Successful Blog

Delegation: How Do You Scale Up and Still Do Your Best Work?

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DELEGATION 1

No One Can Do This Like I Would

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The single social media questions I hear most is:

How do I find time do it all?

I usually answer, “You can’t and I don’t think you’d want to, even if you could.”

We all can only do what’s humanly possible.
We all get the same 24 hours in the same day.

So what’s the best way to get things done in the time that we have?

How Do You Scale Up and Still Do Your Best Work?

Communication might be easier, even quicker through technology, but more people further apart take longer to communicate with. Take, for example, a simple request for information. One message might get to 20 friends, but not all of them will get and respond to that message at the same time in the same way. Not all of them will respond completely. Some will not respond at all. Some will misread or not read the directions and send information that doesn’t help.

Time is an unrenewable resource. We can’t make more. So how do we make the best use of the time that we have?

  • Analyze the work you do to find your high impact value and core compentencies. Why do people hire you? What do you do that makes the most difference? Isolate those tasks and skills. No one is expert at every step of the process. Decide which steps are where you add the highest value. Is it planning, service, execution, design, management, writing, administration? Choose no more than two.
  • Identify the skills and tasks that you do least efficiently — those that you like least, those that you don’t do well, those that anyone can do.
  • Change the way you work to offer those tasks to someone who does them better than you do.

That’s right, the way to offer more of our best work is to delegate. It’s easy to think that no one would do it like we would. And it’s probably true.

But different isn’t the same as wrong and sometimes different is better.

The trick is knowing what to delegate and knowing that we don’t have to delegate the WHOLE task. We can delegate chunks.

Start with the obvious stuff. Let fresh eyes read your work for errors. Ask another person to key in the changes. Those are tasks that are easily isolated and executed by someone who’s probably more proficient at them than we are. We can check the final before it goes out.

When we pass on the tasks that we don’t like, don’t do well, and don’t need to do, we can put the best of our time where it makes the most difference — doing what only we can do.

How so you offer more of your best work when you’re scaling up?

Part 2 tomorrow … Delegation 2: I Can’t Let Someone Else Do That!!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!
Buy the Insider’s Guide. Learn how to write so that the Internet talks back!

Thanks to Week 190 SOBs

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muddy teal strip A

Successful and Outstanding Bloggers

Let me introduce the bloggers
who have earned this official badge of achievement,

and the right to call themselves
Successful Blog SOBs.

I invite them to take a badge home to display on their blogs.

muddy teal strip A

barrywordpresscom

They take the conversation to their readers,
contribute great ideas, challenge us, make us better, and make our businesses stronger.

I thank all of our SOBs for thinking what we say is worth passing on.
Good conversation shared can only improve the blogging community.

Should anyone question this SOB button’s validity, send him or her to me. Thie award carries a “Liz said so” guarantee, is endorsed by Kings of the Hemispheres, Martin and Michael, and is backed by my brothers, Angelo and Pasquale.

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Want to become an SOB?

If you’re an SO-Wanna-B, you can see the whole list of SOBs and learn how to be one by visiting the SOB Hall of Fame– A-Z Directory . Click the link or visit the What IS an SOB?! page in the sidebar.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

Thanks to Week 189 SOBs

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The June 6th Edition

muddy teal strip A

Successful and Outstanding Bloggers

Let me introduce the bloggers
who have earned this official badge of achievement,

and the right to call themselves
Successful Blog SOBs.

I invite them to take a badge home to display on their blogs.

muddy teal strip A

blondishnet
consumercentric

They take the conversation to their readers,
contribute great ideas, challenge us, make us better, and make our businesses stronger.

I thank all of our SOBs for thinking what we say is worth passing on.
Good conversation shared can only improve the blogging community.

Should anyone question this SOB button’s validity, send him or her to me. Thie award carries a “Liz said so” guarantee, is endorsed by Kings of the Hemispheres, Martin and Michael, and is backed by my brothers, Angelo and Pasquale.

deep purple strip

Want to become an SOB?

If you’re an SO-Wanna-B, you can see the whole list of SOBs and learn how to be one by visiting the SOB Hall of Fame– A-Z Directory . Click the link or visit the What IS an SOB?! page in the sidebar.

–ME “Liz” Strauss

What Is an Online Social Media Conversation?

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The LANGUAGE of SOCIAL MEDIA

Words have a deep effect on
how we interpret and interact with the world.
The words we use and how we define them
reveal our interests, concerns, and values.
This series explores the words of social media.

social media conversation

When two or more people talking communicate ideas, we call that a conversation. The dynamic of a conversation works most successfully when the people sharing their thoughts reach a balance of contributing and exchanging ideas. It’s been said that conversation, “dialogue,” is the highest form of learning because it allows immediate response and clarification as questions are answered and messages are sent and received. Great conversations connect people on point of knowledge, values, and feeling.

Wikipedia suggests that conversation takes four major forms:

The Majority of conversations can be divided into four categories according to their major subject content:

  • Conversations about subjective ideas, which often serve to extend understanding and awareness.
  • Conversations about objective facts, which may serve to consolidate a widely-held view.
  • Conversations about other people (usually absent), which may be either critical, competitive, or supportive. This includes gossip.
  • Conversations about oneself, which sometimes indicate attention-seeking behaviour.

In the real world, few conversations fall exclusively into one category. Nevertheless, the proportional distribution of any given conversation between the categories can offer useful psychological insights into the mind set of the participants.

In a fluid, flexible conversation no one is in constantly in control. Control passes as the conversation moves from speaker to speaker. Ideas and thoughts attach and change the direction of the conversational thread to take in a direction the the speaker wants to go.

