#At least once he figures out human limitations he can be a good strategist again
Text
Every Mono-Black Commander Part 1: Oh right, old magic design
A while back, I did a couple of articles regarding every single (at the time) Boros legend available to helm one’s commander deck. It was a long, slow process, but it’s a color combination I care about a lot, so I think it was worth the while.
I kinda felt like doing this again, so I was wondering what colours would be best to do this about. And it turns out the colour combo I care about the most after Boros is…mono-black. I mean, I have 2 mono-black decks at time of writing with a third half-built, so it stands to reason that I’m clearly an expert in this field.
Now…this might be a mistake. This might take a while. Because as it turns out, there are almost 3 times as many B commanders as RW ones. But, we’ll figure it out as we go. This is: Every Mono Black Commander. Part one. Of I don’t know how many. Once again I’m not including the partners because that’ll take too long, but to be fair, it’ll be a hot minute until we get there.
Baron Sengir (12 decks, 88th most played)
Oh right. Homelands. Part of the upside with doing Boros last was that I got to skip this entire phase of Magic’s design, since Enemy colour pairs weren’t allowed to have cards until, like, Apocalypse. There wasn’t a Boros commander until Ravnica, so the cards I was talking about were at least functional.
Baron Sengir is an old, old classic at this point. The original Vampire tribal commander, it’s an 8-mana flyer with two basically shite abilities and has been pretty heavily outdone by, among other things, himself. But, he’s still Baron fucking Sengir, so you can’t help but appreciate him. Just read that flavour text, it’s so unbelievably edgy but still so cool.
Grandmother Sengir (4 decks, N/A)
For some reason, EDHREC doesn’t list anything below a card we’ll get to later on the list, so I don’t know how Grandmother Sengir stacks up against such powerful competition. Look, she’s an overcosted creature with a bad ability, I know I love jank but this is just uninteresting. Next.
(Also if she’s part of the Sengir family why is she a Human not a Vampire?)
Ihsan’s Shade (32 decks, 69th most played)
If I had to guess, Ihsan’s Shade has such a nice position on account of its reprint at Uncommon in Masters 25, letting it be one of the 15 commanders available for the colour identity in Pauper commander- though most of those are fairly new cards, so for a while the Shade was probably one of the better options. And that’s just sad. But hey, still dodges White removal and most of Red’s, so eh. He’s the only Legendary Shade (barring changelings), so I guess he’s got that going for him if you want to build that deck.
Irini Sengir (6 decks, 102nd most played)
Legendary Creature- Vampire Dwarf is a fun typeline, but that’s about the best Irini has going for her. I guess she’s a Black card that messes with Enchantress, so if you’re really struggling with like, 4 Estrid decks in your meta, why not. Or just play a deck with Fracturing Gust.
Veldrane of Sengir (9 decks, 94th most played)
…holy shit this card is just awful, isn’t it? Looking at what’s below it on the decks list, some of these cards are a lot more interesting and I have no idea why you’d play this idiot over any of those. I’d rather build Irini, man.
Aight are there any other Sengirs I should know about? No? Good, thank fuck.
Purraj of Urborg (3 decks, N/A)
Well we’re through Homelands, but it’s still early Magic design. Purraj at least does A Thing, where she gets bigger if you cast black spells. I can actually envision a decklist built around Purraj in a way that I couldn’t with half of these Sengir dorks. She’s still comically underpowered, and I of course understand why people wouldn’t build her, but you could do something here.
Shauku, Endbringer (16 decks, 83rd most played)
Shauku is the first of these cards that is like, actually kickass. It’s kind of unfortunate that she’s been overshadowed somewhat by similar murder commanders, but she’s still the original. Not only that, but she exiles things too, which is honestly a pretty decent effect in the zone. Shame about that drawback, though, because you’d love to attack with your big flier. Oh well, guess you have to keep exiling things.
Oh right, 7 mana. Yeah ok fair enough moving on.
Spirit of the Night (16 decks, 82nd most played)
Spirit of the Night has the same number of decks as commander as Shauku, but I assume its slightly higher because more people are playing it in the 99? Either way, here’s your first Big Daddy Demon to ramp out. 9 mana, huh? It’s one of the first Keyword Soup cards, and it’s art is absolutely phenomenal- gotta be one of the genuinely scariest pieces of art from that era of Magic, maybe all eras- but it is kinda let down a bit by the statline. Legitimately, if this card had 1 more power (and therefore could 3HKO people with commander damage) it would see so much more play.
Gallowbraid (5 decks, 106th most played, the bottom of the list)
This is the card I mentioned earlier, the lowest thing that EDHREC has deigned to put on its list. I can see why people wouldn’t want to run it, though. Not only is it basically a French vanilla creature, it also actively hurts you for playing it. No one likes cumulative upkeep, and I cannot imagine wanting it on your Commander. This thing isn’t worth the skin it’s made of, apparently.
Morinfen (11 decks, 92nd most played)
It’s Gallowbraid but it traded the Trample and a point of toughness for Flying, making it substantially better and yet still completely useless. Next.
Commander Greven il-Vec (4 decks, N/A)
I’m… actually surprised to see Greven below Gallowbraid, I’m pretty sure that wasn’t the case a couple years ago. Don’t ask me why I remember these things. Considering, however, that his only real claim to fame is his story presence, and people who like him now have a better card with his face on it, I guess it isn’t much surprise his numbers would drop off a bit. He’s at least got some flavour, I guess, considering he’s apparently a very outlived-your-usefulness kinda leader, but that’s not going to make up for being yet another overpriced card with a downside and a mediocre evasive ability.
Crovax the Cursed (7 decks, 97th most played)
Hey look, they spent an entire line of text on this guy making sure you know he’s a Vampire because Summon Legend Vampire was to complex a technology for 1998. Wait, 1998? I thought Stronghold was way older than that, huh. Regardless, like a bunch of these cards so far, Crovax pretty much just a dude, except he has to eat other dudes to stay relevant. Can’t relate, frankly.
Cao Cao, Lord of Wei (33 decks, 66th most played)
Oh fuck, we left the Homelands zone and ended up in the Portal: 3 Kingdoms zone. For the unaware, P3K was the third “starter” set Magic released, this time targeted towards the Asian market- hence the whole set is a reference to the famous historical novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. Considering the book in question, a lot of these cards were probably real people at some point, which just makes me feel weird.
Anyway, Cao Cao is actually one of the more interesting ones. He’s the first Discard commander on this list so far, and tapping to Mind Rot is actually pretty solid. Cao Cao walked so Tinybones could run. He’s also one of the less expensive ones, owing to having been reprinted in From the Vault: Legends, but the price tag he commands is still comical for the card you’re getting. It’s fine.
Cao Ren, Wei Commander (5 decks, 105th most played)
Oh horsemanship. Literally just flying but for the historical fiction set where things aren’t allowed to fly. Cao Ren is literally just a draft common, man. I’m not paying $200 to put a draft common in my deck.
Sima Yi, Wei Field Marshal (5 decks, 104th most played)
Sigh. Wait, this might have been the biggest Human creature in Magic for a while, that it’s this random old strategist is kinda hilarious.
Xiahou Dun, the One-Eyed (77 decks, 53rd most played)
Wait, this guy is the most played so far? Xiahou Dun? I mean, I know he was in the MTGO cube for a bit, but really?
Ok alright fine. He’s probably the least bad of the P3K commanders (at least in black) because he can replace himself with a card or just swing in, his stats aren’t completely unreasonable. But still, this is silly, there are some genuinely bonkers cards that are seeing less play than Xiahou. What am I missing here? I just don’t know.
Xun Yu, Wei Advisor (2 decks, N/A)
I distinctly remember once looking at the total commanders on EDHREC with no decks. I don’t remember if I saw this guy. I do remember actually being able to see the bottom of the list, so what the hell man maybe I want to build Zuo Ci.
…someone has actually built Zuo Ci, now, huh. Anyway point is Xun Yu is both bad and boring so next.
Zhang He, Wei General (3 decks, N/A)
…he’s better than Xun Yu, at least? He’s still a hundred-ish dollar bad card, but you know. Technically speaking, you could do worse.
Zhang Liao, Hero of Hefei (1 deck, N/A)
While a lot of P3K cards are just reflavoured vanilla magic cards, in this case they decided to just take flying off Abyssal Specter and…not put Horsemanship back on it. Shoutout to the one guy apparently playing this deck, but I’ve got to ask why.
I don’t know if there even are any 0-deck commanders left at this point. I should look into that…
Ascendant Evincar (34 decks, 65th most played)
Finally free of P3K, we’re closing off today with yet another meh card that has been overshadowed by newer ones, great. Shrinking your opponents stuff down one is a super good effect in limited, not so much in Commander- two, of course, is nuts, Elesh Norn is a very good card, but -1/-1 just isn’t worth your time most of the time. And you can’t even really abuse it on your own stuff. I guess he’s aight with Heartless Summoning? I’m really grasping at straws here!
Okay, so, that’s the first 20. Sick. Now at this pace, I’ll be done after another….5 articles? Holy shit, I forgot how many bad magic cards WOTC has put out, didn’t I…
Next time (whenever I continue this series), we enter a substantially more interesting, if longer, zone- the Kamigawa Zone. Ta-ta for now.
0 notes
Text
5 Ways to Harness Time and Data in Your Content Process
November 7th, 2017
“The theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time,” wrote Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. “It appeared that each observer might have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.”
Do you ever feel, in your workplace, like different members of your team are operating from a different perception of time? You say it will take two weeks to get a project done; your colleague says three weeks. You’re both experienced content creators, relying on the same historical experiences in the same workplace. How can you determine who’s right? Or should you just split the difference and get going on the work, figuring a few days doesn’t really matter?
In recent years, content marketing has become increasingly data-driven, at least when it comes to analytics and results. The efficacy of our work is something we can and do measure and manage. But there’s a tendency to avoid content creation data—how much time and resources the work really takes—which can make it difficult to:
Meet deadlines
Accurately forecast future work
Tap into our team’s full potential
Justify new resources
Prove the ROI of our time
Push back against unrealistic requests
Clearly, there are significant downsides to ignoring this front-end data, but it’s something content marketers are almost universally guilty of.
“As content creators, we are very results-focused,” said Todd Patton, content marketing manager at Branch Metrics in Palo Alto. “I’d much rather go to my boss and report that we acquired 100 MQLs from a certain ebook than how long it took me to put that ebook together.”
I think this is partly because not every executive appreciates how much effort it takes to write, design, concept, and create high-quality, original material. We’ve all seen the suspicious looks and heard the disbelieving questions throughout our careers. “It takes how long to produce a blog post? Hmm . . . I can write a 1,000-word email in 10 minutes.”
But pretending to others (and to ourselves) that we churn out the work more quickly than we really can, while still meeting the necessary quality standards, will only hurt us in the long run. It’s time to stop hiding from the truth of our content processes. Here are five ways for any content marketer to be more transparent and successful with project planning for both recurring work and one-off initiatives.
1. Involve the Team Throughout the Content Process
In a recent speech about project planning and forecasting, PMO Manager Eric Lucas of Crowley Maritime Corporation said:
“There’s something I call Mighty Mouse syndrome: There are people who love hiding things and then giving a ‘big reveal’; they love the grandeur of saving the day at the last possible moment. But that’s not how humans are successful. You have to work as teams.”
He offered seven tips for how project managers can improve the accuracy of their forecasts:
Humans learn in iterations—getting better at forecasting is a repetitive process.
Involve all the right people.
