Hello again.
It is a busy week for me this week. This is one of only two weeks in a year I open up my Finding Clients Masterclass to enrol new students. It tends to be a bit stressful as new students have lots of questions, which is why I only do it twice a year.
I created the course because many freelancers and agencies I meet were throwing out blog posts and social media updates, hoping to win business. Unfortunately, there is no real strategy or structure behind it. It is just something you were supposed to do, and so they did it. They have no idea whether it was effective or not.
Agency, Freelance or in-House. We All Make the Same Mistake
I see those in-house suffering from the same problem. People carry out certain activities repeatedly simply because that is what they are supposed to do. Nobody ever stops to ask if those activities are worth it or effective.
Take, for example, a web team I worked with within a large university. Every month they spent ages preparing analytics reports for all the various departments, schools and faculties. It was time-consuming, and few people even read them. It provided no organisational benefit.
I suggested replacing the reports with a dashboard that included a leaderboard ranking the various groups against one another based on important digital metrics such as conversion, engagement and usability.
Immediately departmental heads wanted to know why they didn’t rank higher than one of the other departments and started asking the web team to improve their metrics. Budgets appeared, resources were allocated, politics were overcome, and the quality of the university’s digital footprint improved.
Are You Going Through the Motions?
We all tend to go through the motions, not thinking about our effectiveness. I am no different. I built my career on podcasting, yet I haven’t questioned whether it is still relevant until recently. In truth, it is not, and so I will be stopping the main Boagworld Show at the end of this season.
It is an understandable shortfall in our thinking. We cannot spend our whole lives second-guessing everything we do in our jobs. If we did, we would never get anything done.
However, it is sensible to have periods of challenging what we are doing and whether there are better uses for our time.
- Do we produce personas for every project because they actually help or simply because you are supposed to?
- Does asking a client to approve a design mockup really lead to smoother projects?
- Do we actually need a design system for what is a relatively small site or are we building it because we read they are a good idea?
- Am I posting this piece of content because it will lead to more sales or simply because there is an expectation internally I should?
- Are we coding in React because it is the best fit for the project or because it’s trendy right now?
I don’t raise the above for any particular reason; it is merely to point out how many decisions we make without considering whether they are right in our particular circumstances.
Busyness Does Not Equal Productivity
At the heart of this problem is that we often equate busyness with productivity, which is not true.
I know many teams who work flat out, being stretched beyond tolerable limits, yet the value they generate for their clients or organisation is minimal.
In my opinion, success is not about hustling as Gary Vaynerchuk puts it. You cannot simply do more. You have to be doing the right things that provide the maximum benefit, and that means focusing on output, not input.
So my challenge for you this week is to spend the next week questioning everything you are doing and asking whether there is a better use of your time or whether you could achieve the same goal more efficiently.
I would love to know how that goes for you, so drop me an email and let me know!
Upcoming Workshops
I have a number of upcoming online workshops that you might be interested in joining. Here is a list and where you can find out more.
- Customer Experience Strategy (18th March)
- Implementing Customer Experience Online (25th March)
- Websites Designed for Action (21st & 22nd April)
