by Skellie
Photo by (Bill & Mavis) B&M Photography
True productivity is not about doing more in less time. It’s about doing less in less time. It’s about defining what is truly worth doing and sticking to that alone.
Bloggers often tell me that there’s not enough time available to do everything they truly want to do: to start that dream project, to write that value-packed post, to guest-post on a popular blog. If I said to them: “You can have that, but you need to stop reading feeds and outsource comment moderation,” most people would respond: “It’s not that simple.”
But it is. If you can eliminate three hours of the inessential from your week, and doing your dream takes three hours a week, you can have it.
I’m not suggesting that you do all the below, but I’d like you to ask yourself each question and consider the pros and cons of your answer. How much time would you save? What’s the trade-off? A mental exercise rather than a prescriptive list, I want you to start thinking about where elimination fits in your blogging routine.
What if you stopped moderating comments?
Here’s an experiment to conduct for a week: note down the number of comments you moderate over a week, then write down the number of comments you had to mark as spam or delete. If the number of offending comments is very small, you could consider turning off comment moderation. You’ll probably be reading the comments on posts anyway, and can delete any spam you see at that point.
What if you paid someone to moderate comments for you?
If you assume moderating comments once a day is about 40 minutes work each week (at most), you could probably hire a cheap virtual assistant willing to do this for 10 dollars or so — maybe a little less or a little more, depending on who you hire.
What if you stopped reading feeds?
The likely result: you would save hours each week but your posts would be light on links. You might also miss some good posts. But maybe that’s not the end of the world? If you do an analysis, you’ll probably find that most of the posts you find truly helpful come from just a handful of blogs. If you’re not fond of complete withdrawal, you could prune all your feeds except five or so.
What if you mastered the art of short, polite and to the point email?
A little exercise you can do is to look back on your last 5 sent emails and think: “Could I tick all the same boxes in half the words?” If you can say the same thing in half the time, you’ll cut down the time you spend responding to email by 50%.
What if you checked email less?
I used to check email as soon as I hopped online, but now I wait until I’ve completed the most important tasks for the day (to avoid wasting hours on email and then not having enough time left to do what’s really important). I also find that, for what I do, I don’t receive any emails that can’t wait longer than 24 hours. I would check my emails once every three days if I could, but there are some people I correspond with who require a faster response.
What if you sorted email by importance?
If the fear of keeping people waiting prevents you from batching emails, you can set up a separate account to check daily and forward all mail from your most important correspondents to that address. As soon as you get an email from a VIP it gets forwarded to your ‘important/daily’ account, so you won’t miss anything (but you should only get a couple of emails to deal with on a daily basis). You can then check your original account once every three days, or if you’re confident, once a week.
What if you only checked stats once a week?
Checking statistics is something most bloggers do often, but it’s not something we can directly affect. Sort of like reading the news, it’s interesting, but there’s not much we can do about it. If we look over our stats once a week (on a certain day, maybe) we can detect patterns and conduct a more holistic analysis. If it takes 10 minutes in one sitting as opposed to five minutes every day, you’re saving time and reducing interruptions.
What if you posted less?
Unless you’re only posting two times a week, experiment with posting less for seven days. If you used to post every day, try posting three times. If you posted three times, try posting twice. Try to make the posts more value-packed than usual. At the end of the week, analyze your subscribers and traffic. If the stats were significantly worse than usual, go back to your old posting rhythm. If you find there’s not much change, or things have improved, you may just have discovered a way to save several hours each week. It’s an exercise worth doing.
What if you stopped using social media?
From being active on StumbleUpon to being not so active, I haven’t noticed a change in the amount of votes my content gets. I enjoy StumbleUpon, but I haven’t had the time to use it lately. If you’re using social media for the perceived traffic benefit alone, then your efforts are better focused on saving the time and creating value-packed content.
What could you eliminate from your blogging routine?
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37 Comments, Comment or Ping
Jon Morrow
Yeah, I think this is going to be a theme for 2008. Lots of bloggers are posting less and dedicating their time to other activities. I think our industry is growing up a little.
Jan 24th, 2008
Mrs. Micah
I managed to find a couple feeds to stop reading. Unfortunately, with all the people reading my site and commenting, I want to reciprocate. But it’s kind of impossible.
Jan 24th, 2008
Michael Martine
Hmm… have we been reading Tim Ferriss? If so, good on you. This is excellent timing for me. I’ve been thinking of turning off comment moderation. A trick I’ve learned with feeds to be ruthless about what I actually spend time reading. The way I do it is I star only a few feeds as I skim the headlines, then I read the starred ones.
