iDoneThis blog

2014-04-08

Open SSL Heartbleed Bug Security Update

At this time, we have no evidence that iDoneThis has been attacked or that there has been any compromise of user data. All our measures have been precautionary.

We recommend that iDoneThis users change their passwords.

For the Less Tech-Savvy:

Heartbleed is a recently uncovered security vulnerability in OpenSSL, which is used to secure highly sensitive data such as passwords. This would allow would-be attackers to view sensitive, encrypted data from a compromised site without leaving a trace and to use this data to potentially impersonate users of the site.

We’ve fixed the security vulnerability and recommend that you change your password as a precaution.

See the BBC’s coverage as well as Lifehacker’s plain language explanation for more information.

For the More Tech-Savvy:

Yesterday the OpenSSL Project released an update to address the CVE-2014-0160 vulnerability. This vulnerability affected over 60% of web sites, including iDoneThis.

We updated the relevant code on our servers on April 8th, 2014. As of 1pm (Pacific Daylight Time), the vulnerability is no longer present.

As a precaution, we have also re-issued our SSL certificates and revoked our old ones.

Questions or Need to Get in Touch?

Email Rodrigo at rodrigo@idonethis.com. Head here if you need instructions for how to give us security reports.

2014-04-07

Why Poor Leaders Are Valuable

Thomas Edison famously replied when asked whether his repeated failures (ten thousand plus) at creating a working light bulb frustrated him: “No, I just discovered 10,000 ways that won’t work.” When someone demonstrates poor leadership, he or she is showing you one way not to make your light bulb.

My father gave me similar advice while I was attending Navy Officer Candidate School after I had complained about some of the leadership traits of my peers and senior candidates in charge of us:

“Correct in yourself what you do not like in others.”

This single phrase helped me see people’s weaknesses or inabilities not as a chance to point out their blemishes but to look inward and see what I could change about myself.

When people miss this lesson, it’s a wasted opportunity. You may never be able to change the person above you, but you do have the power to create a better work environment for those under you.

Stepping Up Without Learning

At Officer Candidate School (OCS), I noticed an interesting phenomenon of how people transition into leadership. Sometimes they go on to make the same exact mistakes of those who came before them.

Senior candidates (referred to as Candidate Officers or “Candios”) are leaders at OCS. Nearing graduation, they had the job of guiding and mentoring junior candidates (known as either Officer Candidates or Indoctrination Candidates, the most recent check-ins). Candios were either universally loved or hated.

The good ones were patient with us, took time to explain things, and helped get the supplies and equipment necessary to successfully complete our upcoming evolutions. The Candios we didn’t like talked or yelled at us (instead of to us), never took the time to explain things clearly, and were more concerned about themselves than the wellbeing of their subordinates.

You would think that when the time came for us to step into a leadership position, we would all choose to emulate the candidates we liked, right? Yet when we finally became Candios, some of us became like the leaders we admired and others turned out more like the ones we despised.

While some candidates didn’t learn positive traits from good leaders, another equally important factor is that they did not take the time to learn from negative examples set by those who had gone before us.

The Real Meaning of Leadership

In the military, much like the corporate world, “leadership” is one word that is bandied about with astonishing frequency. Now, one thing about being on a ship is that unless you’re the Captain, someone is going to be in charge of you — and unless you’re the most recent check-in, fresh out of boot camp, you are probably in charge of at least one other person. The corporate world is not all that different. In the most technical sense, almost everyone is a leader.

The painful reality, however, is that not everyone is a good one.

When I was a young entrepreneur, I was a pretty bad leader. I tended to be tyrannical and quick to anger. I rarely listened intently to my employees, and I wasn’t always appreciative when people went above and beyond to bring in extra business or ensure the satisfaction of our repeat customers. Then, I became a commissioned officer in the United States Navy and witnessed firsthand other people making the same mistakes that I’d made.

If there is one priceless benefit the Navy has given me, it is the opportunity to learn from the negative leadership examples of others. Reflecting on my time as a leader in the business world and now as a leader in the military, I have come up with three common mistakes that most bad leaders (civilian and military) tend to make.

1. Overuse of Positional Authority.

“Because I said so!” is a parental cop-out, but how often have you found yourself using your position to justify implementing a policy or get someone to do something?

People who over-rely on positional authority use phrases like “It’s my name on your paycheck” and “Because I outrank you!”. As a young, hot-headed entrepreneur, I used the first phrase a lot. Now, as a Naval Officer, I try to be the kind of person who doesn’t need to rely solely upon my position to get people to do things.

2. A “Do as I Say, Not as I Do” Attitude

You can’t be too harsh on other people when you’re the one setting a bad example. Telling people they need to show up to work on time also means you’re telling them, “I will never be late.” Want to extend working hours? You’d better be the first one in and the last one out.

I used to get on my employees’ case for not dressing professionally when they were out in the field interacting with customers. But when my technicians came into the office, they’d see me wearing a T-shirt, tattered jeans, and a raggedy Oakland Raiders ball cap. While I’d only dress like this when I knew I wouldn’t be seeing clients in the office, I probably didn’t give my employees a good impression. In my mind, it was okay because I wasn’t the one dealing directly with customers — but from their perspective, I was setting a double standard.

“Saying something one hundred times is not as good as living it once” is a phrase I try to remember every time I give someone an order. Yes, I’m telling someone to do something — but vocalizing a command pales in comparison to setting a good example for others to follow.

I’ve experienced the receiving end too. A superior officer in my direct chain-of-command would tell me I “had to attend PT (physical training) with the rest of the Sailors,” but during our early morning workouts, he would show up late (if he showed up at all). Now whenever we have divisional PT sessions, I always make sure that I’m out there with my Sailors — and when we run as a group, it doesn’t matter how late I stayed up at the club, I make it a point to stay at the front of the pack.

Leading from the front is a hell of a lot different (and harder) than perching at the top and rolling shit downhill on everyone else.

3. Failure to Facilitate.

Self-centered, “me-first” leadership is commonplace both in the military and in corporate America. To me, most human interaction is a give-something-to-get-something proposition, but far too many people lead with a give-nothing-take-everything attitude.

Failure to facilitate is a direct result of a failure to empathize. If you can’t put yourself in someone else’s shoes, how can you lead effectively? Take a moment of pause to determine what people may want or need before demanding that they be better, faster, or more productive.

If you demand longer hours, higher sales figures, or better customer service without giving the people you manage the tools to succeed in these endeavors, then you’re expecting more without adding anything to the equation.

* * * * *

I’ve seen too many underlings complain about the way they are treated by the people in charge and then, once they climb up the ranks, treat the people under them in the same fashion. Every time poor leadership rears its ugly head, those who suffer its ill effects should take it upon themselves to heed the valuable lesson being provided.

Failing to learn from the mistakes of poor leaders means that everyone’s painful experiences are nothing more than wasted opportunities, doomed to repeat themselves time and again.