Adjust the forecast often.
Ensure the forecast reflects reality, not desire.
Communicate the forecast often—and through multiple channels.
Conduct a “lessons learned” meeting at the end of projects to codify what everyone has learned.
Accept that forecasts are approximations of the future; forecasts have to be “good enough.”
2. Guesstimate Granularly
“When I worked in-house and had limited resources, it always surprised me how long a project would take,” says Megan Maybee, a content marketing strategist at ThomasARTS in Salt Lake City. “Something simple like creating a social contest had so many elements, from design and writing to compliance and legal review. There were a couple times I didn’t give myself enough time, and then it was a huge scramble.”
I, too, am often surprised at how long certain projects take, even those I complete over and over again. It’s because it’s human nature to gloss over the difficulty of the journey mentally and only remember the destination. This tendency to forget accounts for people going through childbirth more than one time (or so I’m told), running more than one marathon, agreeing to more than one dental procedure.
No content marketing project can be predicted or controlled with 100 percent accuracy from the outset, no matter how much experience we have cranking out similar projects. There are always variables, and we must always rely on guesstimation to one degree or another. The key is to get as granular as possible with your project and resource guesstimations—to leave nothing out.
Start by meticulously documenting your workflow, including each little step it takes to execute each content type. Account for every brainstorm meeting, every interview, every individual contribution, every outline, every draft, every proofreading session, and every round of review and approval. Get input from every person who has a role in the production process. Ask questions to understand every aspect.
What I’ve just described is called Bottom-Up Estimating in project management circles. You can also try Analogous Estimating or Parametric Modeling, as described here. But whatever approach you take, be aware of the temptation to underestimate your time in order to appear faster or more competent. It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than to do the opposite.
3. Expect Everyone to Track Their Time
Once you have your repeatable processes granularly documented, start tracking the hours and minutes spent on each project phase (brainstorming, researching, writing, illustration, design, etc.) to make your future guesstimations even more reliable. When you add up all the time you tracked and build in some buffer time, that’s how you’ll know whether the next project is likely to take two weeks or three—whether you or your colleague was right all along.
If you use a work-management software solution like Workfront, the “adding up” is done for you. Individuals can just navigate to the task and use built-in time-tracking tools—or add in their hours manually. Just don’t fall prey to the temptation to assume you’ll always be able to beat your fastest time on each step. Rely on a padded average instead. Not everyone will be thrilled about tracking their time on projects (see tip 5), but it’s an excellent way to reveal which steps are taking more time than you assumed or expected, where time is being wasted, and how you can work more efficiently.
“When I proactively track my time, it helps me focus more immediately and intensely,” says freelance content marketer Angie Lucas (no relation to Eric). “Any time I’m under the gun, the first thing I do when I sit down at my desk is to open my Paymo time-tracking widget and hit Start. I know every minute I spend from that time forward will be billed to a client, which keeps me laser focused on the task at hand.”
4. Rely on a Single Source of Truth
Even if you use nothing but a spreadsheet, it’s relatively easy to keep track of the quantitative data from your project—things like hours, dates, and hard costs. But your qualitative data—emails, shared documents, instant messaging activity, etc.—can be just as important, revealing how smoothly (or bumpily) the project progressed, what roadblocks you encountered, and more.
But who has time to track all of that? Am I seriously expecting you to file away every email into project-specific folders and copy-and-paste relevant IMs into a post-mortem document? Heck no.
There are work management solutions available that enable all of this communication to happen in the space surrounding the quantitative data. These allow you to visit one online location to not only see how long the last project took and how the schedule played out, but also view the finished assets and deliverables—and you’ll be reminded that design asked for two deadline extensions on the layout phase because they weren’t given enough time in the first place.
A single tool, or at least fewer tools, from which to draw data will give you more power to speak with confidence about what you’re working on, how long it will take, and whether you have the bandwidth for that next upcoming project.
5. Understand Polychronic versus Monochronic Time
Remember when I asked if it ever seems you and your team members are operating from different perceptions of time? The truth is, you probably are. Understanding this can open up windows of insight into how you (and others) approach your work.
We live in a monochronic culture, which sees time as “being divided into fixed elements that can be organized, quantified and scheduled.” Time is linear. Time can and should be organized into a daily routine. “Obviously,” you’re thinking. “Doesn’t everyone think that?”
Actually, no. Not only are there entire polychronic cultures (parts of Latin America, sub-Sahara Africa, and the Middle East), there are polychrons even within monochronic cultures who view time as “a never-ending river, flowing from the infinite past, through the present, into the infinite future.” That’s not just highfalutin nonsense. Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. They prefer task-switching and thrive in environments without a fixed schedule. (Incidentally, these preferences are also exhibited in a growing number of digital natives.) They’re often late because, to them, time is truly relative.
If you and your team members can understand your own natural perception of time, you can harness each individual’s strengths for a stronger, more balanced team. For example, you might not want to put one of your polychrons in charge of project scheduling and forecasting (and they’ll probably thank you for it). But you can and should expect them to track their time and meet deadlines just like their monochronic counterparts, recognizing that some employees will produce their most brilliant work with a little less structure.
Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. Click To Tweet
It Takes Time to Make Time
If there’s one thing content marketers are constantly running short on, it’s time. At any given moment, each person on your team might have dozens of projects in the pipeline—all in different stages of planning, ideation, and creation. With so many moving parts, it’s not easy to pause long enough to collect and analyze the up-front data about your content production process. But unless you do—and remember, much of these metrics are available via automated tools—you’ll always be left guessing how long things take, how much bandwidth your team has, and whether you have the resources you need to meet your goals, now and in the future.
This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.
http://www.successwize.com/5-ways-to-harness-time-and-data-in-your-content-process/
0 notes
Text
5 Ways to Harness Time and Data in Your Content Process
November 7th, 2017
“The theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time,” wrote Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. “It appeared that each observer might have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.”
Do you ever feel, in your workplace, like different members of your team are operating from a different perception of time? You say it will take two weeks to get a project done; your colleague says three weeks. You’re both experienced content creators, relying on the same historical experiences in the same workplace. How can you determine who’s right? Or should you just split the difference and get going on the work, figuring a few days doesn’t really matter?
In recent years, content marketing has become increasingly data-driven, at least when it comes to analytics and results. The efficacy of our work is something we can and do measure and manage. But there’s a tendency to avoid content creation data—how much time and resources the work really takes—which can make it difficult to:
Meet deadlines
Accurately forecast future work
Tap into our team’s full potential
Justify new resources
Prove the ROI of our time
Push back against unrealistic requests
Clearly, there are significant downsides to ignoring this front-end data, but it’s something content marketers are almost universally guilty of.
“As content creators, we are very results-focused,” said Todd Patton, content marketing manager at Branch Metrics in Palo Alto. “I’d much rather go to my boss and report that we acquired 100 MQLs from a certain ebook than how long it took me to put that ebook together.”
I think this is partly because not every executive appreciates how much effort it takes to write, design, concept, and create high-quality, original material. We’ve all seen the suspicious looks and heard the disbelieving questions throughout our careers. “It takes how long to produce a blog post? Hmm . . . I can write a 1,000-word email in 10 minutes.”
But pretending to others (and to ourselves) that we churn out the work more quickly than we really can, while still meeting the necessary quality standards, will only hurt us in the long run. It’s time to stop hiding from the truth of our content processes. Here are five ways for any content marketer to be more transparent and successful with project planning for both recurring work and one-off initiatives.
1. Involve the Team Throughout the Content Process
In a recent speech about project planning and forecasting, PMO Manager Eric Lucas of Crowley Maritime Corporation said:
“There’s something I call Mighty Mouse syndrome: There are people who love hiding things and then giving a ‘big reveal’; they love the grandeur of saving the day at the last possible moment. But that’s not how humans are successful. You have to work as teams.”
He offered seven tips for how project managers can improve the accuracy of their forecasts:
Humans learn in iterations—getting better at forecasting is a repetitive process.
Involve all the right people.
Adjust the forecast often.
Ensure the forecast reflects reality, not desire.
Communicate the forecast often—and through multiple channels.
Conduct a “lessons learned” meeting at the end of projects to codify what everyone has learned.
Accept that forecasts are approximations of the future; forecasts have to be “good enough.”
2. Guesstimate Granularly
“When I worked in-house and had limited resources, it always surprised me how long a project would take,” says Megan Maybee, a content marketing strategist at ThomasARTS in Salt Lake City. “Something simple like creating a social contest had so many elements, from design and writing to compliance and legal review. There were a couple times I didn’t give myself enough time, and then it was a huge scramble.”
I, too, am often surprised at how long certain projects take, even those I complete over and over again. It’s because it’s human nature to gloss over the difficulty of the journey mentally and only remember the destination. This tendency to forget accounts for people going through childbirth more than one time (or so I’m told), running more than one marathon, agreeing to more than one dental procedure.
No content marketing project can be predicted or controlled with 100 percent accuracy from the outset, no matter how much experience we have cranking out similar projects. There are always variables, and we must always rely on guesstimation to one degree or another. The key is to get as granular as possible with your project and resource guesstimations—to leave nothing out.
Start by meticulously documenting your workflow, including each little step it takes to execute each content type. Account for every brainstorm meeting, every interview, every individual contribution, every outline, every draft, every proofreading session, and every round of review and approval. Get input from every person who has a role in the production process. Ask questions to understand every aspect.
What I’ve just described is called Bottom-Up Estimating in project management circles. You can also try Analogous Estimating or Parametric Modeling, as described here. But whatever approach you take, be aware of the temptation to underestimate your time in order to appear faster or more competent. It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than to do the opposite.
3. Expect Everyone to Track Their Time
Once you have your repeatable processes granularly documented, start tracking the hours and minutes spent on each project phase (brainstorming, researching, writing, illustration, design, etc.) to make your future guesstimations even more reliable. When you add up all the time you tracked and build in some buffer time, that’s how you’ll know whether the next project is likely to take two weeks or three—whether you or your colleague was right all along.
If you use a work-management software solution like Workfront, the “adding up” is done for you. Individuals can just navigate to the task and use built-in time-tracking tools—or add in their hours manually. Just don’t fall prey to the temptation to assume you’ll always be able to beat your fastest time on each step. Rely on a padded average instead. Not everyone will be thrilled about tracking their time on projects (see tip 5), but it’s an excellent way to reveal which steps are taking more time than you assumed or expected, where time is being wasted, and how you can work more efficiently.
“When I proactively track my time, it helps me focus more immediately and intensely,” says freelance content marketer Angie Lucas (no relation to Eric). “Any time I’m under the gun, the first thing I do when I sit down at my desk is to open my Paymo time-tracking widget and hit Start. I know every minute I spend from that time forward will be billed to a client, which keeps me laser focused on the task at hand.”
4. Rely on a Single Source of Truth
Even if you use nothing but a spreadsheet, it’s relatively easy to keep track of the quantitative data from your project—things like hours, dates, and hard costs. But your qualitative data—emails, shared documents, instant messaging activity, etc.—can be just as important, revealing how smoothly (or bumpily) the project progressed, what roadblocks you encountered, and more.
But who has time to track all of that? Am I seriously expecting you to file away every email into project-specific folders and copy-and-paste relevant IMs into a post-mortem document? Heck no.
There are work management solutions available that enable all of this communication to happen in the space surrounding the quantitative data. These allow you to visit one online location to not only see how long the last project took and how the schedule played out, but also view the finished assets and deliverables—and you’ll be reminded that design asked for two deadline extensions on the layout phase because they weren’t given enough time in the first place.
