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Learnings From A Decade

3 min
Media  ✺  Product Management  ✺  Leadership

What I learned from running an online magazine for ten years.

Hi there, it’s been a long time since the last newsletter. However, I still was shocked that it’s been already three months. Time flew by like a fighter jet, and sometimes I felt like a passive passenger, not a pilot.

The most critical decision in the past months was probably to close down my online magazine Negative White after a decade of voluntary efforts. There are two reasons for the decision:

Increased Workload

By the end of June, I got appointed as product manager for Blick.ch. I’m excited about this tremendous opportunity, and I love to work more on projects, development, and strategy.

However, it adds a ton of mental workload to my already tight schedule as Head of Community and product manager for our newsletters. I felt that I had to re-organize my energy.

Lost Joy

But what really drove the decision was the lack of joy, a general sense of fulfillment in work on Negative White. Sure, there were moments of happiness and success. Nevertheless, the moments when I felt overwhelmed and stressed by the things on my to-do list occurred ever more frequently.

In the very first newsletter issue I sent through Revue, I wrote about three key metrics: joy, relationship, and money. Joy was always the most significant driver for Negative White. Its decrease, therefore, led to the rational consequence: the era had to end. Don’t get me wrong; it was a tough decision nonetheless.

In 2018, I listed some of my learnings that Negative White provided in this newsletter. They’re still valid, but I’d like to offer a synthesized summary here:

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