I deactivated my Facebook account (what a colossal waste of time it was). I stopped receiving alerts from Pownce (which has become a spam machine).
One thing I haven’t done, and that I need to do, is unsubscribe from many of the email newsletters I get. These are mostly from internet marketing sleazebags so I can see how they work, but now I’m sick of them and don’t need them anymore.
Thanks for the inspiration, Skellie!
Jan 24th, 2008
Daniel Sutoyo
I like the compilation of questions. I particularly like the ones regarding email. That is certainly I need to work on. I don’t think people like reading really long emails either.
I think blogging has helped me to summarize, making lists, and emphasizing keywords in other documents. It has helped me to convey clearer message with fewer words. I hope to achieve this through emailing.
Mrs. Micah raises a good point. I would love to respond to every comment and visit their site and leave a comment, but sometimes it is just impossible.
The rss feeds is really true. I already pruned a lot of my feeds. I sort the categories base on importance: a few I read regularly, a few I scan through, a few to just get inspiration, and a few for pure entertainment.
Jan 24th, 2008
Ritu
Great post on productivity Skellie! We as bloggers sure do manage our time effectively in what we do in order to be more efficient.
I can very well relate to checking emails and stats. I check my stats once a week, I am not sure if I can go checking only once a week ;-). When it comes to emails, I am pretty bad but I try not to let that affect my productivity. I usually check my emails more that twice a day but my emails go directly into the “marked folders”. For example, all the comments go ina folder called ” comments” and all the emails say from ” Mr. X” goes directly to the folder marked “Mr.X”. This allows the inbox to be pretty light and it fills up with emails that I am getting for the first time.
This really helps in terms of weeding out the unnecessary ones and the ones that needs my immediate attention.
Jan 24th, 2008
DJ
I’m not sure 5 is a good idea. If every reader of your blog took #5 as gospel, you’d have no readers.
I think it’s better to scehdule time to read the blogs that are worth reading. Use a RSS aggregator to collect all the posts in one place. You’ll save time from searching, and you’ll see only the posts that are new.
The reason I think reading is important, it because you learn how to blog from reading other posts. You can see what works and what doesn’t. These lessons you can take back to your own blog, and make your writing that much better. Living in a vacuum doesn’t help you.
Of course if you are reading too much, you’re not writing. The key is to strike a reasonable balance.
Jan 24th, 2008
DJ
Hmmm… not sure why I put 5. I mean the section on not reading other blogs.
Jan 24th, 2008
Anthony
Leave it to Skellie to remind us of what’s important–creating value packed content.
That’s really what its all about.
Jan 24th, 2008
udi
Hi
Great post - and there are some golden rules there, like checking the stats less - if only I could be strong enough…
There is one tip, however, I do not agree with: <What if you mastered the art of short, polite and to the point email?
From my experience, it takes more time to write a concise email over a long email.
There are other good reasons to writing short mails, though:
1. the mail have better chances of being read.
2. The person on the receiving side will appreciate you not waisting their time.
3. your mail have more chances of being effective and crating an action on the receiving end.
That said, I do agree writing short mails is good, and well worth the effort - it just takes longer.
- udi
Jan 24th, 2008
esvl
Great tips!!!
On comments
I have a bunch of blogs except for my main blog which you can find if you click on my name, on those blogs I just leave the comments for a week and then check them because I just blog on those blogs part time and for extra cash. But what I have noticed they dont get so much quality comments and they get way more spam because I dont moderate. Where my main blog only has quality comments. But if i would mark them I would say it comes close to 200 a week that I have to delete.
On the feeds
As my blog is still growing I guess its important for me to have as many feeds I can read because this gives me the chance to communicate with other bloggers and make blogging friends with which we can help each other’s blogs grow. As well as learn more about my niche by subscribing to as many blogs that talks about my niche.
On posting less
I totally agree that everyone should try and post less, I did it and my blog’s quality immediately increased, I got more comments and my posts are now longer and more worth for people to bookmark or stumble, instead of my short useless posts I used to have. I was amazed that when I started posting less, my traffic multiplied by 80 times a month
On checking emails
A lot of people are stuck on their emails, checking every hour, I guess the emails got me. I really try to check less but its kind of addicting.
Jan 24th, 2008
Joanna Young
Hi Skellie
I guess it depends on your blogging purpose, and getting clear on that before you decide what you’re going to eliminate.
