This week was mostly working on the booze project I kicked off last week. We had a great workshop, got to a really compelling positioning, and everyone seems to be happy – so happy days.

It’s very nice to work quickly and to focus on one thing from when it starts to when it finishes. I feel like lots of ills when working in agencies is that you always have ten projects on the go at a time, and that means lots of context switching. Likewise, clients are working on a whole bunch of projects and finding diary space is hard, which means projects don’t take huge amounts of actual time to complete, but take ages in calendar time.

On the rare occasions that you can blitz something without interruption for two weeks, it feels almost transgressively brilliant. I wonder how to organise my work for more of that?

Reflecting on how I’ve been working on lots of alcohol brands lately made me realise that one of the things that’s nice about being solo is a different approach to conflicts of interest. Where, say, a particular gin brand might get tetchy about its branding agency working with another big gin brand, I’m able to more seamlessly navigate those conflicts.

That’s useful because it allows me more opportunities, obviously, but it’s also useful because, as I’ve noted before, much of my value comes from how much knowledge I have and more importantly how transferable that knowledge is. If I can only work on one brand in a particular category, a whole chunk of my knowledge becomes non-transferable and therefore, in a sense, worthless.