Sweet Sassafras, this is good. Review Seth Godin’s “Is it too late to catch up?” It’s got bullet points and everything.
I’ve been out on the fringe of basecamp, but I’m going to check it out over the weekend and see how I can practically apply its stuff. I’ll let you know.
I muchly prefer Emma to his email suggestions. She’s low-maintenance but perky-in-ya-know-a-good-way.
This was my favorite of Seth’s list:
Don’t have any meetings about your web strategy. Just do stuff. First you have to fail, then you can improve.
Stop having so many meetings. Start doing more stuff. Amen.
What do you think? What else can someone do to catch up?
We’re going to start thinking about strategic planning next week. How to make it simpler. How to actually implement the stuff that excites you. Something in Seth’s post brought me back to something important to remember as you, too, think about what you’re going to do next year.
You cannot increase what you do not measure and reward.
You hear the measure part a lot. Lots of managers like to leave out the reward part, though.
But that’s another post for another day.
So how do you balance Seth’s advice to “just do stuff” with all the experts who tell you to have a plan before diving into social media, because without it you’re aimlessly wasting time?
I’m no expert, but …
Great question, Allie. First, I think, you lock up all the experts.
Experts get paid a lot of money to suggest, hold, and sit in meetings.
As a student myself :), I believe first you have to distinguish between having a plan and holding a bunch of meetings. I think you do need a plan – a simple plan that’s easy to explain to someone else in three sentences or less that answers the question:
“What is it you’re trying to accomplish?”
Then, you begin to figure out how best to accomplish this task. Take notes as you go. Take at least one small step everyday toward the answer to that question. Don’t put your head to bed until you’ve made one small progression. Measure and reward progress that results from those small steps.
I live by a variation of Seth’s line… “What gets measured gets done”.
I believe that you have to have a plan so you have a direction. But my plans have to be simple and executionable. Otherwise I get paralyzed by the all the spreadsheets and reports that I am “expected” to create.
I use a pyramid similar to Maslow’s… at the top is my long term vision (with a date)… and then below that are my 3-5 year goals, 2 year goals, each block describes what it will look like. The bottom block is broken down into Short Term goals: one year, 6 months, one month.
The pryamid is graphically descriptive so I can easily see where I am.
It’sthe bottom block that I use to develop my operational plan… so that I’m not just doing the busy stuff and not moving forward.
Catching up. Ha. I pushed aside yesterday’s mail to find the keyboard and respond. Planning means bringing linear thought to my non-linear reality. It’s helpful. It makes me feel good. But, ultimately, plans change and shift.
This is really a three-pronged topic: philosophy, method, and tools.
Jane’s method reminds me of a system promoted by Franklin Dayplanners in the days before Covey morphed it into an incredibly convoluted (nearly unworkable) methodology: Principles, Life Goals, Long Term Goals, Intermediate Projects, Daily Goals. Based on Maslow’s hierarchy, it’s rock solid. Maybe that’s why Ben Franklin dreamed it up in the first place.
Where that system breaks down is in the hustle of compressed daily living. To-do lists are time-based and seldom survive sustained bombardment by emails, phone calls, and drop-ins. How many tasks do you forward from day to day?
Instead, I found the Getting Things Done method best for planning and tactical execution. The learning curve is daunting, but day-to-day operation becomes second-nature. (It also syncs nicely into my 4-Speed Selling System.)
I haven’t seen Basecamp. I’m not a fan of “hosted” apps in general, but especially ones where I’d store business intelligence. Call me old-school or even analog: I want that data here. Also: it’s a rented vs. owned proposition. I like owning what I use.
I use Daylite from Marketcircle (www.Marketcircle.com) to manage sales, group projects, and my home (4 kids, nanny, dog, etc.). Works like a charm. Plus, it has an iPhone client that syncs over 3G, Edge, or wifi. My entire team is on it and we know where things stand at a moment’s notice.
Software and methodology aside, if there’s one thing that’s critical to any system, though, it’s circle-the-wagons and think time. If I don’t get my 20 minutes every mornign, I’m behind in my count the rest of the day. (Seven days a week.) Monthly: an hour reviewing/resetting. Quarterly: mudhole time thinking deep and long. Annually: reflecting and reevaluating. (A Nov event; just finished it.)
The principles of personal management apply equally to sales and client management. When we’re synced up, there’s a greater willingness to squeeze the trigger and ride that bullet.
Cool ideas, Tim, and good question, Allie,
Most people think that if you have a plan, it will prepare you for every aspect of your journey and assure you of its success. Being effective with social media means learning a new culture, a new language, discovering new skills that communicate who you are in a way that people care about. Even if you can imagine the obstacles you might face before you start, you won’t be able to understand how to really deal with them until you’re face to face with them.
So if you really want to get something done, stop wasting your time with meetings that expect to come up with a perfect plan to traverse a mountain you’ve never visited. Decide what you want to accomplish, set a goal and then start to move toward it. You will encounter many flaws with your original thinking, but will also uncover new understanding that will help you move toward it more effectively.
I like and use Emma as well. But Godin’s suggestion of MailChimp isn’t bad at all. I’ve used it and their “free for nonprofits” feature is very nice. I think you’ll find Basecamp more fun than a frisky sherpa. My office is stuck with TimeFox right now, however. Even though Basecamp is more expensive, it has a siren’s call for us.
Tim, I like your advice of working in small, daily increments when working to create strategy and asking yourself what you’re trying to accomplish. What makes me tear my hair out the most is when some of us are still creating the strategy and others of us have moved on to executing the strategy. Pitfalls of “paralysis of action” abound on both sides of that issue.
Thanks – Jane, Peter, Charlie. You’ve each given me food for additional posting thought.
Thanks for sharing, Stacy. I think it, too, is a pitfall of routing. With each project, who has absolute yes/no authority? Even with a jigazillion collaborators, there’s still got to be an air traffic controller that says “yes, move forward,” or “no, wait a minute, we’re not yet ready for you to do that stuff.”
I’m glad you use Emma. That brings me no small amount of joy.
Ownership is key, Tim. Each project has an owner who reports on it at our semi-regular meetings. The system works so well we went from two meetings a week to maybe two a month. Daylite allows us to manage projects individually while allowing everyone to see where things stand as need be.