Leaving and responding to comments is a core part of blogging for me. It takes time, but it’s worth it for me because it fits my purpose.
I also need to follow a fair number of feeds to keep engaged in conversations, see what my readers are up to, follow blogging friends, catch up with the work of cients…
If I stopped doing that & flipped to ‘broadcasting’ mode I might be more productive - but I don’t think I’d develop such rich and interesting connections with other bloggers (which lead in their own way to new and interesting opportunities), and I think I’d soon get heart sick of it.
Joanna
Jan 24th, 2008
Lilja
Doing less in less time sounds good to me.
I know I can get trapped by link-hopping - one interesting link leads to another and another… I get angry with myself sometimes because of this that appears to be a waste of time. However that might be true in many cases, I also know that this is how I gather important information and it feeds my creative processes.
You have to find a balance.
Jan 24th, 2008
Michael Martin
You have some good ideas there of course, but I disagree with others.
Yes, you could save time by having someone else moderate comments. And yes, “short, polite and to the point” emails will answer a question, but that’s about all they’ll do. Being productive in this way is undermining your reader appreciation.
David Airey responds to every comment on his blog, and he gets hundreds of the things! But knowing that my comment is guaranteed a personal response makes his blog stand out to me.
And it’s usually not hard to tell when someone is flying through their replies to you. The reader will still appreciate your reply, but mightn’t become so loyal a reader?
I even could have saved time by not bothering to comment here, but it’s more fun to do so. Productivity has to have boundaries.
I agree with the last 4 though. I’m starting to think I’ll abandon my Digg profile altogether now. I’ve never done much promotion with it, and the quality of the Digg headlines have been dropping more and more lately…
Jan 24th, 2008
Antoine Khater
Skellie I have used various combination of these with various results
I mainly stopped moderating comments, reduced my email time to the max and rarely check stats.
However I read feed many times a day and I can’t decide to post less. It would be really great if you could share with us your experience since I have noticed you are posting less. Did you loose your readers ? do you feel “better” ? etc…
Jan 25th, 2008
Linda
Yes, yes, balance … I’d really like a blog post about finding balance. I want to be effective. I also want to be free-in-mind, out-of-bounds-creative. When I set everything else aside to be effective, and try to limit myself, my production amount decreases.
But I’m great at letting my mind wander along with links and interesting knowledge from RSS-feeds - for too long. How to find that balance, that is my question.
Jan 25th, 2008
pete
It’s all about being honest with yourself. Once you can learn to honestly assess and accept or refuse a task, it becomes easier to trim the extraneous tasks. Knowing how much you can actually do versus how much you want to do opens doors to many possibilities, including a clearer mind.
I’ve recently started re-evaluating the necessity of many things I do (or try to do) and have found that my intentions to do things are what usually prevent me from doing them. I’d like to do everything, but the time wasted trying to keep up with everything left me with little time to seriously focus on individual tasks. It snowballed and I ended up getting nowhere, worrying about everything and completing nothing. Now, I’m moving forward with a lighter, more defined load. Tasks are finally being completed, and with better results.
Jan 25th, 2008
jsanderz
My trouble is that I am easily distracted my other great blogs like yours.
I use Netvibes for all my feeds and instead of trying to read everything, I now only read something that catches my eye. I have started to read my emails only once or twice a day rather than eight or nine, but I subscribe to quite a lot of magazines and then there are all of the books that I want to read, and…
Help I drowning in a sea of information.
Skellie I get your point.
Regards
Jan 25th, 2008
Ruchir
“What if you stopped using social media?”
I would say you should only do that if you already are a well known personality in either the blogosphere or the social media sphere. If someone with a brand new blog does that, you can say bye-bye to social media success…
“What if you stopped reading feeds?”
I agree, people are having too many worthless feeds in their reader, including me. I think that instant of subscribing to only a few feeds, you still should subscribe to as many blogs as you want. Just make separate folder for feeds you just skim, for feeds you actually read and for news feeds to get the breaking news quickly…You can then check the feeds you don’t read as much once in a month perhaps?
“What if you paid someone to moderate comments for you?”
Yep, that’s cheap and productive too. I don’t know why so many A List bloggers still don’t do it…
“What if you sorted email by importance?”
Yeah, if you have GMail, then you can set up a VIP folder and then make a filter that filters email from your inbox to that folder…
Jan 25th, 2008
Alfa King
I’d rather say “productivity by better time management, useful resource allocation and prioritization”. This will automatically eliminate the less important tasks/activities without actually eliminating them from your list. The eliminables are important at some point to some people, maybe not to everybody, and I don’t think it’d be a good idea to chop them off altogether. It’s all a question of mindset and how you organize your routine.
