I’m Behance Founder Scott Belsky and This Is How I Work

If you are into visual creation, you need to be on Behance . The professional social platform allows artists, designers and other creators to share their work in high definition and create portfolios to share. We spoke with Behance founder Scott Belsky, now Adobe’s Chief Product Officer, about his work, his personal shortcuts, and his books on entrepreneurship and creativity.

Location : New York / San Francisco Current location: Adobe Product Director; Author and Seed Investor Current Mobile Device: Apple iPhone X Current Computer: MacBook Pro One word that best describes the way you work: Constant

First of all, tell us a little about your past and how you got where you are now.

I’ve always loved design and business, and throughout my career I’ve found ways to combine both. In 2005, I founded Behance, a platform for showcasing and exploring work. Behance is a long journey that consisted of five years of bootstrapping and a little over a year as a venture capital firm before we were acquired by Adobe in late 2012. The difficulties we went through and the team we put together helped me develop as a leader.

Our first product was actually an organizational product for creative teams called the Action Book. We literally sold paper products and tickets to events like the 99U conference to pay the bills while we built the Behance network! Today, Behance has over 15 million members, and I’m the Chief Product Officer for Adobe, focusing on creating products for creative people.

I am also an early stage investor and product consultant for companies like Pinterest, Uber, and Cheddar, among others. Over the years, I have been fascinated by the stories of other entrepreneurs and leaders about the big turns, especially how they dealt with the volatility of their travels. Five years ago, the newly launched book project “Messy Middle” became this hobby.

Tell us about a recent work day.

I’m obsessed with how I manage my tasks, how I keep track of long-term priorities, and how I spend my time. I say I am planning every minute, but some blocks are scheduled for “clean and watch” and “family.” I also challenge myself to be present wherever I am, and prepare in advance to be more productive with others.

My typical day begins with breakfast with a mentor, friend, or founder, whom I recommend. Then I have a series of product reviews with teams, checks with my employees, and random calls to partners or entrepreneurs I work with or have been introduced to. When I’m in New York, I try to come home for dinner with my family. When I’m in San Francisco, I usually have work lunches or get a few product-oriented friends together for an industry talk with no agenda.

Finally, at the end of each day, I spend time cleaning up urgent items in my email, my Wunderlist- based to-do list, and Slack. I hate being a bottleneck and believe that “being decisive and not supporting others” is one of the most important tasks of a leader.

What apps, gadgets or tools can’t you live without?

Recently, I have been tracking my sleep with the Oura ring because I want to better understand my habits. I love my DJI Mavic drone for weekend entertainment. Also, after trying so many different moisturizers, I have to give credit to my Dyson moisturizer ; it is the most reliable, quiet and efficient I have tried.

How is your workplace arranged?

Like many of you, I am an agile warrior! Sometimes I limit myself to my iPad, so I can draw as well as write. When I’m in peak performance mode, I use my MacBook Pro.

I try to outline my ideas and make slides using Adobe XD , one of my team’s new products for experienced designers that I hacked to be a Powerpoint or Keynote alternative. What I love about using Adobe XD is that I can create any number of artboards to show the story rather than tell it, and then I can quickly turn them into a prototype and share using a web URL that people can comment. It’s smooth.

But I also take notes and still use [Behance’s notebooks] Dot Grid Books and Action Book Mini to write tasks on the go.

What’s your favorite lesson about working with and for creative professionals?

Creative teams are visible and thrive on the awareness of progress. The greatest creative team and project leaders are great travel storytellers. They find ways to advertise the vision, using graphical representations of the team’s goals and experiences so people really “understand.” Magic happens when a creative team is completely focused on a goal rather than just doing their job.

It’s also important to think about milestones in a long-term creative project. Unfortunately, we all need short-term rewards to feel motivated. So, when you’ve come a long way with no end in sight, get creative and set some achievable goals along the way that you can celebrate.

What’s your best shortcut or life hack?

I am creating keyboard shortcuts on my iPhone to send regular messages to people with acronyms. For example, I have a long sentence for Uber drivers about where to pick me up in New York and all I have to type is “uberd” and that stretches the whole sentence. I also use response templates in Gmail.

I am constantly trying to handle monotonous work with something else in parallel. I try to read or watch something while brushing my teeth. When I’m mindlessly organizing, I listen to a podcast. I schedule calls while in transit at the airport, etc. When I am on duty, I want to feel fully loaded.

Tell us about an interesting, unusual, or challenging process you have at work.

In addition to my Wunderlist activity list, I keep a document I call Active Tracking in Evernote that lists the more important issues and goals I set for my teams and products. I try to quickly review it at least once a day, and often encourages me to send a few messages for review to team members or change my schedule. These items are not “tasks”. On the contrary, these are the priorities to which I want to keep adding energy.

I also try to audit myself at the end of each week by quickly going through my calendar and asking myself, “How much of what I did moved the ball forward?” It helps me identify certain meetings that were a waste of time and other conversations that were particularly productive.

Who are the people who help you achieve results, and how do you rely on them?

My longtime assistant Nina knows my priorities and helps me find a balance between work and family. She also has great instincts as to which meetings and conversations should happen first. We try to sit down and look at the calendar ahead of time every couple of weeks and almost always make some changes when discussing it.

I also rely heavily on my Emmy Chief of Staff, whose skills are a great addition to mine. For example, Amy is great at tracking processes and making sure the right people are involved in making the right decisions, while I can sometimes be a little intolerant of the process. If it weren’t for Emmy, it would be difficult for me to maintain coordination with the many people I work with.

How do you keep track of what you need to do?

Wunderlist for tasks, Evernote for goals.

How to recharge or relax?

I try to walk on the beach every month, even in the off-season. The waves clear my mind. And Netflix.

What’s your favorite side project?

For the past five or so years, my side project has been collecting all the ideas for leading creative projects and teams that I hear, observe, or think during board meetings or other times of disagreement or resolution. Over time, over 830 ideas have been collected in my Evernote file. A couple of years ago, I decided to divide them into three groups: Endurance, Optimization, and Last Mile. After a lot of culling and aggregation, I got ~ 120 ideas, which became the main content for The Messy Middle .

What are you reading now or what do you recommend?

This summer I read Endurance: The Incredible Shackleton Journey by Alfred Lansing and loved it. When I get the chance, I plan to read a new book by my friend Todd Henry on managing creative teams called Herding Tigers . I also like this name.

Who else would you like to see to answer these questions?

I want to know more about the people who create Cirque du Soleil – they are some of the most creative and productive organizations in the world.

What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?

“Keep making the fuss” from one of my mentors, Seth Godin.

What problem are you still trying to solve?

How do you make creative products powerful enough for professionals, yet simple and accessible to everyone? As labor is increasingly commodified and automated, creativity is becoming an increasingly important form of literacy that the next generation must have in order to be successful, but also the only paying person in the world today. I want to help more people get creative, but this requires new approaches to creating creative products and bringing them to market. This is a very interesting problem.