The topic for this month’s Nonprofit Blog Carnival is personal
productivity online. In a nutshell my advice is to spend time on your blue
chips and don’t let the monkeys sit in your lap. Let me explain.
Years ago, when I worked in corporate
America, I was in a training class where we did this exercise. Everyone was given a long list of questions
to answer and 20 minutes to finish as much as we could. You handed in your answers and got your chips
as you completed each question/task. Some
of the questions could be answered easily and some took more time and
thought. For each answer you got a
white, red or blue chip. White chips
were 1 point, red chips were 5 points and blue chips were 10 points. You only needed to answer two blue chip
questions to win. If you spent the whole
time on white chip questions you would never get to finish 20 of them in the
time available. The point of the
exercise – spend your time on the blue chips (most important items) first. It’s
true that they usually take more time but it is worth allocating the time. This
lesson has stayed with me for a lifetime.
I think this is a particularly important advice for
nonprofit leaders – especially small nonprofits with limited resources and
people wearing multiple hats. Small
nonprofit leaders always seem to talk about all the things they have on their
plate and why they aren’t getting to something they think is really
important. Often they are in the self-imposed
white chip trap.
When I was first promoted to be a manager my boss gave me
this advice. He said, “People will come
to you - not because they want you to solve their problems – but because they
want you to understand their difficulty and why something isn’t getting
done. Be careful that you don’t take the
monkey from them because before you know it your desk is full of monkeys and
you can’t do your job.” It was great
advice. Each of us should be accountable
for our own responsibilities. Nonprofit
executives can be too quick to take the monkeys and feel personally responsible
for everything Do you
recognize any of these scenarios?
- ED takes on answering phones during lunch hour every day rather
than letting calls go to voicemail.
- ED gets involved in the details of what interns will work on
when it could easily be decided by an immediate supervisor.
- ED gets involved in daily operations in ways that
establishing policies and protocols could eliminate their involvement.
Notice anything familiar yet? We all spend some time on the white
chips. If you want to improve your
personal productivity you need to to step back, identify your white chips and
monkeys – especially the repetitive ones – and re-engineer the process to eliminate
duplicate or unnecessary work.
The topic of the carnival is supposed to be about personal
productivity ONLINE. So let’s talk about
online.
The first step is to know your objective and audience. Are you using online activity as a resource,
for marketing, fundraising, advocacy, awareness? Who is the audience? Where do they hangout? If your answer is everyone and everywhere you will be spending too much time on the white chips. If your answer is everything, then I suggest you send some monkeys packing.
You can use measurements, analytics and soft data too to
figure out where you are getting the most bang for the buck online and which
areas have the most potential for growth.
I use google analytics to analyze which of my blog articles get the most
attention and how the traffic is being driven.
I peel the information in several ways.
Since I am mostly – not completely – a local business I analyze how much
of the traffic is coming from local sources.
I look to see which articles inspire people to look at additional pages
and not just the landing page. I analyze the data in different ways depending on what I am trying to accomplish. I
actually have two blogs this one and The Grandma Chronicles. At the Grandma Chronicles I write about being
a grandmother and product reviews. What
is so interesting is that the drivers to each blog are very different.
I have not had much luck with my nonprofit consulting blog facebook
page.
In my case linkedin groups,
pinterest (yes, pinterest) and participating on other blogs is most
effective.
I use twitter for resources
and peer interactions but not for business development.
At both of my twitter accounts I have about 8
lists and when I am at twitter I don’t go through the feed.
I use my lists so that what I am reading is focused.
For consulting the topics include governance,
nonprofit technology, NJ nonprofits, philanthropy, executive search, etc.
MyWishlist of Books for Nonprofit Folk Pinterest Board drives traffic all the time since I post new pins throughout the year. The Wishlist is my signature
piece so I give it attention all year long.
For the Grandma Chronicles, facebook is more effective. This page likes a bunch of grandparenting,
parenting and toy company pages and it is very easy to have interesting stuff
to post all the time. I intersperse this
treasure trove with my own original material and the facebook page drives
traffic to my blog where people do click on my Amazon links. Pinterest is also effective with the grandma
crowd. Participating on twitter or linkedin
is a zero and participating on other blogs is not very effective. For this “business” I would like to have
readers anywhere in the United States and being local is irrelevant.
The monkeys? There
are lots of them in your email. They are
jumping around and want desperately to land in your lap. Delete, unsubscribe and forward with a copy
to sender – letting the sender know they will hear back directly from the responsible
party.
So to sum up – be more productive online by playing your
blue chips instead of the white ones and staying away from the monkeys.
Marion
