Editorial: Collaboration Overload Is Killing Creative Work, And Leaders Need to Rebuild the Rhythm
For years, creative teams treated more collaboration as a shortcut to better outcomes. Hybrid work and always-on tools turned that instinct into a default operating system. The result is predictable and brutal: teams spend so much time coordinating that they lose the time, confidence, and clarity required to actually make anything original.
The mechanism is simple. Collaboration feels productive because itʼs visible, social, and fast. But creativity needs invisible time like quiet, dead ends, incomplete drafts, and sustained attention without an audience. Add Slack, Teams, Figma, Notion, Miro, and endless pings across service work and cross-functional teams, and you get constant context switching, fuzzy ownership, and fatigue. AI only raises the stakes by pushing human value toward taste, discernment, and originality, which are precisely the qualities that collapse under perpetual interruption.
The fix isnʼt less collaboration. Itʼs a curated collaboration built around a deliberate cadence: solo depth first, then high-quality group critique, then real rest. Protect no-meeting, no-ping focus blocks as a visible norm. Create clear ownership so teams donʼt hover. Replace frequent low-quality syncs with fewer, sharper ensemble moments like time-boxed critiques, workshops with a single outcome, and checkpoints that prevent consensus spirals.
If you lead a creative team, treat 2026 as a reset year. Cut meeting time and tool- monitoring expectations by 10-20%, formalize protected deep-work windows, and redesign critiques to happen after independent exploration, not during it. Rhythm is the operating system for creativity. Rebuild it deliberately, and the work gets better fast.
Spacebar Studios are offering to complete the initial setup in December for free, and then hit the ground running officially in January.
This would include everything such as:
Developing & refining your ICP
Building your newsletter template & design
Creating sample drafts for approval
Kicking off subscriber growth initiatives along with the first issues
Feel free to book a time here with their team - https://calendly.com/spacebarventures/spacebar-studios
Case Study: Go Wide for Signal, Then Go Deep for Defensibility
Every early-stage startup hits the same fork sooner than expected: build a lightweight product that can serve many customer types, or commit to one vertical and become the best solution in that world. On a deck, “diversifyˮ looks safer because it expands TAM and can pull in revenue from multiple directions. In practice, it can quietly create a scattered roadmap, diluted positioning, and a team thatʼs constantly context-switching between conflicting customer definitions of value.
Going wide can be useful early to collect signal and learn where the pull is strongest. But winning long-term tends to require a wedge: one customer type where you can build full-stack depth, earn pricing power, and become mission-critical, then expand outward from a position of strength..
Hereʼs the condensed playbook:
Use going wide to learn
Diversification can help you get early revenue and test multiple personas fast. It can also make your company feel like it has momentum because lots of different customers are touching the product. But if youʼre not careful, that “optionalityˮ turns into a roadmap pulled in five directions and a product that satisfies everyone a little and no one a lot.
Know the hidden cost of flexibility
Serving multiple segments forces product decisions to serve multiple masters. Customer success ends up juggling incompatible expectations, and the team spends more time coordinating than compounding.
Go deep when youʼve found a wedge with real pull
Depth creates defensibility because youʼre solving the nuanced, unglamorous problems that only exist inside one vertical. Thatʼs what turns a tool into an operating system. You also get tighter feedback loops and faster iteration because the customers look more similar.
Treat the decision as a sequence: wide → deep → expand
Early traction is discovery, not destiny. Watch where adoption is strongest, which customers expand fastest, and where retention holds. Use that to choose the vertical to double down on. Once youʼve built credibility and usage density in one segment, diversification becomes the next natural step.
Play of the Week: Build a 2026 Leadership Reading Portfolio
As uncertainty rises and AI compresses basic competence into table stakes, the leaders who stand out in 2026 wonʼt be the most informed; theyʼll be the best at judgment. Use curated reading as a deliberate leadership tool to sharpen taste, perspective, and decision-making under ambiguity, not just to collect ideas.
Read for judgment: Choose books that reveal how decisions actually get made under pressure through systems, power dynamics, and imperfect information (e.g., crisis leadership, institutional behavior, moral trade-offs)..
Balance realism with humanity: Pair strategy-heavy reads (bureaucracy,
incentives, execution) with books centered on dignity, community, and human connection. Leadership fails when either side dominates.
Train your taste deliberately: Rotate across lenses like history, philosophy, memoir, and fiction, so you build pattern recognition, not tunnel vision. Taste determines what you ignore as much as what you act on.
Apply one insight per book: After each read, write a single operational
takeaway youʼll test in the next 30 days (how you run meetings, make calls, or communicate under uncertainty.
Create a personal canon: Revisit a few timeless works annually. Re-reading under new conditions often teaches more than chasing the latest release.
For leaders planning 2026, this approach compounds quietly. Instead of chasing frameworks, you develop the ability to move faster with fewer regrets when the path isnʼt obvious.
Metric Benchmark
A total of 778 SMB owners or managers completed the survey. Source: SMB Marketing Report.
Closing Note
The thread running through this edition is discipline. Not discipline as rigidity, but as intentional constraint: protecting deep work in a noisy collaboration culture, earning focus before expanding a startupʼs scope, and training judgment instead of chasing surface-level knowledge. In each case, the advantage comes from resisting the default and designing your own operating rhythm.
Build with rhythm. Build with focus. Build with taste.
See you next week.
📣 Forward or Reply
If you liked this edition of Growth Curve, forward it to a founder who needs to stop renting audience — and start owning it.