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Eric Sagong commissioned as an active duty Naval Officer in March 2010. He is now serving a tour as part of an exchange program with the Air Force and is attached to a logistics division at Tinker AFB in Oklahoma City, OK. His company website is www.mistechscorp.com. Contact him at ericsagong@ericsagong.com.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

2014-03-27

How to Keep Believing in Yourself

I stood there catching my breath. Thoughts were gushing in my mind. “You don’t even believe in me,” I sighed to my best friend. “No one does.”

As soon as the words left my mouth, it dawned on me. This was a metaphorical mirror — a projection of my own reality. I’d hit a wall. Exhausted physically and emotionally from working 100-hour weeks, it was now as clear as day: I had lost my way in believing in me.

This wasn’t about others, it was about my own relationship with myself.

Usually fueled by a quiet confidence, I’d become worn down, paralysed from making decisions as big as the best way to issue company stock right down to the minutiae of which Instagram filter to use. I was plagued with self-doubt. Which was the best way forward? What are all the possible outcomes? Are things succeeding or failing? Who can and will help me?

The Entrepreneur’s Confidence Rollercoaster

Some people think they’re awesome. They even outwardly share the sentiment. From a young age, parents coo to them how special they are. Unfortunately, I’ve battled with feeling the opposite for most of my life. Couple this with an energetic drive and you have a delicate tension to balance.

The thing about entrepreneurship is that you’re forever operating outside a box or known boundaries. That’s why some of the greatest innovators are ignorant to begin with.

The trouble with the world is that the stupid are cocksure and the intelligent are full of doubt.
—Bertrand Russell

This freedom can be crippling. Your confidence can be built to egocentric levels one day and smashed down to nothing the next. You contemplate how taking a job would feel like a sweet retirement. You are drowning in advice and critical feedback from everyone, and forget what it was like when you were in that position. You look around at everyone’s social media showreels and wonder if they are going through the same.

It’s only now that publications like Inc. are uncovering tales from founders with articles such as The Psychological Price of Entrepreneurship:

Entrepreneurs have struggled silently. There’s a sense that they can’t talk about it, that it’s a weakness.

One of the most-loved conferences by web geeks, Brooklyn Beta, created a space to host and share these conversations in 2013. Leading startup incubator Y Combinator also recently funded 7 Cups of Tea, a mental health platform that connects you with qualified listeners.

We’re only just beginning to rejoice in what sharing in this area can be like.

Overcoming Doubt with Gratitude and Perspective

With some space, it’s been almost comical to personally reflect on my progress. How our company can be profiled in a national newspaper one day, an incredible co-founder join me the next, and our growth be up 50% month/month in November — and still feel this way.

Never let the things you want make you forget the things you have.

It’s natural we want to keep pushing, but it’s important to recall the wins so you can curb any self-doubt. One helpful practice is keeping a done list, which will show you what you did rather than your to-do list. Ryan Nicodemus discusses in the “Costs and Benefits of Awareness" the cost of failing to shift your perspective to recall your wins:

Our standards change whenever we are infected with a new awareness. We scrutinize ourselves more. The more we scrutinize, the more the spotlight brightens, and the more our imperfections stand out.

Tiny Buddha’s Melissa Ng recommends being careful with who you surround yourself with. When you are rebuilding your belief, keep away from toxic people who will tell you “No” or “You can’t”. I often divide people into two groups: critics and cheerleaders. Your critics are crucial for providing awareness that helps you grow, but in times of self-criticism and doubt, devote time to your cheerleaders who will egg you on and boost you up.

Ng also reminds us that:

Self-doubt never disappears. Over time, you just get better at dealing with it. It will greet you every time you fall out of your comfort zone and whenever you strive to do something great. But know that it’s not something you have to fear or resent. Your doubts are only thoughts, not your future.

Now excuse me while I go remember and appreciate I might actually know stuff.

This article originally appeared on Kate’s blog and has been edited.

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Kate Kendall is the co-founder and CEO of CloudPeeps, a marketplace that connects businesses with remote community managers. She’s also the founder and CEO of The Fetch. Lover of writing, tea, cities and communities. Say hi @katekendall.

2014-03-26

Build Brick by Brick

John Heywood was an English playwright who lived hundreds of years ago.

Today, Heywood is known for his poems, proverbs, and plays. But more than any one work, it’s his phrases that have made him famous. For example, here are some popular sayings that have been attributed to Heywood:

“Out of sight out of mind.”
“Better late than never.”
“The more the merrier.”
“Many hands make light work.”

There is one phrase from Heywood that is particularly interesting when it comes to building better habits:

“Rome was not built in one day.”

Build Brick by Brick

Typically, people use the phrase “Rome wasn’t built in a day” to remind someone of the time needed to create something great. And it’s true. It takes time — sometimes years — to master a skill, craft, or habit.

While it’s good to keep perspective on your dreams, I think it’s better to remember the other side of this story: Rome wasn’t built in a day, but they were laying bricks every hour.

The problem is that it can be really easy to overestimate the importance of building your Roman empire and underestimate the importance of laying another brick. It’s just another brick. Why worry about it? Much better to think about the dream of Rome. Right?

Actually Rome is just the result, the bricks are the system. The system is greater than the goal. Focusing on your habits is more important than worrying about your outcomes.

Of course, there’s nothing necessarily impressive about adding another brick. It’s not a fantastic amount of work. It’s not a grand feat of strength or stamina or intelligence. Nobody is going to applaud you for it.

But laying a brick every day, year after year? That’s how you build an empire. You can start small. You can focus on improving 1 percent each day. You can simply put in another rep.

You don’t have to build everything you want today, but you do have to find a way to add another brick.

This article originally appeared on JamesClear.com

Liked this guest post? Subscribe to our free newsletter for more great content on productivity, motivation, and how to work better!

James Clear writes at JamesClear.com, where he shares ideas for using behavior science to improve your performance, increase your creativity, and do better work. For fresh ideas on how to master your habits — both mentally and physically — join his free newsletter.

Image: Fabiana/Flickr

2014-03-20

How Long It Really Takes to Form a New Habit, Backed by Science

Maxwell Maltz was a plastic surgeon in the 1950s when he began noticing a strange pattern among his patients. When Dr. Maltz would perform an operation — like a nose job, for example — he found that it would take patients about 21 days to get used to seeing their new face. Similarly, when a patient had an arm or a leg amputated, Maltz noticed that the patient would sense a phantom limb for about 21 days before adjusting to the new situation.

These experiences prompted Maltz to think about his own adjustment period to changes and new behaviors, and he noticed that it also took himself about 21 days to form a new habit. Maltz wrote about these experiences and said, “These, and many other commonly observed phenomena tend to show that it requires a minimum of about 21 days for an old mental image to dissolve and a new one to jell.”

In 1960, Maltz published that quote and his other thoughts on behavior change in a book called Psycho-Cybernetics. The book went on to become an blockbuster hit, selling more than 30 million copies.

And that’s when the problem started.

You see, in the decades that followed, Maltz’s work influenced nearly every major “self-help” professional from Zig Ziglar to Brian Tracy to Tony Robbins. And as more people recited Maltz’s story — like a very long game of “Telephone” — people began to forget that he said “a minimum of about 21 days” and shortened it to, “It takes 21 days to form a new habit.”