A single tool, or at least fewer tools, from which to draw data will give you more power to speak with confidence about what you’re working on, how long it will take, and whether you have the bandwidth for that next upcoming project.
5. Understand Polychronic versus Monochronic Time
Remember when I asked if it ever seems you and your team members are operating from different perceptions of time? The truth is, you probably are. Understanding this can open up windows of insight into how you (and others) approach your work.
We live in a monochronic culture, which sees time as “being divided into fixed elements that can be organized, quantified and scheduled.” Time is linear. Time can and should be organized into a daily routine. “Obviously,” you’re thinking. “Doesn’t everyone think that?”
Actually, no. Not only are there entire polychronic cultures (parts of Latin America, sub-Sahara Africa, and the Middle East), there are polychrons even within monochronic cultures who view time as “a never-ending river, flowing from the infinite past, through the present, into the infinite future.” That’s not just highfalutin nonsense. Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. They prefer task-switching and thrive in environments without a fixed schedule. (Incidentally, these preferences are also exhibited in a growing number of digital natives.) They’re often late because, to them, time is truly relative.
If you and your team members can understand your own natural perception of time, you can harness each individual’s strengths for a stronger, more balanced team. For example, you might not want to put one of your polychrons in charge of project scheduling and forecasting (and they’ll probably thank you for it). But you can and should expect them to track their time and meet deadlines just like their monochronic counterparts, recognizing that some employees will produce their most brilliant work with a little less structure.
Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. Click To Tweet
It Takes Time to Make Time
If there’s one thing content marketers are constantly running short on, it’s time. At any given moment, each person on your team might have dozens of projects in the pipeline—all in different stages of planning, ideation, and creation. With so many moving parts, it’s not easy to pause long enough to collect and analyze the up-front data about your content production process. But unless you do—and remember, much of these metrics are available via automated tools—you’ll always be left guessing how long things take, how much bandwidth your team has, and whether you have the resources you need to meet your goals, now and in the future.
This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.
http://www.successwize.com/5-ways-to-harness-time-and-data-in-your-content-process/
0 notes
Text
5 Ways to Harness Time and Data in Your Content Process
“The theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time,” wrote Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. “It appeared that each observer might have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.”
Do you ever feel, in your workplace, like different members of your team are operating from a different perception of time? You say it will take two weeks to get a project done; your colleague says three weeks. You’re both experienced content creators, relying on the same historical experiences in the same workplace. How can you determine who’s right? Or should you just split the difference and get going on the work, figuring a few days doesn’t really matter?
In recent years, content marketing has become increasingly data-driven, at least when it comes to analytics and results. The efficacy of our work is something we can and do measure and manage. But there’s a tendency to avoid content creation data—how much time and resources the work really takes—which can make it difficult to:
Meet deadlines
Accurately forecast future work
Tap into our team’s full potential
Justify new resources
Prove the ROI of our time
Push back against unrealistic requests
Clearly, there are significant downsides to ignoring this front-end data, but it’s something content marketers are almost universally guilty of.
“As content creators, we are very results-focused,” said Todd Patton, content marketing manager at Branch Metrics in Palo Alto. “I’d much rather go to my boss and report that we acquired 100 MQLs from a certain ebook than how long it took me to put that ebook together.”
I think this is partly because not every executive appreciates how much effort it takes to write, design, concept, and create high-quality, original material. We’ve all seen the suspicious looks and heard the disbelieving questions throughout our careers. “It takes how long to produce a blog post? Hmm . . . I can write a 1,000-word email in 10 minutes.”
But pretending to others (and to ourselves) that we churn out the work more quickly than we really can, while still meeting the necessary quality standards, will only hurt us in the long run. It’s time to stop hiding from the truth of our content processes. Here are five ways for any content marketer to be more transparent and successful with project planning for both recurring work and one-off initiatives.
1. Involve the Team Throughout the Content Process
In a recent speech about project planning and forecasting, PMO Manager Eric Lucas of Crowley Maritime Corporation said:
“There’s something I call Mighty Mouse syndrome: There are people who love hiding things and then giving a ‘big reveal’; they love the grandeur of saving the day at the last possible moment. But that’s not how humans are successful. You have to work as teams.”
He offered seven tips for how project managers can improve the accuracy of their forecasts:
Humans learn in iterations—getting better at forecasting is a repetitive process.
Involve all the right people.
Adjust the forecast often.
Ensure the forecast reflects reality, not desire.
Communicate the forecast often—and through multiple channels.
Conduct a “lessons learned” meeting at the end of projects to codify what everyone has learned.
Accept that forecasts are approximations of the future; forecasts have to be “good enough.”
2. Guesstimate Granularly
“When I worked in-house and had limited resources, it always surprised me how long a project would take,” says Megan Maybee, a content marketing strategist at ThomasARTS in Salt Lake City. “Something simple like creating a social contest had so many elements, from design and writing to compliance and legal review. There were a couple times I didn’t give myself enough time, and then it was a huge scramble.”
I, too, am often surprised at how long certain projects take, even those I complete over and over again. It’s because it’s human nature to gloss over the difficulty of the journey mentally and only remember the destination. This tendency to forget accounts for people going through childbirth more than one time (or so I’m told), running more than one marathon, agreeing to more than one dental procedure.
No content marketing project can be predicted or controlled with 100 percent accuracy from the outset, no matter how much experience we have cranking out similar projects. There are always variables, and we must always rely on guesstimation to one degree or another. The key is to get as granular as possible with your project and resource guesstimations—to leave nothing out.
Start by meticulously documenting your workflow, including each little step it takes to execute each content type. Account for every brainstorm meeting, every interview, every individual contribution, every outline, every draft, every proofreading session, and every round of review and approval. Get input from every person who has a role in the production process. Ask questions to understand every aspect.
What I’ve just described is called Bottom-Up Estimating in project management circles. You can also try Analogous Estimating or Parametric Modeling, as described here. But whatever approach you take, be aware of the temptation to underestimate your time in order to appear faster or more competent. It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than to do the opposite.
3. Expect Everyone to Track Their Time
Once you have your repeatable processes granularly documented, start tracking the hours and minutes spent on each project phase (brainstorming, researching, writing, illustration, design, etc.) to make your future guesstimations even more reliable. When you add up all the time you tracked and build in some buffer time, that’s how you’ll know whether the next project is likely to take two weeks or three—whether you or your colleague was right all along.
If you use a work-management software solution like Workfront, the “adding up” is done for you. Individuals can just navigate to the task and use built-in time-tracking tools—or add in their hours manually. Just don’t fall prey to the temptation to assume you’ll always be able to beat your fastest time on each step. Rely on a padded average instead. Not everyone will be thrilled about tracking their time on projects (see tip 5), but it’s an excellent way to reveal which steps are taking more time than you assumed or expected, where time is being wasted, and how you can work more efficiently.
“When I proactively track my time, it helps me focus more immediately and intensely,” says freelance content marketer Angie Lucas (no relation to Eric). “Any time I’m under the gun, the first thing I do when I sit down at my desk is to open my Paymo time-tracking widget and hit Start. I know every minute I spend from that time forward will be billed to a client, which keeps me laser focused on the task at hand.”
4. Rely on a Single Source of Truth
Even if you use nothing but a spreadsheet, it’s relatively easy to keep track of the quantitative data from your project—things like hours, dates, and hard costs. But your qualitative data—emails, shared documents, instant messaging activity, etc.—can be just as important, revealing how smoothly (or bumpily) the project progressed, what roadblocks you encountered, and more.
But who has time to track all of that? Am I seriously expecting you to file away every email into project-specific folders and copy-and-paste relevant IMs into a post-mortem document? Heck no.
There are work management solutions available that enable all of this communication to happen in the space surrounding the quantitative data. These allow you to visit one online location to not only see how long the last project took and how the schedule played out, but also view the finished assets and deliverables—and you’ll be reminded that design asked for two deadline extensions on the layout phase because they weren’t given enough time in the first place.
A single tool, or at least fewer tools, from which to draw data will give you more power to speak with confidence about what you’re working on, how long it will take, and whether you have the bandwidth for that next upcoming project.
5. Understand Polychronic versus Monochronic Time
Remember when I asked if it ever seems you and your team members are operating from different perceptions of time? The truth is, you probably are. Understanding this can open up windows of insight into how you (and others) approach your work.
We live in a monochronic culture, which sees time as “being divided into fixed elements that can be organized, quantified and scheduled.” Time is linear. Time can and should be organized into a daily routine. “Obviously,” you’re thinking. “Doesn’t everyone think that?”
Actually, no. Not only are there entire polychronic cultures (parts of Latin America, sub-Sahara Africa, and the Middle East), there are polychrons even within monochronic cultures who view time as “a never-ending river, flowing from the infinite past, through the present, into the infinite future.” That’s not just highfalutin nonsense. Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. They prefer task-switching and thrive in environments without a fixed schedule. (Incidentally, these preferences are also exhibited in a growing number of digital natives.) They’re often late because, to them, time is truly relative.
If you and your team members can understand your own natural perception of time, you can harness each individual’s strengths for a stronger, more balanced team. For example, you might not want to put one of your polychrons in charge of project scheduling and forecasting (and they’ll probably thank you for it). But you can and should expect them to track their time and meet deadlines just like their monochronic counterparts, recognizing that some employees will produce their most brilliant work with a little less structure.
Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular.
Click To Tweet
It Takes Time to Make Time
If there’s one thing content marketers are constantly running short on, it’s time. At any given moment, each person on your team might have dozens of projects in the pipeline—all in different stages of planning, ideation, and creation. With so many moving parts, it’s not easy to pause long enough to collect and analyze the up-front data about your content production process. But unless you do—and remember, much of these metrics are available via automated tools—you’ll always be left guessing how long things take, how much bandwidth your team has, and whether you have the resources you need to meet your goals, now and in the future.
This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.
http://ift.tt/2AhhIFG
0 notes
Text
5 Ways to Harness Time and Data in Your Content Process
“The theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time,” wrote Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. “It appeared that each observer might have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.”
Do you ever feel, in your workplace, like different members of your team are operating from a different perception of time? You say it will take two weeks to get a project done; your colleague says three weeks. You’re both experienced content creators, relying on the same historical experiences in the same workplace. How can you determine who’s right? Or should you just split the difference and get going on the work, figuring a few days doesn’t really matter?
In recent years, content marketing has become increasingly data-driven, at least when it comes to analytics and results. The efficacy of our work is something we can and do measure and manage. But there’s a tendency to avoid content creation data—how much time and resources the work really takes—which can make it difficult to:
Meet deadlines
Accurately forecast future work
Tap into our team’s full potential
Justify new resources
Prove the ROI of our time
Push back against unrealistic requests
Clearly, there are significant downsides to ignoring this front-end data, but it’s something content marketers are almost universally guilty of.
“As content creators, we are very results-focused,” said Todd Patton, content marketing manager at Branch Metrics in Palo Alto. “I’d much rather go to my boss and report that we acquired 100 MQLs from a certain ebook than how long it took me to put that ebook together.”
I think this is partly because not every executive appreciates how much effort it takes to write, design, concept, and create high-quality, original material. We’ve all seen the suspicious looks and heard the disbelieving questions throughout our careers. “It takes how long to produce a blog post? Hmm . . . I can write a 1,000-word email in 10 minutes.”