While I can understand and agree on “defining what is truly worth doing and sticking to that alone”, I don’t get your point clearly about “doing less in less time”. It seems to contradict what you argue further about “elimination”. If you are using less time it means you have still some time left which allows for other things (the less important things), which is where my point about “time management and prioritization” comes in.
Anyway, I hope am not confused or confusing you.
Jan 25th, 2008
Catherine Lawson
Great post. I really like the idea of forwarding important emails.
Also, I think I would save time not replying to comments on my blog too often - maybe reponding to a dozen at once instead of every couple of commentors.
Jan 25th, 2008
Anthony Lawrence
Another point: “good enough” often really is. From my December 2005 post on this very subject ( http://aplawrence.com/foo-self-employed/getting-more-done.html )
“Another technique that lets me do more work than most people think they could do is not to always be a perfectionist. I could spend several hours writing a little piece like this, and no doubt it would be better for my attention to it. But I don’t work that way: I write it once, read it once, make any obvious corrections needed and leave it at that. Yes, that leaves me open to bad spelling and bad grammar now and then, and sometimes I put down some pretty baffling phrases. But, generally speaking, I trust that it’s good enough. If I spent hours and hours worrying about the best way to say things, where to break paragraphs and particularly worried about punctuation (it is my observation that too many people spend too much time worrying about punctuation!), I couldn’t get half as much done.”
Jan 25th, 2008
Read Scott
My blogging routine is pretty clean and swift. Nothing to cut out that I can think of.
Jan 25th, 2008
Stephanie
I’ve been working on a lot of this. I use GMail for a lot of my emails, such as newsletter subscriptions, and I love being able to filter the emails by types. It lets me get rid of the junk more easily. And unless I’m expecting to be contacted, I only check it once a day.
Writing longer, more informational posts has been interesting. I’m slowly seeing the difference there too. It’s still hard sometimes to find enough time to do everything (having 2 kids will do that to a person), but it’s a bit better.
Jan 25th, 2008
skellie
@ Michael Martine: I got the FHWW a few days ago, actually, and the stuff on elimination did inspire this post. I’m liking the book :).
@ DJ: The alternate suggestion in that paragraph is to cut down only to the feeds you get true value from. I hope some people would keep Skelliewag in that handful of feeds :-).
@ Michael Martin: I disagree that readers will find short and polite emails that answer their questions offensive or lacking. It’s about doing what they ask of you in less time. If you’re sending short emails and not responding to them properly, then that’s a problem. But I don’t think length needs to correlate with value.
@ Antoine Khater: If you read the ‘Creating vital content’ strategy you’ll see a few articles I’ve written on posting less and trying to pack more value into each post. The results have been very positive so far.
@ Alfa King: I’m not sure I understand. Time management alone isn’t useful because you’re still doing unnecessary tasks (albeit efficiently). But there’s a difference between efficiency and effectiveness.
Thanks to everyone else for the comments — sorry I can’t respond to everyone (but have read them all).
Jan 25th, 2008
Evan Hadkins
Mostly good advice I think. The ability to just click and go to something can be an incredible time waster - it may be better to just take five minutes off and go for a walk.
I’m not sure about the comments and stuff though. I’d need to know what people find over a period of something like three months. Stuff that we don’t see as the core our customers can. A successful computer business I know went broke because they stopped selling parts and other stuff which no one hardly ever bought. When they stopped selling the little stuff though people stopped buying the big stuff (they wanted somewhere where they knew they could get everything even if they probably wouldn’t need to).
Productivity is essential, just watch the effects closely.
Jan 25th, 2008
Jason Simon
Productivity by elimination is a provocative title and I like it. It suggests that as bloggers, we should think open, think different. This has become my topic of interest at http://opentodifference.com
– Jason Simon
Jan 28th, 2008
Lexi
just last week, i unsubscribed from about five blog feeds and email newsletters. i had gotten information overload! my desire to learn everything i could about blogging distracted me from my goals. glad i came to my senses….
Feb 4th, 2008
dt
Hi skellie,
Talking about using less stumble upon, i just stumbled this post!
Anyways great advice as always.
Feb 4th, 2008
Jilli
Bravo!
(this is me using my time efficiently by posing a short comment…kinda, lol)
Skellie, you rock. It’s that simple.
Feb 21st, 2008
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