That’s how society started spreading the common myth that it takes 21 days to form a new habit (or 30 days or some other magic number). It’s remarkable how often these timelines are quoted as statistical facts. Dangerous lesson: If enough people say something enough times, then everyone else starts to believe it.

It makes sense why the “21 Days” Myth would spread. It’s easy to understand. The time frame is short enough to be inspiring, but long enough to be believable. And who wouldn’t like the idea of changing your life in just three weeks?

The problem is that Maltz was simply observing what was going on around him and wasn’t making a statement of fact. Furthermore, he made sure to say that this was the minimum amount of time needed to adapt to a new change.

So what’s the real answer? How long does it actually take to form a new habit? Is there any science to back this up? And what does all of this mean for you and me?

How Long it Really Takes to Build a New Habit

Phillippa Lally is a health psychology researcher at University College London. In a study published in the European Journal of Social Psychology, Lally and her research team decided to figure out just how long it actually takes to form a habit.

The study examined the habits of 96 people over a 12-week period. Each person chose one new habit for the 12 weeks and reported each day on whether or not they did the behavior and how automatic the behavior felt.

Some people chose simple habits like “drinking a bottle of water with lunch.” Others chose more difficult tasks like “running for 15 minutes before dinner.” At the end of the 12 weeks, the researchers analyzed the data to determine how long it took each person to go from starting a new behavior to automatically doing it.

The answer?

On average, it takes more than 2 months before a new behavior becomes automatic — 66 days to be exact. And how long it takes a new habit to form can vary widely depending on the behavior, the person, and the circumstances. In Lally’s study, it took anywhere from 18 days to 254 days for people to form a new habit. [1]

In other words, if you want to set your expectations appropriately, the truth is that it will probably take you anywhere from two months to eight months to build a new behavior into your life — not 21 days.

Interestingly, the researchers also found that “missing one opportunity to perform the behavior did not materially affect the habit formation process.” In other words, it doesn’t matter if you mess up every now and then. Building better habits is not an all-or-nothing process.

Finding Inspiration in the Long Road

Before you let this dishearten you, let’s talk about three reasons why this research is actually inspiring.

First, there is no reason to get down on yourself if you try something for a few weeks and it doesn’t become a habit. It’s supposed to take longer than that! There is no need to judge yourself if you can’t master a behavior in 21 short days. Learn to love your 10 Years of Silence. Embrace the long, slow walk to greatness and focus on putting in your reps.

Second, you don’t have to be perfect. Making a mistake once or twice has no measurable impact on your long-term habits. This is why you should treat failure like a scientist, give yourself permission to make mistakes, and develop strategies for getting back on track quickly.

And third, embracing longer timelines can help us realize that habits are a process and not an event. All of the “21 Days” hype can make it really easy to think, “Oh, I’ll just do this and it’ll be done.” But habits never work that way. You have to embrace the process. You have to commit to the system.

Understanding this from the beginning makes it easier to manage your expectations and commit to making small, incremental improvements — rather than pressuring yourself into thinking that you have to do it all at once.

Where to Go From Here

At the end of the day, how long it takes to form a particular habit doesn’t really matter that much. Whether it takes 50 days or 500 days, you have to put in the work either way.

The only way to get to Day 500 is to start with Day 1. So forget about the number and focus on doing the work.

Note:
[1]: Even though the study only ran for 12 weeks, the researchers were able to use the data to estimate the longer timelines (like 254 days) to form habits. Again, the exact time depends on a variety of factors and isn’t nearly as important as the overall message: habits can take a long time to form.

This article originally appeared on JamesClear.com

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James Clear writes at JamesClear.com, where he shares ideas for using behavior science to improve your performance, increase your creativity, and do better work. For fresh ideas on how to master your habits — both mentally and physically — join his free newsletter.

Image: Luc B/Flickr

2014-03-19

The Art, Craft, and Science of Great Management

When you meet management consultant Anne Libby, you can’t help but notice her passion and clarity in talking about how to bring workplaces to their senses.

Great management, according to Anne, is a “mixture of art, craft and science” — which can be a foggy path to navigate. Throughout our interview, Anne offers both practical tips and food for thought to help managers and the people around them do their best.

Tell me about a common problem managers encounter.

People think they should already know how to manage — that it’s a natural thing that happens and therefore, they should be good at it. It’s as likely that you would be good at managing as you would be at playing the violin. It’s a complex skill. Just because you’re an awesome developer doesn’t mean that you’re awesome at managing other devs.

How do you learn to be a good manager?

When things don’t turn out the way you want — for example, when you tell someone to do something and three weeks later you find out they didn’t do it — if your first reaction is to be mad at the person, that’s probably not going to work.

Instead it’s always an opportunity to ask yourself: “what could I have done differently?” Sometimes the answer is nothing, but often you really weren’t communicating what you think you were.

There’s also how you’re getting feedback. Does your organization value giving and receiving feedback so this practice is built into the ordinary course of business? Or do you have to figure out how to gather it for yourself? It depends on the cultural context of your organization.

Understanding context is part of appreciating the human element of management. How important is that personal aspect?

You’re not managing tasks, you’re managing the whole person, and you need to honor that.

Another common management issue is failing to understand how complex the context is. Your family, your workplace, and your peer relationships are complicated, so it’s just as important to honor the complexity of the people that work for you as it is to honor the complexity of the people that are in the rest of your life.

What’s one way to introduce that personal element at work?

Sometimes things get too personal at work and that can become problematic. If you want to get to know your people better, get to know some of their career goals. This is both personal and professional.

Veronika Sonsev, CEO and cofounder of InSparq, told me about a great way she leads. First, she finds out the top three goals you want to have on your resume when you leave the company, and then the top two things you want her to say about you in a recommendation. Then every week, she does a planning session to figure out how to get you one step closer to those bullet points.

Understanding what people’s goals are and what is incentivizing them is really important. Like right now, if I had a boss, they’d want to know that I’m trying to figure out how to spend more time with family in Chicago. One week a month you can work remotely in Chicago? That would be a really powerful thing to give to me that’s both personal and work.

And just like I’m saying the manager should know what their team members’ goals are, people should know some of their manager’s personal goals too. The more transparency you have over goals, the more people can reach out and help one another.

Communication is often at the root of management difficulties. What one thing would you recommend managers do to improve communication?

For teachers, there’s a saying: “Tell them what you told them. Tell them again.” Thinking that you told someone something is not enough. How do you know if the person and you understood the same thing? There are so many levels of complexity in that.

If you think you’re communicating something, it’s your job to make sure that the message was both given and received. That’s true of all of us. Think about how you manage your personal life: you can’t just tell someone something and expect that it’s going to happen. It happens in the context of everything else, and life is complicated.

That seems to be an especially challenging part of email.

People think it’s easier. The most common problem I see with this is people trying to work out a relationship or performance issue by email. You should never ever ever do that. You think you’re writing it down so you’re communicating it really well. It never works.