But pretending to others (and to ourselves) that we churn out the work more quickly than we really can, while still meeting the necessary quality standards, will only hurt us in the long run. It’s time to stop hiding from the truth of our content processes. Here are five ways for any content marketer to be more transparent and successful with project planning for both recurring work and one-off initiatives.
1. Involve the Team Throughout the Content Process
In a recent speech about project planning and forecasting, PMO Manager Eric Lucas of Crowley Maritime Corporation said:
“There’s something I call Mighty Mouse syndrome: There are people who love hiding things and then giving a ‘big reveal’; they love the grandeur of saving the day at the last possible moment. But that’s not how humans are successful. You have to work as teams.”
He offered seven tips for how project managers can improve the accuracy of their forecasts:
Humans learn in iterations—getting better at forecasting is a repetitive process.
Involve all the right people.
Adjust the forecast often.
Ensure the forecast reflects reality, not desire.
Communicate the forecast often—and through multiple channels.
Conduct a “lessons learned” meeting at the end of projects to codify what everyone has learned.
Accept that forecasts are approximations of the future; forecasts have to be “good enough.”
2. Guesstimate Granularly
“When I worked in-house and had limited resources, it always surprised me how long a project would take,” says Megan Maybee, a content marketing strategist at ThomasARTS in Salt Lake City. “Something simple like creating a social contest had so many elements, from design and writing to compliance and legal review. There were a couple times I didn’t give myself enough time, and then it was a huge scramble.”
I, too, am often surprised at how long certain projects take, even those I complete over and over again. It’s because it’s human nature to gloss over the difficulty of the journey mentally and only remember the destination. This tendency to forget accounts for people going through childbirth more than one time (or so I’m told), running more than one marathon, agreeing to more than one dental procedure.
No content marketing project can be predicted or controlled with 100 percent accuracy from the outset, no matter how much experience we have cranking out similar projects. There are always variables, and we must always rely on guesstimation to one degree or another. The key is to get as granular as possible with your project and resource guesstimations—to leave nothing out.
Start by meticulously documenting your workflow, including each little step it takes to execute each content type. Account for every brainstorm meeting, every interview, every individual contribution, every outline, every draft, every proofreading session, and every round of review and approval. Get input from every person who has a role in the production process. Ask questions to understand every aspect.
What I’ve just described is called Bottom-Up Estimating in project management circles. You can also try Analogous Estimating or Parametric Modeling, as described here. But whatever approach you take, be aware of the temptation to underestimate your time in order to appear faster or more competent. It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than to do the opposite.
3. Expect Everyone to Track Their Time
Once you have your repeatable processes granularly documented, start tracking the hours and minutes spent on each project phase (brainstorming, researching, writing, illustration, design, etc.) to make your future guesstimations even more reliable. When you add up all the time you tracked and build in some buffer time, that’s how you’ll know whether the next project is likely to take two weeks or three—whether you or your colleague was right all along.
If you use a work-management software solution like Workfront, the “adding up” is done for you. Individuals can just navigate to the task and use built-in time-tracking tools—or add in their hours manually. Just don’t fall prey to the temptation to assume you’ll always be able to beat your fastest time on each step. Rely on a padded average instead. Not everyone will be thrilled about tracking their time on projects (see tip 5), but it’s an excellent way to reveal which steps are taking more time than you assumed or expected, where time is being wasted, and how you can work more efficiently.
“When I proactively track my time, it helps me focus more immediately and intensely,” says freelance content marketer Angie Lucas (no relation to Eric). “Any time I’m under the gun, the first thing I do when I sit down at my desk is to open my Paymo time-tracking widget and hit Start. I know every minute I spend from that time forward will be billed to a client, which keeps me laser focused on the task at hand.”
4. Rely on a Single Source of Truth
Even if you use nothing but a spreadsheet, it’s relatively easy to keep track of the quantitative data from your project—things like hours, dates, and hard costs. But your qualitative data—emails, shared documents, instant messaging activity, etc.—can be just as important, revealing how smoothly (or bumpily) the project progressed, what roadblocks you encountered, and more.
But who has time to track all of that? Am I seriously expecting you to file away every email into project-specific folders and copy-and-paste relevant IMs into a post-mortem document? Heck no.
There are work management solutions available that enable all of this communication to happen in the space surrounding the quantitative data. These allow you to visit one online location to not only see how long the last project took and how the schedule played out, but also view the finished assets and deliverables—and you’ll be reminded that design asked for two deadline extensions on the layout phase because they weren’t given enough time in the first place.
A single tool, or at least fewer tools, from which to draw data will give you more power to speak with confidence about what you’re working on, how long it will take, and whether you have the bandwidth for that next upcoming project.
5. Understand Polychronic versus Monochronic Time
Remember when I asked if it ever seems you and your team members are operating from different perceptions of time? The truth is, you probably are. Understanding this can open up windows of insight into how you (and others) approach your work.
We live in a monochronic culture, which sees time as “being divided into fixed elements that can be organized, quantified and scheduled.” Time is linear. Time can and should be organized into a daily routine. “Obviously,” you’re thinking. “Doesn’t everyone think that?”
Actually, no. Not only are there entire polychronic cultures (parts of Latin America, sub-Sahara Africa, and the Middle East), there are polychrons even within monochronic cultures who view time as “a never-ending river, flowing from the infinite past, through the present, into the infinite future.” That’s not just highfalutin nonsense. Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. They prefer task-switching and thrive in environments without a fixed schedule. (Incidentally, these preferences are also exhibited in a growing number of digital natives.) They’re often late because, to them, time is truly relative.
If you and your team members can understand your own natural perception of time, you can harness each individual’s strengths for a stronger, more balanced team. For example, you might not want to put one of your polychrons in charge of project scheduling and forecasting (and they’ll probably thank you for it). But you can and should expect them to track their time and meet deadlines just like their monochronic counterparts, recognizing that some employees will produce their most brilliant work with a little less structure.
Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular.
Click To Tweet
It Takes Time to Make Time
If there’s one thing content marketers are constantly running short on, it’s time. At any given moment, each person on your team might have dozens of projects in the pipeline—all in different stages of planning, ideation, and creation. With so many moving parts, it’s not easy to pause long enough to collect and analyze the up-front data about your content production process. But unless you do—and remember, much of these metrics are available via automated tools—you’ll always be left guessing how long things take, how much bandwidth your team has, and whether you have the resources you need to meet your goals, now and in the future.
This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.
http://ift.tt/2AhhIFG
0 notes
Text
5 Ways to Harness Time and Data in Your Content Process
“The theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time,” wrote Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. “It appeared that each observer might have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.”
Do you ever feel, in your workplace, like different members of your team are operating from a different perception of time? You say it will take two weeks to get a project done; your colleague says three weeks. You’re both experienced content creators, relying on the same historical experiences in the same workplace. How can you determine who’s right? Or should you just split the difference and get going on the work, figuring a few days doesn’t really matter?
In recent years, content marketing has become increasingly data-driven, at least when it comes to analytics and results. The efficacy of our work is something we can and do measure and manage. But there’s a tendency to avoid content creation data—how much time and resources the work really takes—which can make it difficult to:
Meet deadlines
Accurately forecast future work
Tap into our team’s full potential
Justify new resources
Prove the ROI of our time
Push back against unrealistic requests
Clearly, there are significant downsides to ignoring this front-end data, but it’s something content marketers are almost universally guilty of.
“As content creators, we are very results-focused,” said Todd Patton, content marketing manager at Branch Metrics in Palo Alto. “I’d much rather go to my boss and report that we acquired 100 MQLs from a certain ebook than how long it took me to put that ebook together.”
I think this is partly because not every executive appreciates how much effort it takes to write, design, concept, and create high-quality, original material. We’ve all seen the suspicious looks and heard the disbelieving questions throughout our careers. “It takes how long to produce a blog post? Hmm . . . I can write a 1,000-word email in 10 minutes.”
But pretending to others (and to ourselves) that we churn out the work more quickly than we really can, while still meeting the necessary quality standards, will only hurt us in the long run. It’s time to stop hiding from the truth of our content processes. Here are five ways for any content marketer to be more transparent and successful with project planning for both recurring work and one-off initiatives.
1. Involve the Team Throughout the Content Process
In a recent speech about project planning and forecasting, PMO Manager Eric Lucas of Crowley Maritime Corporation said:
“There’s something I call Mighty Mouse syndrome: There are people who love hiding things and then giving a ‘big reveal’; they love the grandeur of saving the day at the last possible moment. But that’s not how humans are successful. You have to work as teams.”
He offered seven tips for how project managers can improve the accuracy of their forecasts:
Humans learn in iterations—getting better at forecasting is a repetitive process.
Involve all the right people.
Adjust the forecast often.
Ensure the forecast reflects reality, not desire.
Communicate the forecast often—and through multiple channels.
Conduct a “lessons learned” meeting at the end of projects to codify what everyone has learned.
Accept that forecasts are approximations of the future; forecasts have to be “good enough.”
2. Guesstimate Granularly
“When I worked in-house and had limited resources, it always surprised me how long a project would take,” says Megan Maybee, a content marketing strategist at ThomasARTS in Salt Lake City. “Something simple like creating a social contest had so many elements, from design and writing to compliance and legal review. There were a couple times I didn’t give myself enough time, and then it was a huge scramble.”
I, too, am often surprised at how long certain projects take, even those I complete over and over again. It’s because it’s human nature to gloss over the difficulty of the journey mentally and only remember the destination. This tendency to forget accounts for people going through childbirth more than one time (or so I’m told), running more than one marathon, agreeing to more than one dental procedure.
No content marketing project can be predicted or controlled with 100 percent accuracy from the outset, no matter how much experience we have cranking out similar projects. There are always variables, and we must always rely on guesstimation to one degree or another. The key is to get as granular as possible with your project and resource guesstimations—to leave nothing out.
Start by meticulously documenting your workflow, including each little step it takes to execute each content type. Account for every brainstorm meeting, every interview, every individual contribution, every outline, every draft, every proofreading session, and every round of review and approval. Get input from every person who has a role in the production process. Ask questions to understand every aspect.
What I’ve just described is called Bottom-Up Estimating in project management circles. You can also try Analogous Estimating or Parametric Modeling, as described here. But whatever approach you take, be aware of the temptation to underestimate your time in order to appear faster or more competent. It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than to do the opposite.
3. Expect Everyone to Track Their Time
Once you have your repeatable processes granularly documented, start tracking the hours and minutes spent on each project phase (brainstorming, researching, writing, illustration, design, etc.) to make your future guesstimations even more reliable. When you add up all the time you tracked and build in some buffer time, that’s how you’ll know whether the next project is likely to take two weeks or three—whether you or your colleague was right all along.
If you use a work-management software solution like Workfront, the “adding up” is done for you. Individuals can just navigate to the task and use built-in time-tracking tools—or add in their hours manually. Just don’t fall prey to the temptation to assume you’ll always be able to beat your fastest time on each step. Rely on a padded average instead. Not everyone will be thrilled about tracking their time on projects (see tip 5), but it’s an excellent way to reveal which steps are taking more time than you assumed or expected, where time is being wasted, and how you can work more efficiently.
“When I proactively track my time, it helps me focus more immediately and intensely,” says freelance content marketer Angie Lucas (no relation to Eric). “Any time I’m under the gun, the first thing I do when I sit down at my desk is to open my Paymo time-tracking widget and hit Start. I know every minute I spend from that time forward will be billed to a client, which keeps me laser focused on the task at hand.”
