Warning – this is a more personal post and one that isn’t about hardcore SEO tactics. Despite this, I think that I have some useful lessons to share and I hope you find it useful. For thoughts on similar principles but more from an SEO project perspective rather than an individual efficiency angle, you could read project management for SEO.
How I get things done as founder of an SEO agency
After becoming a dad 6 weeks ago, I have been trying desperately to squeeze efficiency gains out of my day. Just before my daughter was born, I was stretching my day out and was regularly at my desk by 8am and still there well after 7pm at night plus working in the evenings and at weekends. Many of you may work even longer hours than this. I don’t think it’s uncommon among business owners. In a previous life, I worked in management consulting and the hours were brutal. I always wanted to build a company that didn’t rely on long hours, but somehow even (generally) succeeding at that didn’t stop me working long hours.
As a general rule, I was fine with it and not coping too badly.
However
I don’t want to be the kind of dad that is never home. I want to be there for bathtime.
But I also don’t want to compromise my ambition. I don’t want Distilled to suffer and I don’t want to hold up or let down my team or our clients.
So, I’m left with finding a few hours a day of ‘efficiency savings’. I need to get better at what I do and more efficient at how I do it. It’s not like I wasn’t trying before, but now it’s serious. Since I’ve been putting so much effort into it, I thought I would also share with you some of my biggest wins and the tools, tips and tricks that help me get things done. I hope they are helpful whatever your role in the SEO process – certainly I have been sharing some of this stuff with the team here at Distilled and I also think that there is a lot of scope to use these same techniques and ideas in in-house roles.
Overarching principles
Everything is based on Getting Things Done (GTD). To my mind, this is all about your mind. Specifically, it’s about finding the things your mind is bad at, and seeking ways to fix it. Here are some key ways my mind is broken – maybe yours is too:
- I’m easily distracted by did you see this kitten?
- I can remember phone numbers from 15 years ago and forget to return a phone call despite a post-it note stuck on my monitor
- ‘Background thinking’ tasks (like trying to remember a list of priorities) make me massively less efficient at whatever I’m actually doing
As a result, I like the fact that GTD builds habits and systems that enable me to:
- Get all the trivial stuff out of my head…
- …and into a trusted system where I know I will find it again…
- and delineate my time away from distractions of new information (like email)
If you have never tried it, it’s hard to describe how powerful a trusted system is. If you trust yourself to work from your todo list and therefore you manage even your most important tasks that way, you free up so much of your mental capacity. I have been guilty in the past of having a todo list, but then using post-its for important stuff. But then I stopped checking my todo list because I never got through the post-its. Similarly, if you try to empty your inbox, but leave really important email in there so that you don’t miss it, you’re doing it wrong.
Email – inbox zero
Many of you will have heard of the concept of inbox zero. I highly recommend watching Merlin Mann’s talk at Google on the subject:
While I’m recommending Merlin’s stuff, do your colleagues a favour and have a read of his article about writing good email and check out his talk on time and attention (something I need to do more thinking about).
I only really got the inbox zero thing when I realised a few crucial elements:
- Getting your inbox to zero is not the same as having no email left to deal with (that would be crazy)
- There is huge value to separating the emails you are working on from the place new emails arrive
- Move tasks out of email onto your todo list when you can
Oh, and keyboard shortcuts are your friend (gmail is excellent for this).
Working on the right things
There is a danger with efficiency systems that you just work faster and faster on trivial things. I have two ways of trying to make sure I’m working on important stuff:
- A weekly review: which involves running through all the stuff I want to achieve and adding tasks to my todo list (balancing the trivial urgent things that tend to accumulate on there). At the same time, I try to clear out the cruft – removing irrelevant things and modifying deadlines where needed
- Daily prioritisation: I have recently started ending my working day with a checklist (checklists rock – see Tom’s post) – the last item on which is “list 5 tasks to do tomorrow”
Apparently [I haven’t found a solid reference – link available if you supply one] Charles Schwab once happily paid a fortune for the following efficiency advice:
Each evening, pick six things to do tomorrow. Then do those things.
Supposedly it changed his life. I started with five things (because I mis-remembered that advice, actually) but even so, it’s already making a difference after only a couple of weeks. My record isn’t perfect – only on special days have I managed to do all 5 things, but it keeps me focussed on the things I want to get done.
Delegation and management
It’s all well and good having your own todo list in order. But hopefully you don’t do everything yourself. You probably delegate things, ask others to do things and rely on other people managing their own time and todo list.
Teams work best when everyone takes responsibility for their own performance and their own job – but that doesn’t mean you should just assume they will. I used to think that following up on things you had asked others to do was micro-management. But I’m coming round to the view that actually, that’s just management.