If you have a problem with someone, you need to look at their face. FaceTime or Skype them. At a minimum, talk to them on the phone. The best is to sit down in a room with them where you’re seeing their body language and facial expression, unmediated by technology. Writing it down is good but write it down for yourself so you have a script. But if you email somebody because you’re nervous about saying something, it’s probably not going to work out well.

Being thoughtful about what you do and don’t want to use email for is the best thing you could do for your company’s communication. When is it important to be together? What are the things we need to be together for? What are the things that are okay to use technology to mediate? The companies that ask those questions will be more scalable.

Say hi to Anne on Twitter at @annelibby and on her blog.

A version of this post first appeared in our free newsletter. Subscribe to stay up to date with more great content on how to work better.

Janet Choi is the Chief Creative Officer at iDoneThis and keeps the wheels of the iDoneThis blog turning. She is not a morning person. Follow her @lethargarian or on Google+.

2014-03-13

How to Stop Life from Passing You By: the Weird Science of Stretching Time

One unnerving aspect of getting older is how life seems to start speeding up. Feeling that whoosh as time rushes past you can be disheartening as you wonder where the days, or months, or even years go.

Yet we’re not doomed to march to time’s relentless beat. Your sense of time is weird and pliable — stretching, compressing, coming to a standstill. And you can mold it, to some extent, to move to your own beat.

When you encounter the familiar, time seems to constrict and when you acquire new knowledge, it expands. Neuroscientist David Eagleman explains:

Time is this rubbery thing…. It stretches out when you really turn your brain resources on, and when you say, “Oh, I got this, everything is as expected,” it shrinks up.

That relationship between time’s elasticity and whether your brain is processing new information gets at why time seems to turn up the tempo as we age. As the world starts to become more familiar, we learn less and sometimes even seek information and experiences that fit within what we already know. There’s less adventure, play, exploration, creativity, and wonder to invite and engage with newness.

The way you spend your time influences how you perceive it. So the choices you make about what to do now impacts how you’ll manage your time later. Here are two ways to make your days richer and more memorable so that your sense of time expands and life doesn’t pass you by.

Fill Your Time with New Experiences to Counteract Routines

Time speeding up as we grow older is nothing new. In 1890, William James described this exact experience in his Principles of Psychology:

In youth we may have an absolutely new experience, subjective or objective, every hour of the day. Apprehension is vivid, retentiveness strong, and our recollections of that time, like those of a time spent in rapid and interesting travel, are of something intricate, multitudinous and long-drawn-out. But as each passing year converts some of this experience into automatic routine which we hardly note at all, the days and the weeks smooth themselves out in recollection to contentless units, and the years grow hollow and collapse.

James identified how the automatic nature of routines means that learning isn’t really taking place over a century before Dinah Avni-Babad and Ilana Ritov tested this phenomenon. In experiments examining perception of time in routine versus nonroutine situations, the researchers found that people remember the duration of familiar circumstances as shorter.

In one study, participants had to count how many times underlined numbers appeared in each row of a list of numbers and then estimate how long the task took. For the “routine” group, the underlined number was always 5 while it varied for the “nonroutine” group. Even in these simple, nearly identical tasks, the slightest novelty provided by a mix of underlined numbers rather than 5’s expanded the nonroutine group’s duration estimate.

Echoing James, Avni-Babad and Ritov summarize how learning and new experiences draw out time:

Unless people experience major changes that break the routine in their lives and provide them with anchors to retrieve from memory, life can become one short, timeless sequence of routine inaction.

To combat the effect of automatic routines, fill your time up with new experiences and knowledge to form accessible memory anchors. Turn your brain resources on with new challenges or projects and learning new skills. Ask questions and exercise your curiosity muscles. Take a trip or change up your environment more often. Embrace your inner child and go exploring, even if it’s just to stretch yourself a little.

You’ll find that life stops passing you by so quickly when you stop underlining the same 5’s every day.

Wait, Why Does Time Crawl When You’re Not Having Fun?

If time is supposed to constrict when you’re doing something routine, then why does time seem to drag so slowly while it’s actually happening?

There’s a difference between how time feels as you’re experiencing it and how you remember it. Avni-Babad and Ritov explain that routine frees up brainpower instead of fully engaging it with new information: “the automatic nature of the routine leaves attentional resources for monitoring time (the watched pot effect).” If you’ve ever worked a routine job, for example, you’re intimately familiar with the watched pot effect, where job-time unfolds at a fraction of the speed of regular time.

In contrast, remembering how long something took is “a constructive process involving recall of change points.” Those memory anchors of new knowledge, experiences, and events are what shape how you perceive the passage of time. And it’s the memory that counts because that’s what you tend to use to make your decisions about how to manage your time going forward.

Fill Your Time with Meaningful Progress

Context also makes a difference in how you perceive time by influencing what you remember. So the relevance of events can determine whether time tends more towards squishiness or stretchiness.

A 2006 study led by Gal Zauberman from the Wharton School provides a good example of how this works. In this experiment, participants estimated how many months had passed since the date of certain news events such as the death of Anna Nicole Smith, Barack Obama’s presidential bid announcement, and Britney Spears shaving her head. Participants also had to rate whether these target events triggered subsequent developments. All in all, people underestimated the passage of time by about 3 months.

However, if people felt that certain events triggered a greater number of subsequent events, they felt that more time had passed. Related events act as memory anchors, stretching out your sense of time — while unrelated events don’t have this effect. So if you’d been paying close attention to Obama’s first presidential campaign but didn’t follow the many public trials and tribulations of Britney Spears, you would’ve thought that more time had passed since the bid announcement — even though the two events took place within a week of each other.

Making related memories and building upon knowledge, then, can help expand time. What does that mean for you? To slow down the passage of time, fill it with meaningful progress.

The wistfulness and disappointment you feel when life seems to speed past arises because you’re noticing the passage of yet another month or birthday or year — but you haven’t really made any strides on the things you wanted to do. The counterintuitive lesson from Zauberman’s research is that time seems to pass by quicker because you didn’t take action and you can slow it down by making progress on projects and goals.

Making and recognizing progress not only builds up intrinsic motivation, it prevents you from slipping into the hollowness of automatic, forgettable routines. When you think about how you first started out with a skill or working towards a goal like getting fit or learning how to do your job well, it seems like forever ago because you’ve made a lot of progress. There are lots of relevant and remarkable milestones, all along the way.

When you put your intentions into practice and take time to celebrate your progress, you’ll create a succession of memories to look back on when you think about the passage of time. You won’t feel left behind.

* * * * *

Though you might feel like you have less and less time, don’t mourn the fact that life’s passing you by. Instead, get proactive by spending your time thoughtfully and creating new memories.

Fill out the chapters of your journey with new experiences and all sizes of milestones, and you’ll find that you’re marching, ambling, skipping to a slower, richer beat.

Liked this post? Subscribe to our free newsletter for more great content on productivity, management, and how to work better!

Janet Choi is the Chief Creative Officer at iDoneThis and keeps the wheels of the iDoneThis blog turning. She is not a morning person. Follow her @lethargarian or on Google+.

