[56/250] How to achieve 10 hours of work in 5, with outcomes that clients perceive as your best work.
That's what two simple changes can make.
Good afternoon lovely,
How’s this for an amazing comment:
‘I think this is one of your best.’
That was a response from a client this week, after I delivered a piece of work that was researched, written, and finalised within 5 hours. The piece itself was about ethics and ethical behaviours in business, so you can imagine the depth and breadth of the research, and the length of the final piece. (Clue: Epic.)
It reminded me that there are many ways to achieve greatness.
You can stand in front of crowds and tickle their respective fancies enough that they talk about you. You can make music that grabs them by the heart and won’t let go. Or, given this is really about business, you can deliver with a Capital D.
The question of outstanding outputs in a business like mine, which is a ghostwriting and publishing advisory company, is kind of subtle.
The research has to be bang-on. You have to draw people in, make them feel like every sentence is worth their time. You must channel the voice of your client and do it in a way that makes them feel like they’re a million-dollar author. You must also sell effectively. Oh, and did I mention you have to be able to write?
Yet that’s not what created an incredible piece of work.
Credit for that goes to two very different things:
A fundamental change to scheduling
Reading everything aloud 9 times, one after the other, without a break.
The first won’t surprise you, because scheduling and capacity is my perennial whine.
But the second shook even me off my feet.
Now, I’ve been reading everything aloud since I was a Baby Writer. The thing that I had been missing was the loud, constant, unforgivingly annoying repetition.
That advice came from a mentor of mine, who has used the method himself to similarly glorious outcomes. It works for all of the following reasons:
it forces you to focus
it makes you edit for rhythm, pace, sound, completeness, and accuracy
it’s one of only three things that can force a pattern interrupt to shift you into another gear. (The other two are (1) absence, and (2) reading backwards.)
it shortens time to delivery.
For example, I start out intending to rock 9 repeats. Most of the time I hit convergence in 5. Convergence is the point at which there are no more changes to make.
My rule is simple: If you touch it, you require another read.
Becoming highly systematic like this shortens time to delivery by something like 15 or 20 hours. Without doing it, you literally have to let it sit overnight.
Not any more, sista.
And that, my friend, dovetails into the scheduling change I mentioned earlier.
From day one in 2020, the rule is that one client’s work is handled per person each day. Effective creative time is limited to 5 hours. All phones and emails are switched to the OFF position for the duration. Once you hit five hours, that’s it for client work for the day and you have to do something else. It is the only thing that preserves cognitive performance and energy, and stops you draining your creative life force away.
It means that our work is focused, productive, and tight.
It means you get out on time, and that nothing is neglected (project management, finance, administrivia, emails, etc).
And it has the added benefit of giving our clients certainty about days, deadlines, and timing. They finally know why their deadlines are set the way they are.
As one of those clients commented to me yesterday, ‘I don’t know if it’s true, but you seem to have a magical way of getting people to leave you alone.’
Candidly? It sure is true!
If there is one thing I’ve learned in the past six years, it’s that if you can’t get people to do this, you will never be effective.
Creativity requires space. Interruptions are clutter.
And the bonus is, when you’ve got nothing else taking your attention away, you work more intensely, faster, and more effectively than ever before.
It takes bucketloads of courage to cut yourself off, to decide not to be hyper-responsive, and to design your scheduling months in advance. It’s effortful work, which is why people rarely see these little things as being the Golden Keys to freedom.
But, my friend, they really are.
‘til next week, may all your days sparkle as much as mine.
~ Leticia