4. Rely on a Single Source of Truth
Even if you use nothing but a spreadsheet, it’s relatively easy to keep track of the quantitative data from your project—things like hours, dates, and hard costs. But your qualitative data—emails, shared documents, instant messaging activity, etc.—can be just as important, revealing how smoothly (or bumpily) the project progressed, what roadblocks you encountered, and more.
But who has time to track all of that? Am I seriously expecting you to file away every email into project-specific folders and copy-and-paste relevant IMs into a post-mortem document? Heck no.
There are work management solutions available that enable all of this communication to happen in the space surrounding the quantitative data. These allow you to visit one online location to not only see how long the last project took and how the schedule played out, but also view the finished assets and deliverables—and you’ll be reminded that design asked for two deadline extensions on the layout phase because they weren’t given enough time in the first place.
A single tool, or at least fewer tools, from which to draw data will give you more power to speak with confidence about what you’re working on, how long it will take, and whether you have the bandwidth for that next upcoming project.
5. Understand Polychronic versus Monochronic Time
Remember when I asked if it ever seems you and your team members are operating from different perceptions of time? The truth is, you probably are. Understanding this can open up windows of insight into how you (and others) approach your work.
We live in a monochronic culture, which sees time as “being divided into fixed elements that can be organized, quantified and scheduled.” Time is linear. Time can and should be organized into a daily routine. “Obviously,” you’re thinking. “Doesn’t everyone think that?”
Actually, no. Not only are there entire polychronic cultures (parts of Latin America, sub-Sahara Africa, and the Middle East), there are polychrons even within monochronic cultures who view time as “a never-ending river, flowing from the infinite past, through the present, into the infinite future.” That’s not just highfalutin nonsense. Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. They prefer task-switching and thrive in environments without a fixed schedule. (Incidentally, these preferences are also exhibited in a growing number of digital natives.) They’re often late because, to them, time is truly relative.
If you and your team members can understand your own natural perception of time, you can harness each individual’s strengths for a stronger, more balanced team. For example, you might not want to put one of your polychrons in charge of project scheduling and forecasting (and they’ll probably thank you for it). But you can and should expect them to track their time and meet deadlines just like their monochronic counterparts, recognizing that some employees will produce their most brilliant work with a little less structure.
Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular.
Click To Tweet
It Takes Time to Make Time
If there’s one thing content marketers are constantly running short on, it’s time. At any given moment, each person on your team might have dozens of projects in the pipeline—all in different stages of planning, ideation, and creation. With so many moving parts, it’s not easy to pause long enough to collect and analyze the up-front data about your content production process. But unless you do—and remember, much of these metrics are available via automated tools—you’ll always be left guessing how long things take, how much bandwidth your team has, and whether you have the resources you need to meet your goals, now and in the future.
This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.
http://ift.tt/2AhhIFG
0 notes
Text
5 Ways to Harness Time and Data in Your Content Process
“The theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time,” wrote Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. “It appeared that each observer might have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.”
Do you ever feel, in your workplace, like different members of your team are operating from a different perception of time? You say it will take two weeks to get a project done; your colleague says three weeks. You’re both experienced content creators, relying on the same historical experiences in the same workplace. How can you determine who’s right? Or should you just split the difference and get going on the work, figuring a few days doesn’t really matter?
In recent years, content marketing has become increasingly data-driven, at least when it comes to analytics and results. The efficacy of our work is something we can and do measure and manage. But there’s a tendency to avoid content creation data—how much time and resources the work really takes—which can make it difficult to:
Meet deadlines
Accurately forecast future work
Tap into our team’s full potential
Justify new resources
Prove the ROI of our time
Push back against unrealistic requests
Clearly, there are significant downsides to ignoring this front-end data, but it’s something content marketers are almost universally guilty of.
“As content creators, we are very results-focused,” said Todd Patton, content marketing manager at Branch Metrics in Palo Alto. “I’d much rather go to my boss and report that we acquired 100 MQLs from a certain ebook than how long it took me to put that ebook together.”
I think this is partly because not every executive appreciates how much effort it takes to write, design, concept, and create high-quality, original material. We’ve all seen the suspicious looks and heard the disbelieving questions throughout our careers. “It takes how long to produce a blog post? Hmm . . . I can write a 1,000-word email in 10 minutes.”
But pretending to others (and to ourselves) that we churn out the work more quickly than we really can, while still meeting the necessary quality standards, will only hurt us in the long run. It’s time to stop hiding from the truth of our content processes. Here are five ways for any content marketer to be more transparent and successful with project planning for both recurring work and one-off initiatives.
1. Involve the Team Throughout the Content Process
In a recent speech about project planning and forecasting, PMO Manager Eric Lucas of Crowley Maritime Corporation said:
“There’s something I call Mighty Mouse syndrome: There are people who love hiding things and then giving a ‘big reveal’; they love the grandeur of saving the day at the last possible moment. But that’s not how humans are successful. You have to work as teams.”
He offered seven tips for how project managers can improve the accuracy of their forecasts:
Humans learn in iterations—getting better at forecasting is a repetitive process.
Involve all the right people.
Adjust the forecast often.
Ensure the forecast reflects reality, not desire.
Communicate the forecast often—and through multiple channels.
Conduct a “lessons learned” meeting at the end of projects to codify what everyone has learned.
Accept that forecasts are approximations of the future; forecasts have to be “good enough.”
2. Guesstimate Granularly
“When I worked in-house and had limited resources, it always surprised me how long a project would take,” says Megan Maybee, a content marketing strategist at ThomasARTS in Salt Lake City. “Something simple like creating a social contest had so many elements, from design and writing to compliance and legal review. There were a couple times I didn’t give myself enough time, and then it was a huge scramble.”
I, too, am often surprised at how long certain projects take, even those I complete over and over again. It’s because it’s human nature to gloss over the difficulty of the journey mentally and only remember the destination. This tendency to forget accounts for people going through childbirth more than one time (or so I’m told), running more than one marathon, agreeing to more than one dental procedure.
No content marketing project can be predicted or controlled with 100 percent accuracy from the outset, no matter how much experience we have cranking out similar projects. There are always variables, and we must always rely on guesstimation to one degree or another. The key is to get as granular as possible with your project and resource guesstimations—to leave nothing out.
Start by meticulously documenting your workflow, including each little step it takes to execute each content type. Account for every brainstorm meeting, every interview, every individual contribution, every outline, every draft, every proofreading session, and every round of review and approval. Get input from every person who has a role in the production process. Ask questions to understand every aspect.
What I’ve just described is called Bottom-Up Estimating in project management circles. You can also try Analogous Estimating or Parametric Modeling, as described here. But whatever approach you take, be aware of the temptation to underestimate your time in order to appear faster or more competent. It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than to do the opposite.
3. Expect Everyone to Track Their Time
Once you have your repeatable processes granularly documented, start tracking the hours and minutes spent on each project phase (brainstorming, researching, writing, illustration, design, etc.) to make your future guesstimations even more reliable. When you add up all the time you tracked and build in some buffer time, that’s how you’ll know whether the next project is likely to take two weeks or three—whether you or your colleague was right all along.
If you use a work-management software solution like Workfront, the “adding up” is done for you. Individuals can just navigate to the task and use built-in time-tracking tools—or add in their hours manually. Just don’t fall prey to the temptation to assume you’ll always be able to beat your fastest time on each step. Rely on a padded average instead. Not everyone will be thrilled about tracking their time on projects (see tip 5), but it’s an excellent way to reveal which steps are taking more time than you assumed or expected, where time is being wasted, and how you can work more efficiently.
“When I proactively track my time, it helps me focus more immediately and intensely,” says freelance content marketer Angie Lucas (no relation to Eric). “Any time I’m under the gun, the first thing I do when I sit down at my desk is to open my Paymo time-tracking widget and hit Start. I know every minute I spend from that time forward will be billed to a client, which keeps me laser focused on the task at hand.”
4. Rely on a Single Source of Truth
Even if you use nothing but a spreadsheet, it’s relatively easy to keep track of the quantitative data from your project—things like hours, dates, and hard costs. But your qualitative data—emails, shared documents, instant messaging activity, etc.—can be just as important, revealing how smoothly (or bumpily) the project progressed, what roadblocks you encountered, and more.
But who has time to track all of that? Am I seriously expecting you to file away every email into project-specific folders and copy-and-paste relevant IMs into a post-mortem document? Heck no.
There are work management solutions available that enable all of this communication to happen in the space surrounding the quantitative data. These allow you to visit one online location to not only see how long the last project took and how the schedule played out, but also view the finished assets and deliverables—and you’ll be reminded that design asked for two deadline extensions on the layout phase because they weren’t given enough time in the first place.
A single tool, or at least fewer tools, from which to draw data will give you more power to speak with confidence about what you’re working on, how long it will take, and whether you have the bandwidth for that next upcoming project.
5. Understand Polychronic versus Monochronic Time
Remember when I asked if it ever seems you and your team members are operating from different perceptions of time? The truth is, you probably are. Understanding this can open up windows of insight into how you (and others) approach your work.
We live in a monochronic culture, which sees time as “being divided into fixed elements that can be organized, quantified and scheduled.” Time is linear. Time can and should be organized into a daily routine. “Obviously,” you’re thinking. “Doesn’t everyone think that?”
Actually, no. Not only are there entire polychronic cultures (parts of Latin America, sub-Sahara Africa, and the Middle East), there are polychrons even within monochronic cultures who view time as “a never-ending river, flowing from the infinite past, through the present, into the infinite future.” That’s not just highfalutin nonsense. Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. They prefer task-switching and thrive in environments without a fixed schedule. (Incidentally, these preferences are also exhibited in a growing number of digital natives.) They’re often late because, to them, time is truly relative.
If you and your team members can understand your own natural perception of time, you can harness each individual’s strengths for a stronger, more balanced team. For example, you might not want to put one of your polychrons in charge of project scheduling and forecasting (and they’ll probably thank you for it). But you can and should expect them to track their time and meet deadlines just like their monochronic counterparts, recognizing that some employees will produce their most brilliant work with a little less structure.
Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular.
Click To Tweet
It Takes Time to Make Time
If there’s one thing content marketers are constantly running short on, it’s time. At any given moment, each person on your team might have dozens of projects in the pipeline—all in different stages of planning, ideation, and creation. With so many moving parts, it’s not easy to pause long enough to collect and analyze the up-front data about your content production process. But unless you do—and remember, much of these metrics are available via automated tools—you’ll always be left guessing how long things take, how much bandwidth your team has, and whether you have the resources you need to meet your goals, now and in the future.
This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.
http://ift.tt/2AhhIFG
0 notes
Text
5 Ways to Harness Time and Data in Your Content Process
“The theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time,” wrote Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. “It appeared that each observer might have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.”
Do you ever feel, in your workplace, like different members of your team are operating from a different perception of time? You say it will take two weeks to get a project done; your colleague says three weeks. You’re both experienced content creators, relying on the same historical experiences in the same workplace. How can you determine who’s right? Or should you just split the difference and get going on the work, figuring a few days doesn’t really matter?
In recent years, content marketing has become increasingly data-driven, at least when it comes to analytics and results. The efficacy of our work is something we can and do measure and manage. But there’s a tendency to avoid content creation data—how much time and resources the work really takes—which can make it difficult to:
Meet deadlines
Accurately forecast future work
Tap into our team’s full potential
Justify new resources
Prove the ROI of our time
Push back against unrealistic requests
Clearly, there are significant downsides to ignoring this front-end data, but it’s something content marketers are almost universally guilty of.
