Working Smarter, not Faster

What do you get when you work your fingers to the bone? Bony fingers — A former manager at LLNL

When getting into blogging, people just tell you to write. Yes, that’s important. And like any business, production is critical for the business to survive.

No AIs were harmed in making this post.

But even if you’ve done this a lot of times before, if you’re doing something new (and if you’re not, why bother?) you never know how it is going to work.

So you may be wasting valuable time. Worse, you may be putting stuff out that doesn’t work and leaves a bad taste in a prospective client’s mouth.

So… what is one to do?

You can’t manage what you don’t measure — Peter Drucker

I started reading Drucker when I was a grad student in Engineering. He makes so much sense here.

You may be producing junk. Or you may have hit a gold mine. More likely, somewhere in the middle.

There are many ways of measuring success. I will use blogging as an example.

I use three measurements. Ranking, views, and clicks.

Ranking — No one can see my pages of search engines aren’t showing them to people searching.

Views — How many times a day are my pages showing up in people’s searches? Am I using the right topics or keywords?

Clicks — Are people ACTUALLY reading anything I write?

These are steps along the way to success. My success is people reading my posts. The other two are steps towards that goal.

With this in mind, I can put out content and learn from every post that I put out. Sometimes I learn that a topic can be expanded. Other times I should walk away from it. It’s all good because, in the end, I grow from it.

There is also a balance between learning and doing. There are a lot of skills you need to develop to grow a business. If you’re doing it all by yourself, there are places like Udemy and YouTube where you can get low-cost or no-cost advice on how to do different things.

There are also sites like Quora or Reddit where you can ask questions. Sometimes even ChatGPT (there I said it, but no AI was used in this post!)

It’s a balance. I use a simple question I learned from a book I read on time management years ago by Alan Lakein.

What’s the best use of my time, right now?

Sometimes it’s about working and meeting deadlines.

Sometimes it’s about forgetting about deadlines and figuring out how you can do it better.