Just as with managing my own tasks, I have found that there are really two critical steps to doing this effectively:
- Note them down somewhere I trust
- Review that list
Building both habits is hard. In the past, I thought it best to build #1 first (as there is no list to check until you are writing things on it). In a similar way to the “important task” dilemma described above, however, I found myself never putting things on the list because I wasn’t in the habit of checking it. So recently I have flipped this on its head. I’ll let the noting down take care of itself but I will religiously check the list at the end of every day.
When I say list, I actually mean two things:
- A list in Remember The Milk (see below)
- A tag in gmail (‘followup’) – also more on this below
My tools
My basic toolkit is pretty simple:
- Laptop
- iPhone
- Moleskine notebook and nice pen [this is an area where I find that if I make it fun to write notes, I’m more likely to write them]:
At Distilled, we recently switched over to Google Apps for our domain which means that we finally have gmail. Suffice it to say I’m a big fan – the search is revolutionary to those used to Thunderbird / Outlook (especially as the IMAP access means we aren’t forcing the web interface on anyone). My little tweaks so far:
- Turn on keyboard shortcuts (then use “?” to view a list of available shortcuts)
- Turn on labs
- Turn on “send and archive”. A small tweak, but an awesome one.
- Turn off unread counts for inbox – avoid having it bug you to check new email
- I would use “multiple inboxes” to show my followup and starred email on the same page but it currently conflicts with:
- Rememberthemilk addon (I use the Chrome version) – more on RTM below
- Create a follow-up filter so that when you email [email protected] it is tagged for followup later
Most of the software I use is either web-based or has applications for most desktop OSs and mobile platforms. I’m on Windows 7 (and iPhone). Screenshots below from the iPhone:
Remember The Milk
I have tried a few todo-list-management tools and nothing beats Remember The Milk in my opinion. I don’t use all its coolness, but do rely on:
- A few lists:
- Work
- Personal
- Delegated
- Projects
- GTD – a “meta” list to remind me to run through my checklists weekly etc.
- Some tags – particularly tagging tasks I have delegated with the name of the delegatee – making it easy to group them for follow-up
- The ability to email tasks into the system
- The gmail addon mentioned above
Evernote
I use Evernote (which essentially syncs text, photo and voice notes across devices) for two main tasks:
- Capturing stuff to process later (quick notes, web pages, photos) – especially on the notes front this is handy if I don’t have pen and paper on me – I almost always have my phone
- Managing my daily list – again because I have it with me all the time, this is where I keep my ‘daily’ list of 5 things along with my end of day checklist
I also have it set up so that I can email stuff into it much like rememberthemilk.
Incidentally, I’m only scratching the surface of what you can do with Evernote. @swerveball pointed me to this excellent article from Ruud Hein on implementing GTD with Evernote but I have to admit I’m a bit scared of it.
Supporting tools
There are a few tools that aren’t strictly for getting things done, but nonetheless help me be more efficient:
Salesforce
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We use Salesforce for keeping track of contacts, prospects and leads (as well as for managing much of the contract process – but that’s another post). I use the iPhone app to keep access to thousands of contacts wherever I am. I particularly love the fact that the screen above has a button to ‘clone’ Rand.
Readitlater
I mentioned earlier that I am easily distracted. One of the tools I use to manage that is Read It Later – which is a combination of Firefox plugin and iPhone app (integrating with Echofon for Twitter on the iPhone) that means I can save interesting articles to read later. This means that (most days) I don’t get overwhelmed by the stream of great stuff to read and can capture it in one place to read when it’s convenient to me rather than when I should be working on that document.
Dropbox
In the interests of being able to work everywhere and grab important documents even when mobile, I am increasingly loving Dropbox. That link is clean, this one gets me an extra 256Mb of space – I hope no-one minds that little semi-affiliate link-drop [Update – apparently if you use my referral link, not only do I get more space, but you get more space on your free account too – which is super-cool]. Syncronising files between computers and having a mobile app – it’s pretty damn close to magic.
My checklists
Finally, I have mentioned checklists a couple of times. Here are the two most important ones I use:
Daily
- Review internal emails – gmail search: (label:starred OR label:inbox) AND (from:distilled.co.uk OR from:distilledconsulting.com)
- Follow up delegated tasks
- Remember The Milk list
- Gmail label:followup
- Delay urgent starred / todo items that can’t happen today
- List 5 things to do tomorrow
Weekly
- Review open projects and create next tasks
- Clear inboxes –> todo list
- Rememberthemilk
- Evernote
- Notebook
- Review all todo tasks
- remove unnecessary ones
- create / adjust deadlines where necessary
Incidentally, it’s not all about working smarter. I wish it were. There is still a large degree to which it’s sacrifice and hard work. I am writing this post at 11.30pm while my daughter sleeps beside me. I sleep a lot less than before (even factoring in the baby effect) but somehow (at least for now), it’s all OK.
Also, if you are waiting for an email reply from me, sorry! None of this makes me perfect, but imagine how bad I’d be without it!