“As content creators, we are very results-focused,” said Todd Patton, content marketing manager at Branch Metrics in Palo Alto. “I’d much rather go to my boss and report that we acquired 100 MQLs from a certain ebook than how long it took me to put that ebook together.”
I think this is partly because not every executive appreciates how much effort it takes to write, design, concept, and create high-quality, original material. We’ve all seen the suspicious looks and heard the disbelieving questions throughout our careers. “It takes how long to produce a blog post? Hmm . . . I can write a 1,000-word email in 10 minutes.”
But pretending to others (and to ourselves) that we churn out the work more quickly than we really can, while still meeting the necessary quality standards, will only hurt us in the long run. It’s time to stop hiding from the truth of our content processes. Here are five ways for any content marketer to be more transparent and successful with project planning for both recurring work and one-off initiatives.
1. Involve the Team Throughout the Content Process
In a recent speech about project planning and forecasting, PMO Manager Eric Lucas of Crowley Maritime Corporation said:
“There’s something I call Mighty Mouse syndrome: There are people who love hiding things and then giving a ‘big reveal’; they love the grandeur of saving the day at the last possible moment. But that’s not how humans are successful. You have to work as teams.”
He offered seven tips for how project managers can improve the accuracy of their forecasts:
Humans learn in iterations—getting better at forecasting is a repetitive process.
Involve all the right people.
Adjust the forecast often.
Ensure the forecast reflects reality, not desire.
Communicate the forecast often—and through multiple channels.
Conduct a “lessons learned” meeting at the end of projects to codify what everyone has learned.
Accept that forecasts are approximations of the future; forecasts have to be “good enough.”
2. Guesstimate Granularly
“When I worked in-house and had limited resources, it always surprised me how long a project would take,” says Megan Maybee, a content marketing strategist at ThomasARTS in Salt Lake City. “Something simple like creating a social contest had so many elements, from design and writing to compliance and legal review. There were a couple times I didn’t give myself enough time, and then it was a huge scramble.”
I, too, am often surprised at how long certain projects take, even those I complete over and over again. It’s because it’s human nature to gloss over the difficulty of the journey mentally and only remember the destination. This tendency to forget accounts for people going through childbirth more than one time (or so I’m told), running more than one marathon, agreeing to more than one dental procedure.
No content marketing project can be predicted or controlled with 100 percent accuracy from the outset, no matter how much experience we have cranking out similar projects. There are always variables, and we must always rely on guesstimation to one degree or another. The key is to get as granular as possible with your project and resource guesstimations—to leave nothing out.
Start by meticulously documenting your workflow, including each little step it takes to execute each content type. Account for every brainstorm meeting, every interview, every individual contribution, every outline, every draft, every proofreading session, and every round of review and approval. Get input from every person who has a role in the production process. Ask questions to understand every aspect.
What I’ve just described is called Bottom-Up Estimating in project management circles. You can also try Analogous Estimating or Parametric Modeling, as described here. But whatever approach you take, be aware of the temptation to underestimate your time in order to appear faster or more competent. It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than to do the opposite.
3. Expect Everyone to Track Their Time
Once you have your repeatable processes granularly documented, start tracking the hours and minutes spent on each project phase (brainstorming, researching, writing, illustration, design, etc.) to make your future guesstimations even more reliable. When you add up all the time you tracked and build in some buffer time, that’s how you’ll know whether the next project is likely to take two weeks or three—whether you or your colleague was right all along.
If you use a work-management software solution like Workfront, the “adding up” is done for you. Individuals can just navigate to the task and use built-in time-tracking tools—or add in their hours manually. Just don’t fall prey to the temptation to assume you’ll always be able to beat your fastest time on each step. Rely on a padded average instead. Not everyone will be thrilled about tracking their time on projects (see tip 5), but it’s an excellent way to reveal which steps are taking more time than you assumed or expected, where time is being wasted, and how you can work more efficiently.
“When I proactively track my time, it helps me focus more immediately and intensely,” says freelance content marketer Angie Lucas (no relation to Eric). “Any time I’m under the gun, the first thing I do when I sit down at my desk is to open my Paymo time-tracking widget and hit Start. I know every minute I spend from that time forward will be billed to a client, which keeps me laser focused on the task at hand.”
4. Rely on a Single Source of Truth
Even if you use nothing but a spreadsheet, it’s relatively easy to keep track of the quantitative data from your project—things like hours, dates, and hard costs. But your qualitative data—emails, shared documents, instant messaging activity, etc.—can be just as important, revealing how smoothly (or bumpily) the project progressed, what roadblocks you encountered, and more.
But who has time to track all of that? Am I seriously expecting you to file away every email into project-specific folders and copy-and-paste relevant IMs into a post-mortem document? Heck no.
There are work management solutions available that enable all of this communication to happen in the space surrounding the quantitative data. These allow you to visit one online location to not only see how long the last project took and how the schedule played out, but also view the finished assets and deliverables—and you’ll be reminded that design asked for two deadline extensions on the layout phase because they weren’t given enough time in the first place.
A single tool, or at least fewer tools, from which to draw data will give you more power to speak with confidence about what you’re working on, how long it will take, and whether you have the bandwidth for that next upcoming project.
5. Understand Polychronic versus Monochronic Time
Remember when I asked if it ever seems you and your team members are operating from different perceptions of time? The truth is, you probably are. Understanding this can open up windows of insight into how you (and others) approach your work.
We live in a monochronic culture, which sees time as “being divided into fixed elements that can be organized, quantified and scheduled.” Time is linear. Time can and should be organized into a daily routine. “Obviously,” you’re thinking. “Doesn’t everyone think that?”
Actually, no. Not only are there entire polychronic cultures (parts of Latin America, sub-Sahara Africa, and the Middle East), there are polychrons even within monochronic cultures who view time as “a never-ending river, flowing from the infinite past, through the present, into the infinite future.” That’s not just highfalutin nonsense. Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. They prefer task-switching and thrive in environments without a fixed schedule. (Incidentally, these preferences are also exhibited in a growing number of digital natives.) They’re often late because, to them, time is truly relative.
If you and your team members can understand your own natural perception of time, you can harness each individual’s strengths for a stronger, more balanced team. For example, you might not want to put one of your polychrons in charge of project scheduling and forecasting (and they’ll probably thank you for it). But you can and should expect them to track their time and meet deadlines just like their monochronic counterparts, recognizing that some employees will produce their most brilliant work with a little less structure.
Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular.
Click To Tweet
It Takes Time to Make Time
If there’s one thing content marketers are constantly running short on, it’s time. At any given moment, each person on your team might have dozens of projects in the pipeline—all in different stages of planning, ideation, and creation. With so many moving parts, it’s not easy to pause long enough to collect and analyze the up-front data about your content production process. But unless you do—and remember, much of these metrics are available via automated tools—you’ll always be left guessing how long things take, how much bandwidth your team has, and whether you have the resources you need to meet your goals, now and in the future.
This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.
http://ift.tt/2AhhIFG
0 notes
Text
5 Ways to Harness Time and Data in Your Content Process
“The theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time,” wrote Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. “It appeared that each observer might have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.”
Do you ever feel, in your workplace, like different members of your team are operating from a different perception of time? You say it will take two weeks to get a project done; your colleague says three weeks. You’re both experienced content creators, relying on the same historical experiences in the same workplace. How can you determine who’s right? Or should you just split the difference and get going on the work, figuring a few days doesn’t really matter?
In recent years, content marketing has become increasingly data-driven, at least when it comes to analytics and results. The efficacy of our work is something we can and do measure and manage. But there’s a tendency to avoid content creation data—how much time and resources the work really takes—which can make it difficult to:
Meet deadlines
Accurately forecast future work
Tap into our team’s full potential
Justify new resources
Prove the ROI of our time
Push back against unrealistic requests
Clearly, there are significant downsides to ignoring this front-end data, but it’s something content marketers are almost universally guilty of.
“As content creators, we are very results-focused,” said Todd Patton, content marketing manager at Branch Metrics in Palo Alto. “I’d much rather go to my boss and report that we acquired 100 MQLs from a certain ebook than how long it took me to put that ebook together.”
I think this is partly because not every executive appreciates how much effort it takes to write, design, concept, and create high-quality, original material. We’ve all seen the suspicious looks and heard the disbelieving questions throughout our careers. “It takes how long to produce a blog post? Hmm . . . I can write a 1,000-word email in 10 minutes.”
But pretending to others (and to ourselves) that we churn out the work more quickly than we really can, while still meeting the necessary quality standards, will only hurt us in the long run. It’s time to stop hiding from the truth of our content processes. Here are five ways for any content marketer to be more transparent and successful with project planning for both recurring work and one-off initiatives.
1. Involve the Team Throughout the Content Process
In a recent speech about project planning and forecasting, PMO Manager Eric Lucas of Crowley Maritime Corporation said:
“There’s something I call Mighty Mouse syndrome: There are people who love hiding things and then giving a ‘big reveal’; they love the grandeur of saving the day at the last possible moment. But that’s not how humans are successful. You have to work as teams.”
He offered seven tips for how project managers can improve the accuracy of their forecasts:
Humans learn in iterations—getting better at forecasting is a repetitive process.
Involve all the right people.
Adjust the forecast often.
Ensure the forecast reflects reality, not desire.
Communicate the forecast often—and through multiple channels.
Conduct a “lessons learned” meeting at the end of projects to codify what everyone has learned.
Accept that forecasts are approximations of the future; forecasts have to be “good enough.”
2. Guesstimate Granularly
“When I worked in-house and had limited resources, it always surprised me how long a project would take,” says Megan Maybee, a content marketing strategist at ThomasARTS in Salt Lake City. “Something simple like creating a social contest had so many elements, from design and writing to compliance and legal review. There were a couple times I didn’t give myself enough time, and then it was a huge scramble.”
I, too, am often surprised at how long certain projects take, even those I complete over and over again. It’s because it’s human nature to gloss over the difficulty of the journey mentally and only remember the destination. This tendency to forget accounts for people going through childbirth more than one time (or so I’m told), running more than one marathon, agreeing to more than one dental procedure.
No content marketing project can be predicted or controlled with 100 percent accuracy from the outset, no matter how much experience we have cranking out similar projects. There are always variables, and we must always rely on guesstimation to one degree or another. The key is to get as granular as possible with your project and resource guesstimations—to leave nothing out.
Start by meticulously documenting your workflow, including each little step it takes to execute each content type. Account for every brainstorm meeting, every interview, every individual contribution, every outline, every draft, every proofreading session, and every round of review and approval. Get input from every person who has a role in the production process. Ask questions to understand every aspect.
What I’ve just described is called Bottom-Up Estimating in project management circles. You can also try Analogous Estimating or Parametric Modeling, as described here. But whatever approach you take, be aware of the temptation to underestimate your time in order to appear faster or more competent. It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than to do the opposite.
3. Expect Everyone to Track Their Time
Once you have your repeatable processes granularly documented, start tracking the hours and minutes spent on each project phase (brainstorming, researching, writing, illustration, design, etc.) to make your future guesstimations even more reliable. When you add up all the time you tracked and build in some buffer time, that’s how you’ll know whether the next project is likely to take two weeks or three—whether you or your colleague was right all along.
If you use a work-management software solution like Workfront, the “adding up” is done for you. Individuals can just navigate to the task and use built-in time-tracking tools—or add in their hours manually. Just don’t fall prey to the temptation to assume you’ll always be able to beat your fastest time on each step. Rely on a padded average instead. Not everyone will be thrilled about tracking their time on projects (see tip 5), but it’s an excellent way to reveal which steps are taking more time than you assumed or expected, where time is being wasted, and how you can work more efficiently.