Images: [1] adapted from Herr Kaczmarek/Flickr; [2] ArTeTeTrA/Flickr; [3] Sunova Surfboards/Flickr & Nicolas Risch Photography

2014-03-12

How to Attract the Right Audience and Subvert the Funnel

We were lucky enough to have Chris Savage, co-founder and CEO of Wistia, deliver a great talk to the Vegas tech community on why video is so powerful when building audiences and how to make video production easier.

The good folks at Wistia often recommend to video newbies that they work with whatever camera they have handy — so we MacGyver’d something with Walter’s iPhone, some tape, a picture frame, and a bar stool to capture Chris’s words of wisdom.

Hey! It’s the transcript:

I’m excited to be here with you guys. I’m going to be talking about building audience with video and content marketing, and a bunch of stuff that I do everyday that I’m excited about. It’s fun to be here in Tony Hsieh-town, so it’s fun to be able to give back a little bit.

I started Wistia in 2006. That’s me on the right. That’s my cofounder Brendan. We were 22 and drunk and seemed like a good idea. And we’re still going, seven and a half years later so I’m pretty happy about that.

Today Wistia has 26 people in it, all shapes and sizes, and we do a ton of content marketing. So we put out about 3 blog posts a week, 1-2 videos a week, it’s the main driver of our business, we have over 50,000 companies at this point that use us, so the stuff that I’m going to be going over with you guys is stuff we’ve learned from ourselves, stuff we’ve learned from other companies, and hopefully there are a couple pieces that you can use today.

When we first started thinking about content marketing, we thought about the funnel, and I’m sure you’ve heard about the funnel. And what we tried to do was make content that would move people through the stages of the funnel, so that ultimately we could have our house of money, which is like the cheesiest, best thing I could find for a successful business. But when we were trying to make content that was around the funnel, we ran into a lot of problems. I think that’s actually because the funnel is really limiting.

So the first thing is that funnels are inherently sales-focused, so if you make content but you’re trying to make it for a certain stage. So for us, the bottom people who are paying us for video-hosting analytics, someone who might be ready to buy video-hosting analytics, someone who might be making video. When you’re trying to push someone through the funnel, it limits the kind of content that you can make and it limits how that content is going to be shared. And ultimately we started to find that it limited our potential audience. So if we were only making content for people who could use video-hosting analytics today that would be stopping a lot of people from being interested in the stuff that we make.

Then the last thing is that the goal of funnels is to push. And I found that a lot of the content I love the most doesn’t ask me for anything. It’s just a gift. So I’m going to show you guys a video that we made about a month or two ago, and as we watch this one minute clip from that video, think about where in the funnel you’d think about this content fitting.

[video]

The goals for this video are very different than goals I would think about for content that’s going through the funnel. So the goals in this video are: to build trust — we want people to think that they can trust Wistia, we’re going to do right by your time, teach useful things, hopefully not sell you a ton of things. And the next goal is to engage a wider audience than video hosting analytics. This is not something for people who just care about video hosting analytics, this is for anybody shooting a video anywhere. Like if you could be shoot a video of your kids, and this stuff matters. And that’s important to us — and ultimately the goal is to encourage sharing of the content.

I want to highlight this one example, Teresa, who’s someone who is in our audience. Well actually she’s just a stock photo but it does the trick. Basically the idea is we have lots of people like Teresa in our audience who are college students, and random people in random industries that have nothing to do with being Wistia customers. And the key to this whole process working for us for making content that’s not just about the funnel but it’s about an audience is that she is a perfect audience member.

I’m going to show you why you want a lot of Teresas. So Teresa, we got her email somehow, and this is the same video we were watching — when we send a video to Teresa, we want her to trust us, we want basically not ask much of her except to come through and take a look at the content.

So this is that video - it lives in something called the Learning Center, which is the home of a lot of the content we’ve made that’s been really successful for us, and we want her to see that she’s part of an audience. So we’re showing her how many plays are on this video, how many tweets, how many likes — and there’s no call to action on this page that says “Sign up for a Wistia account”. The goal is literally to try to make this content so useful to her that she says, “oh yeah, my brother, he makes a lot of videos and he would find this interesting,” or “my friend who got a job at some other place, they make a lot of videos, they’d find this interesting” or maybe they just do still photography and they’d think about making video.

Whatever it is, we just want to limit anything that would stop her from sharing the content and our ultimate goal is that when those other people come back here, we give them a very easy way to opt in to the content but it’s not a strong pitch. So this is something that shows up at the end of the video, it literally just says “enter your email to stay up to date on our content” and we’re not saying buy the product, get some special thing, whatever — the only people who sign up for this are people who watched that whole video all the way through, thought it was really interesting, thought it was really useful, and they’re going to be amazing audience members for us.

This is where things start to get interesting because our goal is actually to fill our funnel — we do have a funnel, it’s really consistent, we know exactly how many people convert based on what are the things that they do and touch in our product, when we send them emails, all this other stuff — but our goal is to fill the funnel by growing the audience.

And it’s actually dumb marketing. We’re not super strategic with the things that we’re making, we just make things that we think will be good and kind of follow our mission of empowering everyone to make videos, and then if we do our job right, the sharing goes around, and there’s a splash effect that happens on the site. And the splash is that people are like, “who’s making this great content? I want to know what’s behind the scenes, I want to know where this stuff is coming from” and those people end up making their way to the funnel and I think the thing that makes me so happy about this is it completely aligns our goals with our audience.

So our audience doesn’t want to be sold, they don’t want to waste their time, they don’t want to see a bunch of junk, they just want really useful experiences that they can share with others, and they want useful things that they can tell other people about. And that’s all we’re trying to do. So it doesn’t feel pitchy, it doesn’t feel salesy, all the time when people buy, they’ll say, “the first time I heard about you was your content but I had no idea what your product was for months” and that’s the way that we like it. We like it because we’re so well-aligned.

Tons of companies are doing this well. Just to give a couple examples — the first one is First Round Review. I think it’s a really great example because First Round Capital is a venture capital firm and First Round Review is their version of a Harvard Business Review, and everything around this site is just about getting you to join an audience and see how great the content is. But if you think about what they’re selling, they’re trying to get you guys, the best of you guys, to pitch them at the right moment, right when you need to raise money, right when you’re at the right stage. There’s actually an incredibly small amount of people they want to talk to, like they might fund 12 companies a year, and it could be an amazing year for them. But because they’re so focused on building an audience, they’re going to build that audience, build that name recognition, and get enough people going through this process that the right people will come and sign up.

Another example that I’m sure many of you have heard of is Buffer. This is something I pulled from last week, and I love just the title of this: “The Psychology Behind Brainstorming: why it doesn’t always work and 4 ways to get ideas more consistently” - this really has nothing to do with their product at all, but it has something to do with their mission, and it’s clearly content that’s designed to be pushed around and to build an audience. iDoneThis is doing this as well, I’m sure a bunch of you guys are doing this also. I just love the fact that when building audiences is done properly, content just aligns with the goal so well.