In online social media experiences, conversation is often input via keyboard within the context of a blog comment box, a Twitterstream or a social networking site thread. Not all such social media inputs really qualify as conversations. Individual comments that stand alone are better defined as remarks than as conversations.

Here’s how some folks define their online social media conversation.

@hdbbstephen: “To start with it doesn’t work like this http://bit.ly/AlTEr”
@nanpalmero: “a two way conversation begun on some type social media platform”
@storyseeker: “A conversation with everyone but only the intelligent and good looking reply.”
@gerlaineTalk: “Social Media Conversation definition? Good question. Hmmmm…. A talk of interest and creation of buzz.”
@Thandelike “SM conversation: starts publicly,@lizstrauss, at any point new interlocutors feel free to join in, embellish, pursue with their own ppl.”
@Matthew_T_Grant : ” its a combo of eavesdropping, broadcasting, and direct address (narrow-casting) – public intimacy”
@bethbeck : “Social media: Some call it noise, chatter. 4 me: enlightening, informative, eye-opening, boundary-less. World @ my fingertips!”
@storyseeker: “A conversation with everyone but only the intelligent and good looking reply.”
@tomaplomb: “Listening to a stream of voices, inserting yours into that stream, and watching the ripples.”
@BranislavPeric “There is no such things as “social media conversation”. Conversations, using digital tools, are social media.”
@Matthew_T_Grant : ” its a combo of eavesdropping, broadcasting, and direct address (narrow-casting) – public intimacy”
@lindsaydavies: “Social media conversation is a bit like morse code, short & useful but you really need to be involved to understand it.”

How do you define online social media conversation?

For more information see:
Princeton WorNet
Wiktionary
Wikidpedia
Discussion on Conversation (powerpoint)
Etymology and definition of the term “conversation”

SEE ALSO:
What Is Social Media?
What Is Social Networking?
What IS a Social Community?

Got more to add? C’mon let’s talk.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!

For Your Ears Only

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Why Blogging and Guitar Playing Spell Double Trouble
a Guest Post by Alex Beattie

There are many parallels with ‘blogging’ as a craft and ‘guitar playing’ as a craft.

Both the ‘blog’ and the ‘guitar’ are similar in many ways. However, it is important to point out that the ‘blog,’ in the sense of ‘advertisement’ posts or splogs are not the type of blogs I am referring to. The same holds true for the guitar. A guitar you got a for Christmas, and is still in the case is not the ‘guitar playing’ I am referring to – or if you simply happen to own a guitar.

For the Connection

I am pointing out that these 2 crafts (as I see them) are only comparable, inasmuch as the person (and I stress person) works, cultivates, nurtures, hones, errs, loves, promotes the blog and / or the guitar.

Take Seth Godin, for example. He has a blog and has written over 2500 posts (in a row!!!) and has a well-maintained, beautifully written, insightful, and quite an enjoyable blog – let’s not forget he also has an enormous readership.

Then take the band Widespread Panic. They have been playing music together and in front of audiences since 1986, and have amassed a cult-like, Grateful Dead-esque following. They have never, by choice, had a hit single or a number one hit – by choice. They even turned down a gig opening for the Rolling Stones because they (the band) felt that it wouldn’t be fair to their fans. Fans of Widespread Panic enjoy long jams and 3 hour shows.

One most first be drawn to the crafts for the right reasons – one of them is not money. In order to blog successfully (which could mean many different things), one must do it for the right reasons. (i.e. something to say, a cause, a message, a desire to connect to people and to connect people, or maybe just because one likes to write).

The first comparison I would allude to would be neither offer what the ‘knowledge workers’ understand to be a direct path to monetization.

For the Understanding, Appreciation, Motion

The second comparison I would draw is both require a tremendous amount of studying other blogger’s or guitarist’s works. This doesn’t mean plagiarism or blatantly ripping off licks and melodies, but it does require a deeper understanding of composition – whether it is in the form of melodies, notes and rhythms, or HTML code, paragraph structures and the assembling of jpegs, gifs, png files in a 3 column layout composite.

The third comparison would be that both have enormous rewards when another (especially people of the same ilk) appreciates the sound or the blog. If someone attending a show I played approached me after a show and I was playing for beer money and gas, that made it all worth it. All the years practicing was worth it at that moment.

The same holds true with a blog. Nobody read my first post, maybe nobody reads it still, but a few people have stumbled across something I posted and said, “Hey, that was great work, it really made my day.” Or, “That was insightful, Alex, thank you so much.”

The fourth is that they are both a manner of record. While not all passionate guitarists record or want to record, most do at some point. Both the blog and the guitar are public record which gives them some sense of levity or motion. Listen to The Beatles’ earliest stuff like A Hard Days Night and compare it to Tomorrow Never Knows. The Beatles evolved in real time and it was recorded. The same is true with a blog. It is constantly in motion. This is part of what makes them attractive to passionate people.

There are certainly more comparisons here, but at the risk being too creative, I will stop.

For Your Ears Only

A blog is only worth reading if you can tell that someone (the author or authors) really cares, or really wants to transfer an emotion through your viewport. Music and guitars are only worth hearing and listening to if when you hear it, something stirs about you and brings forth something you didn’t have access to until – Voilá ! – the end of Stevie Ray Vaughan‘s Life Without You comes and on you find yourself teeming with heartache, joy, and happiness which once was recorded by someone who felt the same thing, as if it were meant for your ears only.

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Alex Beattie writes about music and life at the Hound Dog Blog. His twitter name is @rubybluesox

Brilliant, Alex! Thank you!

–ME “Liz” Strauss
Work with Liz!!