“When I proactively track my time, it helps me focus more immediately and intensely,” says freelance content marketer Angie Lucas (no relation to Eric). “Any time I’m under the gun, the first thing I do when I sit down at my desk is to open my Paymo time-tracking widget and hit Start. I know every minute I spend from that time forward will be billed to a client, which keeps me laser focused on the task at hand.”
4. Rely on a Single Source of Truth
Even if you use nothing but a spreadsheet, it’s relatively easy to keep track of the quantitative data from your project—things like hours, dates, and hard costs. But your qualitative data—emails, shared documents, instant messaging activity, etc.—can be just as important, revealing how smoothly (or bumpily) the project progressed, what roadblocks you encountered, and more.
But who has time to track all of that? Am I seriously expecting you to file away every email into project-specific folders and copy-and-paste relevant IMs into a post-mortem document? Heck no.
There are work management solutions available that enable all of this communication to happen in the space surrounding the quantitative data. These allow you to visit one online location to not only see how long the last project took and how the schedule played out, but also view the finished assets and deliverables—and you’ll be reminded that design asked for two deadline extensions on the layout phase because they weren’t given enough time in the first place.
A single tool, or at least fewer tools, from which to draw data will give you more power to speak with confidence about what you’re working on, how long it will take, and whether you have the bandwidth for that next upcoming project.
5. Understand Polychronic versus Monochronic Time
Remember when I asked if it ever seems you and your team members are operating from different perceptions of time? The truth is, you probably are. Understanding this can open up windows of insight into how you (and others) approach your work.
We live in a monochronic culture, which sees time as “being divided into fixed elements that can be organized, quantified and scheduled.” Time is linear. Time can and should be organized into a daily routine. “Obviously,” you’re thinking. “Doesn’t everyone think that?”
Actually, no. Not only are there entire polychronic cultures (parts of Latin America, sub-Sahara Africa, and the Middle East), there are polychrons even within monochronic cultures who view time as “a never-ending river, flowing from the infinite past, through the present, into the infinite future.” That’s not just highfalutin nonsense. Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. They prefer task-switching and thrive in environments without a fixed schedule. (Incidentally, these preferences are also exhibited in a growing number of digital natives.) They’re often late because, to them, time is truly relative.
If you and your team members can understand your own natural perception of time, you can harness each individual’s strengths for a stronger, more balanced team. For example, you might not want to put one of your polychrons in charge of project scheduling and forecasting (and they’ll probably thank you for it). But you can and should expect them to track their time and meet deadlines just like their monochronic counterparts, recognizing that some employees will produce their most brilliant work with a little less structure.
Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular.
Click To Tweet
It Takes Time to Make Time
If there’s one thing content marketers are constantly running short on, it’s time. At any given moment, each person on your team might have dozens of projects in the pipeline—all in different stages of planning, ideation, and creation. With so many moving parts, it’s not easy to pause long enough to collect and analyze the up-front data about your content production process. But unless you do—and remember, much of these metrics are available via automated tools—you’ll always be left guessing how long things take, how much bandwidth your team has, and whether you have the resources you need to meet your goals, now and in the future.
This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.
http://ift.tt/2AhhIFG
0 notes
Text
5 Ways to Harness Time and Data in Your Content Process
“The theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time,” wrote Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. “It appeared that each observer might have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.”
Do you ever feel, in your workplace, like different members of your team are operating from a different perception of time? You say it will take two weeks to get a project done; your colleague says three weeks. You’re both experienced content creators, relying on the same historical experiences in the same workplace. How can you determine who’s right? Or should you just split the difference and get going on the work, figuring a few days doesn’t really matter?
In recent years, content marketing has become increasingly data-driven, at least when it comes to analytics and results. The efficacy of our work is something we can and do measure and manage. But there’s a tendency to avoid content creation data—how much time and resources the work really takes—which can make it difficult to:
Meet deadlines
Accurately forecast future work
Tap into our team’s full potential
Justify new resources
Prove the ROI of our time
Push back against unrealistic requests
Clearly, there are significant downsides to ignoring this front-end data, but it’s something content marketers are almost universally guilty of.
“As content creators, we are very results-focused,” said Todd Patton, content marketing manager at Branch Metrics in Palo Alto. “I’d much rather go to my boss and report that we acquired 100 MQLs from a certain ebook than how long it took me to put that ebook together.”
I think this is partly because not every executive appreciates how much effort it takes to write, design, concept, and create high-quality, original material. We’ve all seen the suspicious looks and heard the disbelieving questions throughout our careers. “It takes how long to produce a blog post? Hmm . . . I can write a 1,000-word email in 10 minutes.”
But pretending to others (and to ourselves) that we churn out the work more quickly than we really can, while still meeting the necessary quality standards, will only hurt us in the long run. It’s time to stop hiding from the truth of our content processes. Here are five ways for any content marketer to be more transparent and successful with project planning for both recurring work and one-off initiatives.
1. Involve the Team Throughout the Content Process
In a recent speech about project planning and forecasting, PMO Manager Eric Lucas of Crowley Maritime Corporation said:
“There’s something I call Mighty Mouse syndrome: There are people who love hiding things and then giving a ‘big reveal’; they love the grandeur of saving the day at the last possible moment. But that’s not how humans are successful. You have to work as teams.”
He offered seven tips for how project managers can improve the accuracy of their forecasts:
Humans learn in iterations—getting better at forecasting is a repetitive process.
Involve all the right people.
Adjust the forecast often.
Ensure the forecast reflects reality, not desire.
Communicate the forecast often—and through multiple channels.
Conduct a “lessons learned” meeting at the end of projects to codify what everyone has learned.
Accept that forecasts are approximations of the future; forecasts have to be “good enough.”
2. Guesstimate Granularly
“When I worked in-house and had limited resources, it always surprised me how long a project would take,” says Megan Maybee, a content marketing strategist at ThomasARTS in Salt Lake City. “Something simple like creating a social contest had so many elements, from design and writing to compliance and legal review. There were a couple times I didn’t give myself enough time, and then it was a huge scramble.”
I, too, am often surprised at how long certain projects take, even those I complete over and over again. It’s because it’s human nature to gloss over the difficulty of the journey mentally and only remember the destination. This tendency to forget accounts for people going through childbirth more than one time (or so I’m told), running more than one marathon, agreeing to more than one dental procedure.
No content marketing project can be predicted or controlled with 100 percent accuracy from the outset, no matter how much experience we have cranking out similar projects. There are always variables, and we must always rely on guesstimation to one degree or another. The key is to get as granular as possible with your project and resource guesstimations—to leave nothing out.
Start by meticulously documenting your workflow, including each little step it takes to execute each content type. Account for every brainstorm meeting, every interview, every individual contribution, every outline, every draft, every proofreading session, and every round of review and approval. Get input from every person who has a role in the production process. Ask questions to understand every aspect.
What I’ve just described is called Bottom-Up Estimating in project management circles. You can also try Analogous Estimating or Parametric Modeling, as described here. But whatever approach you take, be aware of the temptation to underestimate your time in order to appear faster or more competent. It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than to do the opposite.
3. Expect Everyone to Track Their Time
Once you have your repeatable processes granularly documented, start tracking the hours and minutes spent on each project phase (brainstorming, researching, writing, illustration, design, etc.) to make your future guesstimations even more reliable. When you add up all the time you tracked and build in some buffer time, that’s how you’ll know whether the next project is likely to take two weeks or three—whether you or your colleague was right all along.
If you use a work-management software solution like Workfront, the “adding up” is done for you. Individuals can just navigate to the task and use built-in time-tracking tools—or add in their hours manually. Just don’t fall prey to the temptation to assume you’ll always be able to beat your fastest time on each step. Rely on a padded average instead. Not everyone will be thrilled about tracking their time on projects (see tip 5), but it’s an excellent way to reveal which steps are taking more time than you assumed or expected, where time is being wasted, and how you can work more efficiently.
“When I proactively track my time, it helps me focus more immediately and intensely,” says freelance content marketer Angie Lucas (no relation to Eric). “Any time I’m under the gun, the first thing I do when I sit down at my desk is to open my Paymo time-tracking widget and hit Start. I know every minute I spend from that time forward will be billed to a client, which keeps me laser focused on the task at hand.”
4. Rely on a Single Source of Truth
Even if you use nothing but a spreadsheet, it’s relatively easy to keep track of the quantitative data from your project—things like hours, dates, and hard costs. But your qualitative data—emails, shared documents, instant messaging activity, etc.—can be just as important, revealing how smoothly (or bumpily) the project progressed, what roadblocks you encountered, and more.
But who has time to track all of that? Am I seriously expecting you to file away every email into project-specific folders and copy-and-paste relevant IMs into a post-mortem document? Heck no.
There are work management solutions available that enable all of this communication to happen in the space surrounding the quantitative data. These allow you to visit one online location to not only see how long the last project took and how the schedule played out, but also view the finished assets and deliverables—and you’ll be reminded that design asked for two deadline extensions on the layout phase because they weren’t given enough time in the first place.
A single tool, or at least fewer tools, from which to draw data will give you more power to speak with confidence about what you’re working on, how long it will take, and whether you have the bandwidth for that next upcoming project.
5. Understand Polychronic versus Monochronic Time
Remember when I asked if it ever seems you and your team members are operating from different perceptions of time? The truth is, you probably are. Understanding this can open up windows of insight into how you (and others) approach your work.
We live in a monochronic culture, which sees time as “being divided into fixed elements that can be organized, quantified and scheduled.” Time is linear. Time can and should be organized into a daily routine. “Obviously,” you’re thinking. “Doesn’t everyone think that?”
Actually, no. Not only are there entire polychronic cultures (parts of Latin America, sub-Sahara Africa, and the Middle East), there are polychrons even within monochronic cultures who view time as “a never-ending river, flowing from the infinite past, through the present, into the infinite future.” That’s not just highfalutin nonsense. Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. They prefer task-switching and thrive in environments without a fixed schedule. (Incidentally, these preferences are also exhibited in a growing number of digital natives.) They’re often late because, to them, time is truly relative.
If you and your team members can understand your own natural perception of time, you can harness each individual’s strengths for a stronger, more balanced team. For example, you might not want to put one of your polychrons in charge of project scheduling and forecasting (and they’ll probably thank you for it). But you can and should expect them to track their time and meet deadlines just like their monochronic counterparts, recognizing that some employees will produce their most brilliant work with a little less structure.
Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular.
Click To Tweet
It Takes Time to Make Time
If there’s one thing content marketers are constantly running short on, it’s time. At any given moment, each person on your team might have dozens of projects in the pipeline—all in different stages of planning, ideation, and creation. With so many moving parts, it’s not easy to pause long enough to collect and analyze the up-front data about your content production process. But unless you do—and remember, much of these metrics are available via automated tools—you’ll always be left guessing how long things take, how much bandwidth your team has, and whether you have the resources you need to meet your goals, now and in the future.
This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.
http://ift.tt/2AhhIFG
0 notes
Text
5 Ways to Harness Time and Data in Your Content Process
“The theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time,” wrote Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. “It appeared that each observer might have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.”
Do you ever feel, in your workplace, like different members of your team are operating from a different perception of time? You say it will take two weeks to get a project done; your colleague says three weeks. You’re both experienced content creators, relying on the same historical experiences in the same workplace. How can you determine who’s right? Or should you just split the difference and get going on the work, figuring a few days doesn’t really matter?