This is another example, which is Moz. Moz has a bunch of inbound marketing, analytics, and SEO tools, they’re a great product. They have an amazing blog which is wildly, wildly popular. This is an example of a series they do called Whiteboard Fridays where every Friday, someone from Moz gets on camera and they teach about things that are between 4 and 7 minutes long. Every single call to action that they have on their site is just about joining their audience, and they have kind of the same effect going where they’re trying to build a really strong connection with content, and then bring people into the fold of their product.

So where does video fit in? I’m a video guy and I’m the guy standing up, so I’m going to say what I want. We’ve tried a bunch of different kinds of content, and we’ve found that video is particularly effective in audience-building for a couple of reasons.

The first one is that video builds trust in a way that a lot of other mediums don’t. You see the people that are talking and you can judge whether or not you believe them, you can judge whether you want to have a relationship with them. I’m going to show you a video of this guy, his name is Paul. He runs a lawncare business in Pennsylvania, and what Paul does, it’s called WiseGrass, I guess I’ll just play this video, you guys watch it, and we’ll see if we think we trust Paul to take care of our grass.

[video]

The thing that I love about Paul is that Paul has totally changed the game in terms of the amount of traffic that he needs for this to be successful because he’s trying to help these random people make their lawns more beautiful in some suburb of Pennsylvania, but what he’s selling is himself, and he’s selling his personality and his approach, and I feel like at the end of this, you actually feel like you know him a little bit about and you might actually trust him, which is basically all he needs to do. So if he gets like 500 pageviews out of this, that could make a season, that’s the crazy thing about what he’s doing. And I should also mention that he’s been doing content marketing like this for four years, and it is the main driver of his growth. It’s kind of wild.

The next example is this guy from magictricks.com - this guy’s name is Peter Monticup. and he’s a real goofball and basically goes through and teaches you how to do a bunch of cheap, easy magic tricks at magictricks.com. So check it out, buy a bunch of magic tricks — but the thing that’s cool about this is that magic tricks are not a commodity, like nobody knows what a magic trick is going to look like, and nobody knows if you’re going to buy. It’s just hard to know if you’re going to buy into what this thing is going to be. So he realized that the key to scaling himself and scaling people to come into his physical store was just him making videos of these tricks, which doesn’t seem like that remarkable of a thing, except that everything that all of you are trying to do is you’re trying to build things that are not commodities, you’re trying to explain them to people in an automated way, and you’re also trying to build trust and build relationships with them, so it actually does tend to work really, really well. So for Peter, he’s been super successful.

Videos are really just about relationships. I think that’s the thing that’s the most important piece of this. When you’re thinking about video as part of a content marketing strategy is where are the things that when you’re talking somebody in person you sell them, but when you try to put it in a blog post, you try to put it down on a feature page, it’s not just resonating in the way that you want it to — those are often really good places to incorporate video, because you can’t scale yourself and because you can build a relationship, because those are often the things that are the difference in getting people to sign up or not.

So I’m going to go through a couple of the ways we found that make it a lot easier to make video. The first thing is to start scrappy. So Paul’s video is shot on an iPhone on a tripod by himself. It is like a minute and 20 seconds long, and it clearly does the trick. So what Paul does is gets in front of the camera, doesn’t edit anything except for his credits, and he tries this 3 or 4 times, and then he’s done. He’s just changed the process, so he can have something that feels really genuine and it doesn’t have to be really scary. And I think this is something that we kind of discovered by accident, and I’ll show you a piece of content that’s kind of crappy and worked really well for us in a second.

So the first thing is starting scrappy and the second thing is keeping it really simple. So this is Rand from Moz. They’re Whiteboard Friday series, if you ask them, is one of the most successful marketing things that they’ve ever done, they’ve built enormous amount of brand recognition out of it and individual recognition, and the crazy thing is is that it’s just one take, in front of a whiteboard, with 3 lights and the same camera. So it’s basically set up and ready to go and the hardest part is coming up with a presentation that’s going to be 5 minutes long, which of course they’re doing all day every day. They’ve been able to have a weekly series for 4 years now, because they’ve hacked the production so that it’s really really simple.

The next one is that you should use the camera that you already have. Everyone’s always asking me what’s the best camera to use? It’s the one that you have in your pocket. People will get over the scrappiness. That’s why this is an iPhone right here taped to a photo thing. All these cameras work. There are some decent tools out there to help you. One of them is a tool called Filmic Pro, and that’s going to make it easier for you to just do simple things like lock the focus on your subject, and if you’ve ever noticed if you’re holding an iPhone and move it around, the white balance is changing, so things are getting blown out and going back - that’s the kind of app that’s going to help you a lot.

The next one, and this is where you’re going to get your biggest bang for your buck, is buying lights. We’ve put together a lighting kit that you can find at bit.ly/lightingkit, you can also find it at wistia.com/learning and for $100, you go to Home Depot, get these 3 lights, put them together, and what it’s going to do — and this is Chris Lavigne here — what it’s doing on his face is basically, we’re trying to balance out the shadows of his face, and we’re trying to separate him out from the background. So what we’re doing it we’re trying to reduce distractions so you can feel a more intimate connection with him and you don’t have to worry about why he looks so crazy. It turns out if you just shoot everybody without lights, everybody looks pretty weird and crazy, which is how they look all the time, but we judge people more on video and that’s why lighting is important.

The next thing is you’re definitely going to want to put yourself on camera as much as you can, I can’t stress this enough. It’s unbelievable the effect that it has when you can build relationships and scale relationships by getting on camera. And we also try to put the people who are the experts at what they’re talking about in the video about the thing that they’re talking about. So Joe is one of our lead designers so if you are watching a video from Wistia about why we do design a particular way, which if course fits directly into the whole audience-building I was just talking about, Joe is going to be the guy on camera. It’s going to be his voice, he’s going to have the final say on the script, he’s going to make it feel like him. Jeff leads our customer happiness team. If you see a video of us talking about customer happiness, all that stuff, Jeff is the guy who’s going to do that.

I definitely highly highly suggest if you’re going to try this, you should put yourself on there, because while it’s scary, people will actually say things to you, like “I really like when you said xyz, or I love how your hair was, Walter” and I think those connections add up to the difference between these things being shared a lot, they add up to the difference between these people being willing to fight for your brand, is actually having connections with an individual.

The next piece is just making video really consistently. So this is Justine, she runs marketing at a company called Litmus, and they’re doing a monthly video series where they talk about email market share is changing and what new things you should be aware of - like is iPhone up or down, how do the Gmail promotions tabs affect things - so they actually hacked a way. They have all this data and they just need an easy way to talk about it, and they’ve created that. So every month they just get together, and she literally stands next to a computer that has Keynote on it, and just flies through. That’s it. And they’ve gotten so much better in the 3 months they’ve been doing this, and if you want to get inspired, go look at what these guys are doing.

This one might seem obvious but I still think it’s important, which is that you’re going to be wanting to teach as much of this content as possible as opposed to selling. And one of the keys is that you can make a couple amazing videos or couple amazing pieces of content that are focused on selling. You can make an unlimited amount of content that is focused on teaching.

