For a long time I’ve felt like the only thing worth working on is the next most important thing. Why spend time working on something that’s less important if there’s something more important that needs work?

I’ve changed my mind on this. I think it’s always good to be working on two things: The next most important thing, and the next most interesting thing.

It’s hard for an interesting thing to compete for your attention if your only criteria for attention is criticality. Interesting things are rarely critical. They’re exploratory. And if you only think in terms of what absolutely needs your attention right now, you’ll never leave room for things that might satisfy your curiosity. That’s important too, just on a different level.

It’s in this spirit that I hope we have the courage to be more experimental at 37signals. Experimental design, experimental tech, experimental business models, experimental strategies, experimental experiments that may lead to brand new insights and outcomes we didn’t know we were capable of before.

I’m looking forward to the surprises.