed even more buzzwords, more widgets, the idea that we’re streamlining, simplifying, cutting out the middle man, getting the job done, creating something new, and “working smarter”.

And with the ever growing desire to streamline and work smarter came project trackers. I don’t know when it happened but they’re everywhere. For those who aren’t familiar it’s a tool used for teams to track their progress. A way to hold yourself and other team members accountable for their work and see where your/they’re at in the process.

All that sounds great, right? Who doesn’t love accountability? Idk bad people, I guess. But it also sounds like a lot of buttons to click, a lot of updates to post, another password to remember (maybe that’s a me problem, but still), and mostly more time spent rehashing what you just did.

So here’s the big question. Do project trackers actually help us work smarter or did we just add on one more widget and 15 more clickable buttons into our days?

If you want to make something amazing, grab your people and go make it. Hustle harder if you want to call it that, but don’t hustle extra. Take back that extra time and in the words of some once upon a time start up brand, “just do it.”