Before I really got this, we were struggling to come up with ideas for what our next blog post would be, we were struggling to come up with ideas for what our next video would be. We’ve kind of pushed our product, we’ve kind of pushed our company, we’ve kind of pushed these other pieces of this thing. But when we started to really focus on saying, how can we make content that educates people that’s a part of our mission - it became much much much easier and we could make content about lenses and scripting and editing and all these other things that have absolutely nothing to do with our product but that actually sell people on our product every day.

So the last piece I encourage you to think about with making video is Game of Thrones. And the reason I encourage you to think about Game of Thrones is that they do an absolutely phenomenal job of building momentum with their content. So the newest season is about to come out, people are pretty excited about it. People are pretty excited about it because in the last season, you were left with this feeling of, I need to see more, and it turns out at the end of every episode you feel this of I need to see more, because you’re making it through the content, you’re excited about it, you’re judging it.

And one of the things that I’ve noticed with business content and marketing content is that everyone is judging what we’re doing even more than they’re judging entertainment content. They know that you’re a business, they know that you’re a startup, they know that at the end of the day there’s some product you’re trying to sell, so if you can actually make content that gives people watching all the way through and actually helps build momentum, people actually recognize that and they tell other people about that, and they anticipate things, and it makes your life a lot easier.

I’m going to show you a video now that we made in 2002 that was a huge turning point for us. We launched on our blog and for social proof, it had like 13 tweets and 3 likes on it, so you know this thing was crazy viral. Actually I’ve been featuring this thing in talks for a year and a half, so really it had like 1 tweet on it and 0 likes, but I’m going to show you the video and we’re going to look at the analytics and talk about what we learned from it.

[video]

So that’s it. Pretty simple. So these are the analytics for that video, and I’ll just briefly walk you through it. Basically this blue part of the graph is engagement, so when it’s going down, people are skipping ahead or they’re turning the video off. And this orange part of the graph is rewatching. So this is areas people are skipping back and watching over and over for some reason. So the reason someone’s going to do that is something’s particularly interesting, something’s confusing, something’s particularly engaging, and at the bottom, we have the loads, the visitors, the play rates - percentages people click play, the plays, and the hours watched. For the industry, a play rate of about 33% is average for the video on the site, so this is a fine play rate, not that okay. But the engagement on this video was 91%. So on average, people are watching 91% of this video.

What’s in this video? People moving furniture around. It’s not like some crazy wild thing except they’re watching it, and I was like, what the hell’s going on here because we’ve been making tons of content and trying really hard to teach people things and sell them shit, and we were getting like 60% engagement, and then we made this video basically moving furniture around our office, and 91% of people watched all the way through. I was blown away by this.

This little bump here, which used to be more dramatic when there were less views, was when that Yoshi head came out. We started to realize that maybe just showing behind the scenes of our company would be interesting, and maybe being a little bit more forward with how big we are would be interesting, because when we first launched this, at the time, there was like 10 people in the office, maybe a little less than that, and we were terrified of telling people how big we were and what we were doing. Yet this video where you could actually judge that we were super-small was one of the things that really helped us build a connection and it brought a lot of people back. And the most wild part about this is, of the visitors to this page, they still converted to accounts the same percentage anyway, like paying Wistia customers, which was kind of wild.

I think we never would’ve made this if we thought, let’s make a video that’s going to go viral, let’s make a video that’s going to improve our conversion rate, let’s make a video that’s going to better sell our product. We didn’t make it for those reasons. We made it because we literally had a camera sitting there and we happened to be moving furniture around.

So I just encourage you to try to take some more risks and try to take advantage of this medium, because it’s really being underutilized still and so that means it’s a huge advantage for all you guys. It’s a huge advantage to build deeper connections with your audience in a medium that most people don’t use at all.

So all that comes back to iteration, and that’s the only way we’ve gotten where we are is just iterating and iterating and iterating. And not taking the same video and redoing it, just like you wouldn’t take the same blog post and redo it, but trying to improve our content in the future, understand what people want better, and build deeper connections.

Back to the funnel analogy, I don’t think it’s that fun to be pushed through a funnel. I don’t think it’s that fun to be that blue guy falling out of the bottom but I think it’s way more fun to actually be a part of an audience, when you’re engaging with a brand.

So, that is it.

2014-03-07

3 Simple Systems Tweaks for Growing Your Business

In Part 1 of this series, guest poster Mandi Ellefson showed how focusing on systems within your business brings out the best. In Part 2, she explains how to choose what to target for the most momentum.

If you want to grow your business more sustainably, be proud of every project you deliver to clients, and get the best out of your team — build systems. Focusing on your business processes empowers you and your team to do great work and see more creative, reliable results.

But if you’re impatient like me, you want to see that improvement quickly. The good news is you can begin right away with this simple method: Start small, and change one thing at a time.

Why? You’ll get immediate feedback. By focusing on one change at a time, you can isolate the results of every change you make. Putting more than one change into the mixing pot makes it tricky to analyze. Even small changes can have larger consequences. Your business is an ecosystem, so tweaking one thing can cause multiple effects.

Finding What to Adjust

Here are three ways to reveal the best opportunities for you to implement small but meaningful changes.

1. Pain Points

You can’t go wrong with solving a pain point. (Remember, one at a time!)

To find your pain points, ask yourself where things seem to be breaking down in the business — like a hitch in a marketing flow, a time management issue, or a problem that just keeps popping up. Reflect on questions such as:

- Where am I losing customers?
- What tasks do I dread doing?
- What questions do my team keep coming to me with?
- Which tasks use a ton of time but yield small returns?
- Do I have a staff member who consistently misses steps?
- Are particular types of project especially hard to start or wrap up?

Then, start with the pain point that is easiest to address. When you begin with a challenge that can be solved quickly, you gain momentum to tackle larger problems.

2. Fire Prevention

If your business is running relatively smoothly, then you may find it hard to come up with pain points. One alternative is to head off risks in your business. What simple changes could you make to stop fires from breaking out?

Start by creating a prevention list. Divide a sheet of paper into two columns. In the left column, make a list of potential fires — all the things that could go wrong in your business. In the right column, figure out some solutions to these problems.

Let’s say you decide to look at the risks in your sales process. You’d start by thinking about potential fires that could hurt your chances of converting a prospect into a client. This could be as simple as putting the wrong business name on a proposal. As small as that seems, little reasons like that can make you lose a client or start off on the wrong foot with a new client.

This actually happened to me recently. A company I was thinking about hiring spelled my name incorrectly in the first return email. It sounds petty, but the lack of attention to such a personal detail irritated me and ended up being one of too many little things to ignore. I decided not to work with them.

How would you prevent an issue like that? You could establish a one-minute policy that names are triple spellchecked on all proposals. Or set up a step in your sales process to ask all prospects exactly who your project proposal will be going to.

Even a small step, when thoughtfully added, can have a great impact on your business.

