Photo by nikko macaspac on Unsplash
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The perils of busyness
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Are you working on or in your business?
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Outsourcing is supposed to help – if you can find the time
I admit it. I’ve been guilty of the cardinal sin of content marketing in recent months: a lack of new content.
It’s a problem I see all the time in my work, one shared by everyone from small start-ups to global organisations. All have good intentions. They know a well-formulated content marketing strategy populated with quality resources can raise their company profile, drive customer and prospect engagement, and boost lead generation. It may help them be seen as thought leaders, or good employers.
What happens? Life gets in the way.
They publish the odd blog. Some intermittent LinkedIn posts. A white paper.
But there’s no editorial timetable, no publication consistency. This week’s content creation goal gets sidetracked by more pressing matters with a higher priority and tighter deadline. It slips down the agenda. A week passes. And another. And another.
The result: occasional flurries of activity with big gaps in between. And the audience slips away.
The perils of busyness
I get it. The same happens to me.
I got back from the summer holidays and was immediately playing catch-up. We hit September, my clients and their audience also got back from the beach, attention returned to business, industry events kicked-off again and everyone started ramping up their content marketing needs.
Clients pay the bills, so their projects take precedence. The blogs and LinkedIn posts I’d meant to write were sacrificed instead. I was even in the midst of writing this blog last week when an urgent client request came in and my time disappeared.
All understandable. But no-less problematic.
Are you working on or in your business?
Like so many companies large and small, I’m guilty of working in, not on my business.
We all know that to grow we need to set aside time away from the firefighting tasks and daily to-do list to focus on the important but non-urgent stuff.
Author and former clinical psychologist Alice Boyes noted in a 2018 Harvard Business Review article that “our most meaningful tasks are less likely to have deadlines than tasks that are relatively unimportant.” Studies showed though that people typically chose to complete tasks with very short deadlines, even when those with less pressing deadlines promise bigger rewards.
Stephen Covey set out the Eisenhower Matrix in his book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People to address this.
Source: https://todoist.com/productivity-methods/eisenhower-matrix
Important but not urgent tasks are those that move you towards your long-term growth targets. Spending time here, said Covey, is the sweet spot of personal time management. Yet because the activities in this area may not have a deadline, they are easy to put off. Instead the tendency is to focus on Quadrant 1 responsibilities, risking stress, burn out and failure to achieve the growth we seek.
All makes sense in theory. More difficult though to put into practice – especially when you have little control over your daily schedule.
Outsourcing is supposed to help – if you can find the time
Outsourcing is supposed to help with that trade-off – whether firms opt to employ it to support Quadrant 1, 2 or 3 tasks.
Like all outsource service providers, my role as a content copywriter and communications strategist is to shoulder some of the work burden that would otherwise either fall on in-house staff, or not get done. You hand-off the jobs you know need doing to focus on the priority ones that you are best equipped to complete.
The paradox is that staff at many companies are so busy they don’t even have time to think about how and what they could outsource. Busyness begets busyness.
It’s a vicious cycle I struggle with constantly, one I know is all too common.
Maybe it’s time for me to outsource my content marketing …