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Name your months

At http://outline.wtf, we are four founders. Every month, we have a retrospective meeting to talk about how the previous month went, how well we did in achieving our goals, what went well and what was difficult. At the end of the session, we set our targets for the coming month.

A few months ago, I, like everyone else, watched The Last Dance on Netflix. It's an amazing documentary, but one bit of it stuck with me. In the documentary, Phil Jackson (the Chicago Bulls coach) would have a theme for each season. It seemed like a "quirk" of his, but you could see that it helped all of the players and support staff concentrate around one goal/idea for that season.

The name of the documentary comes from the last season that Phil was with the bulls. This is what Steve Kerr - one of the players - said about Phil:

“[Head coach] Phil [Jackson] always looked for a theme for every season, and given that it was the last year we were gonna be together — management had already made that decision — in typical Phil fashion, he had a name for it,” former Bulls guard Steve Kerr said.

“We’d arrived at the practice facility, it’s our first official meeting as a team,” Wennington said. “Get the team handbook, laminated on the front page, The Last Dance.”

Given that Phil was the coach of one of the most successful sports teams ever, I thought that he might be on to something.


In our next retrospective, I suggested to the team that we should try naming the coming month based on what we wanted to achieve that month. We had two major targets:

  • Grow Instagram to 2000 followers
  • Launch the new website

We called that month "Millenium Falcon Season 🦅"

It's such a simple thing, but it had a positive mental effect on us. We communicated more (which isn't easy, as we all have full-time jobs alongside our business), we got a LOT done while staying in high spirits and we reached both of our big targets for the month.

Since then, it's become a fun and motivating ritual to name each month. We change our slack team name each month and the season name often comes up in conversation.


Does anybody else have any "weird" rituals that they use to keep themselves motivated?

  1. 2

    I usually watch motivational videos (of the pumping-up type) on YouTube.

  2. 1

    You can use any name mixer tool to combine two names. Try namemixers to get the good result.

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