3. Hunt Down Opportunities

Recently, one of my clients asked me to help him find more time to focus on customer development. We identified one aspect of his service delivery that was taking him a few hours a week that I thought was a great process to delegate.

So the next time he had to work on this task, he wrote out very specific steps that anyone could follow and recorded a video to go along with it. Within a week, he had a contractor with some base level knowledge complete the process for his clients. This saved him four hours every week, and he can serve more people.

Looking for opportunities for more time, efficiency, and quality means finding easy wins. Ask yourself:

- What steps could I take to reply to leads faster?
- How could I shorten my sales cycle?
- How could I encourage more referrals?
- What tasks could I systematize and delegate or outsource?
- What actions could I regularly take that will create a better outcome?

With questions like these, there’s no need to wait for opportunity to come knocking. Discover your own.

* * * * *

Building effective systems in your business will be the best investment you ever make. And by making small, meaningful changes, you’ll see the impact of your new systems right away.

Liked this guest post? Subscribe to our free newsletter for more content on productivity, management, and how to work better!

Mandi Ellefson helps entrepreneurs put the right systems in place to maximize team output and spur rapid growth. She sniffs out and plugs money leaks for her clients worth tens of thousands of dollars. To learn how to increase profits and get the most from your team, download her free ebook: 4½ Steps to Scale Your Business the Right Way.

Image: adapted from floato/Flickr

2014-03-06

How to Get More Out of Your Team Without Being a Micromanaging Jerk

(Part 1 of 2 in a guest post series on setting up successful systems.)

Anthony Gatto is one of the greatest jugglers ever. He has over twelve world records to his name. Throw him four, five or six balls, and he’ll keep juggling away, no problem. Give him a seventh, and he’ll struggle to keep juggling for ten minutes. Throw an eighth ball into the mix, and he’ll barely last a full minute.

No matter how sublime a juggler’s skills, give him too much to handle and he’ll mess up. Push a juggler too far, and he’ll never be totally Russian — juggler slang for doing a dropless show.

As a boss or manager, you can’t do it all. You must clear your plate to keep growing. So you hire and delegate only to see tasks come back late, incomplete, or low-quality. When that happens, you’ve either got to redo it yourself or submit shoddy work to your clients. Doing either hurts. You wonder if everything would be better if you handled it all yourself, and then you’re back at not being able to juggle it all.

It’s Not a People Problem

If you focus on the hassle of working with a team, you miss the bigger, more complex people picture. According to Dr. W. Edwards Deming, 94% of all failure, troubles, and possibilities for improvement “belong to the system” — not individuals.

As the guy whose techniques resulted in the quality upsurge in Japanese manufacturing following WWII, Dr. Deming has a point. His systems for using statistics in quality control helped form the foundation for successful Japanese businesses like Sony and Toyota, both known for their high-quality products.

While Deming was talking about manufacturing rather than knowledge work, his colleague, Peter Scholtes explains our often misguided approach of assigning failure to people:

Conventional problem-solving would ask such questions as: Whose area is this? Who is supposed to replace worn gaskets? We don’t ask “why,” we ask “who.” We don’t look for causes in the system, we look for culprits in the work force.

Is management a big blame game? That kind of strategy will get you short-term results and a whole lot of frustration.

Shift Your Focus to the System

You’ll be better off if you focus on root causes within the system. Your business system is made up of processes and subprocesses — the steps you take to create value for your customers and revenue for the business. Different processes might include communication, marketing, sales, product delivery, finance, or staffing.

Here’s an example. When I’m starting a new client project, I have a process for bringing my new client on board. This is how it looks:

Collect Payment > Sign Contract > Book first session > Send thank you message > Send thank you to referrer > Intake form > First session

Every component of this process has its own subprocess. My Collect Payment subprocess is to take the first payment over the phone and then set up recurring payments with PayPal. For high-volume businesses, the Collect Payment subprocess could be a shopping cart on the website.

Following my system means every new client gets the same high level of service. I never forget to have a contract signed, I never forget to book a first session, and I never forget to thank referrers, who are the lifeblood of my business.

Look for Causes, Not Culprits

Stop blaming your team, and focus on improving your systems. It means you can hire staff to fit your system instead of relying on the miracle superstar to come along.

Don’t get me wrong. Having great people on your team is incredibly important. But equally important is setting them up for success so they can bring their very best to the company. Relying on talent alone is a huge risk. When Superstar Steve moves on and takes his fabulous results with him, that shouldn’t be a disaster.

Viewing your business as a system of processes moves the ball into your court. You set up the conditions and then empower others. With the right systems in place, your team knows what to do without you. They’ll become more like superstars when they’re carrying out successful systems.

You can stop spending your life picking up dropped balls. Instead, you’ll be getting better and better at juggling as a team.

So, how do you make this happen?

Build your juggling machine

For a simple start, pick a process and write out the steps as you go. This start does not have to be perfect. Next time you go through the process, follow the steps and tweak as necessary. Note what works and what doesn’t, adjust, and you’ll have what you need by iteration.

Store your process notes in a place that fits into your workflow. For example, I do my in-progress process notes in WorkFlowy. When they’re ready, I transfer them over to Google Docs. That way, they’re easy to access and share with team members.

As you move toward systems, your team may protest. You might hear these two common doubts:

Systems sound restrictive and robotic!

Your team might say they’d rather be creative or flexible than follow a proven process. As a creative person, I can relate — systems started out as a love-hate relationship for me. Yet as I’ve become more structured in my business, I get more accomplished in less time and help my clients achieve better results. Creativity thrives within constraints, putting problems and solutions into focus.

I’ve also found that once you show your team how systems benefit them, they’re quick to jump on board. Over time, they’ll come to love your systems, and you’ll find it easier to keep hold of your best staff.

What if everything you do is custom?

This is a very common objection I hear from service businesses, but on closer examination, it’s rarely true that everything is custom.

When you look at the steps you took for your most successful projects, you’ll see common threads. Account for some customization, but have your systems stand in for the bulk of the work — say 80%, with the creative magic coming from the custom 20%.

For example, I help many clients carve out more time to grow their business. When I started doing this, I was only confident enough to promise I’d find them 16 hours a month. Then I ran a beta test with entrepreneurs to fine-tune my process. Now I get even better results, faster, and can easily promise 20-40 hours month. While each client has a different situation, my proven system ensures that they get a greater result, and I can have someone else with baseline coaching skills run the process for me if needed.

* * * * *

Every project can become a dropless show when you build the right processes that focus on solving current problems and preventing future ones. I’ve seen businesses double or triple their revenue in a year by building out systems. In my next post, I’ll show you how to choose which processes to target to get the most impact and momentum.

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Mandi Ellefson helps entrepreneurs put the right systems in place to maximize team output and spur rapid growth. She sniffs out and plugs money leaks for her clients worth tens of thousands of dollars. To learn how to increase profits and get the most from your team, download her free ebook: 4½ Steps to Scale Your Business the Right Way.

Images: [1] adapted from Pauline Gesta/Flickr; [2] Dani Alvarez Cañellas/Flickr

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