In recent years, content marketing has become increasingly data-driven, at least when it comes to analytics and results. The efficacy of our work is something we can and do measure and manage. But there’s a tendency to avoid content creation data—how much time and resources the work really takes—which can make it difficult to:
Meet deadlines
Accurately forecast future work
Tap into our team’s full potential
Justify new resources
Prove the ROI of our time
Push back against unrealistic requests
Clearly, there are significant downsides to ignoring this front-end data, but it’s something content marketers are almost universally guilty of.
“As content creators, we are very results-focused,” said Todd Patton, content marketing manager at Branch Metrics in Palo Alto. “I’d much rather go to my boss and report that we acquired 100 MQLs from a certain ebook than how long it took me to put that ebook together.”
I think this is partly because not every executive appreciates how much effort it takes to write, design, concept, and create high-quality, original material. We’ve all seen the suspicious looks and heard the disbelieving questions throughout our careers. “It takes how long to produce a blog post? Hmm . . . I can write a 1,000-word email in 10 minutes.”
But pretending to others (and to ourselves) that we churn out the work more quickly than we really can, while still meeting the necessary quality standards, will only hurt us in the long run. It’s time to stop hiding from the truth of our content processes. Here are five ways for any content marketer to be more transparent and successful with project planning for both recurring work and one-off initiatives.
1. Involve the Team Throughout the Content Process
In a recent speech about project planning and forecasting, PMO Manager Eric Lucas of Crowley Maritime Corporation said:
“There’s something I call Mighty Mouse syndrome: There are people who love hiding things and then giving a ‘big reveal’; they love the grandeur of saving the day at the last possible moment. But that’s not how humans are successful. You have to work as teams.”
He offered seven tips for how project managers can improve the accuracy of their forecasts:
Humans learn in iterations—getting better at forecasting is a repetitive process.
Involve all the right people.
Adjust the forecast often.
Ensure the forecast reflects reality, not desire.
Communicate the forecast often—and through multiple channels.
Conduct a “lessons learned” meeting at the end of projects to codify what everyone has learned.
Accept that forecasts are approximations of the future; forecasts have to be “good enough.”
2. Guesstimate Granularly
“When I worked in-house and had limited resources, it always surprised me how long a project would take,” says Megan Maybee, a content marketing strategist at ThomasARTS in Salt Lake City. “Something simple like creating a social contest had so many elements, from design and writing to compliance and legal review. There were a couple times I didn’t give myself enough time, and then it was a huge scramble.”
I, too, am often surprised at how long certain projects take, even those I complete over and over again. It’s because it’s human nature to gloss over the difficulty of the journey mentally and only remember the destination. This tendency to forget accounts for people going through childbirth more than one time (or so I’m told), running more than one marathon, agreeing to more than one dental procedure.
No content marketing project can be predicted or controlled with 100 percent accuracy from the outset, no matter how much experience we have cranking out similar projects. There are always variables, and we must always rely on guesstimation to one degree or another. The key is to get as granular as possible with your project and resource guesstimations—to leave nothing out.
Start by meticulously documenting your workflow, including each little step it takes to execute each content type. Account for every brainstorm meeting, every interview, every individual contribution, every outline, every draft, every proofreading session, and every round of review and approval. Get input from every person who has a role in the production process. Ask questions to understand every aspect.
What I’ve just described is called Bottom-Up Estimating in project management circles. You can also try Analogous Estimating or Parametric Modeling, as described here. But whatever approach you take, be aware of the temptation to underestimate your time in order to appear faster or more competent. It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than to do the opposite.
3. Expect Everyone to Track Their Time
Once you have your repeatable processes granularly documented, start tracking the hours and minutes spent on each project phase (brainstorming, researching, writing, illustration, design, etc.) to make your future guesstimations even more reliable. When you add up all the time you tracked and build in some buffer time, that’s how you’ll know whether the next project is likely to take two weeks or three—whether you or your colleague was right all along.
If you use a work-management software solution like Workfront, the “adding up” is done for you. Individuals can just navigate to the task and use built-in time-tracking tools—or add in their hours manually. Just don’t fall prey to the temptation to assume you’ll always be able to beat your fastest time on each step. Rely on a padded average instead. Not everyone will be thrilled about tracking their time on projects (see tip 5), but it’s an excellent way to reveal which steps are taking more time than you assumed or expected, where time is being wasted, and how you can work more efficiently.
“When I proactively track my time, it helps me focus more immediately and intensely,” says freelance content marketer Angie Lucas (no relation to Eric). “Any time I’m under the gun, the first thing I do when I sit down at my desk is to open my Paymo time-tracking widget and hit Start. I know every minute I spend from that time forward will be billed to a client, which keeps me laser focused on the task at hand.”
4. Rely on a Single Source of Truth
Even if you use nothing but a spreadsheet, it’s relatively easy to keep track of the quantitative data from your project—things like hours, dates, and hard costs. But your qualitative data—emails, shared documents, instant messaging activity, etc.—can be just as important, revealing how smoothly (or bumpily) the project progressed, what roadblocks you encountered, and more.
But who has time to track all of that? Am I seriously expecting you to file away every email into project-specific folders and copy-and-paste relevant IMs into a post-mortem document? Heck no.
There are work management solutions available that enable all of this communication to happen in the space surrounding the quantitative data. These allow you to visit one online location to not only see how long the last project took and how the schedule played out, but also view the finished assets and deliverables—and you’ll be reminded that design asked for two deadline extensions on the layout phase because they weren’t given enough time in the first place.
A single tool, or at least fewer tools, from which to draw data will give you more power to speak with confidence about what you’re working on, how long it will take, and whether you have the bandwidth for that next upcoming project.
5. Understand Polychronic versus Monochronic Time
Remember when I asked if it ever seems you and your team members are operating from different perceptions of time? The truth is, you probably are. Understanding this can open up windows of insight into how you (and others) approach your work.
We live in a monochronic culture, which sees time as “being divided into fixed elements that can be organized, quantified and scheduled.” Time is linear. Time can and should be organized into a daily routine. “Obviously,” you’re thinking. “Doesn’t everyone think that?”
Actually, no. Not only are there entire polychronic cultures (parts of Latin America, sub-Sahara Africa, and the Middle East), there are polychrons even within monochronic cultures who view time as “a never-ending river, flowing from the infinite past, through the present, into the infinite future.” That’s not just highfalutin nonsense. Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. They prefer task-switching and thrive in environments without a fixed schedule. (Incidentally, these preferences are also exhibited in a growing number of digital natives.) They’re often late because, to them, time is truly relative.
If you and your team members can understand your own natural perception of time, you can harness each individual’s strengths for a stronger, more balanced team. For example, you might not want to put one of your polychrons in charge of project scheduling and forecasting (and they’ll probably thank you for it). But you can and should expect them to track their time and meet deadlines just like their monochronic counterparts, recognizing that some employees will produce their most brilliant work with a little less structure.
Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular.
Click To Tweet
It Takes Time to Make Time
If there’s one thing content marketers are constantly running short on, it’s time. At any given moment, each person on your team might have dozens of projects in the pipeline—all in different stages of planning, ideation, and creation. With so many moving parts, it’s not easy to pause long enough to collect and analyze the up-front data about your content production process. But unless you do—and remember, much of these metrics are available via automated tools—you’ll always be left guessing how long things take, how much bandwidth your team has, and whether you have the resources you need to meet your goals, now and in the future.
This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.
http://ift.tt/2AhhIFG
0 notes
Text
5 Ways to Harness Time and Data in Your Content Process
“The theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time,” wrote Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. “It appeared that each observer might have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.”
Do you ever feel, in your workplace, like different members of your team are operating from a different perception of time? You say it will take two weeks to get a project done; your colleague says three weeks. You’re both experienced content creators, relying on the same historical experiences in the same workplace. How can you determine who’s right? Or should you just split the difference and get going on the work, figuring a few days doesn’t really matter?
In recent years, content marketing has become increasingly data-driven, at least when it comes to analytics and results. The efficacy of our work is something we can and do measure and manage. But there’s a tendency to avoid content creation data—how much time and resources the work really takes—which can make it difficult to:
Meet deadlines
Accurately forecast future work
Tap into our team’s full potential
Justify new resources
Prove the ROI of our time
Push back against unrealistic requests
Clearly, there are significant downsides to ignoring this front-end data, but it’s something content marketers are almost universally guilty of.
“As content creators, we are very results-focused,” said Todd Patton, content marketing manager at Branch Metrics in Palo Alto. “I’d much rather go to my boss and report that we acquired 100 MQLs from a certain ebook than how long it took me to put that ebook together.”
I think this is partly because not every executive appreciates how much effort it takes to write, design, concept, and create high-quality, original material. We’ve all seen the suspicious looks and heard the disbelieving questions throughout our careers. “It takes how long to produce a blog post? Hmm . . . I can write a 1,000-word email in 10 minutes.”
But pretending to others (and to ourselves) that we churn out the work more quickly than we really can, while still meeting the necessary quality standards, will only hurt us in the long run. It’s time to stop hiding from the truth of our content processes. Here are five ways for any content marketer to be more transparent and successful with project planning for both recurring work and one-off initiatives.
1. Involve the Team Throughout the Content Process
In a recent speech about project planning and forecasting, PMO Manager Eric Lucas of Crowley Maritime Corporation said:
“There’s something I call Mighty Mouse syndrome: There are people who love hiding things and then giving a ‘big reveal’; they love the grandeur of saving the day at the last possible moment. But that’s not how humans are successful. You have to work as teams.”
He offered seven tips for how project managers can improve the accuracy of their forecasts:
Humans learn in iterations—getting better at forecasting is a repetitive process.
Involve all the right people.
Adjust the forecast often.
Ensure the forecast reflects reality, not desire.
Communicate the forecast often—and through multiple channels.
Conduct a “lessons learned” meeting at the end of projects to codify what everyone has learned.
Accept that forecasts are approximations of the future; forecasts have to be “good enough.”
2. Guesstimate Granularly
“When I worked in-house and had limited resources, it always surprised me how long a project would take,” says Megan Maybee, a content marketing strategist at ThomasARTS in Salt Lake City. “Something simple like creating a social contest had so many elements, from design and writing to compliance and legal review. There were a couple times I didn’t give myself enough time, and then it was a huge scramble.”
I, too, am often surprised at how long certain projects take, even those I complete over and over again. It’s because it’s human nature to gloss over the difficulty of the journey mentally and only remember the destination. This tendency to forget accounts for people going through childbirth more than one time (or so I’m told), running more than one marathon, agreeing to more than one dental procedure.
No content marketing project can be predicted or controlled with 100 percent accuracy from the outset, no matter how much experience we have cranking out similar projects. There are always variables, and we must always rely on guesstimation to one degree or another. The key is to get as granular as possible with your project and resource guesstimations—to leave nothing out.
Start by meticulously documenting your workflow, including each little step it takes to execute each content type. Account for every brainstorm meeting, every interview, every individual contribution, every outline, every draft, every proofreading session, and every round of review and approval. Get input from every person who has a role in the production process. Ask questions to understand every aspect.
What I’ve just described is called Bottom-Up Estimating in project management circles. You can also try Analogous Estimating or Parametric Modeling, as described here. But whatever approach you take, be aware of the temptation to underestimate your time in order to appear faster or more competent. It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than to do the opposite.
3. Expect Everyone to Track Their Time
Once you have your repeatable processes granularly documented, start tracking the hours and minutes spent on each project phase (brainstorming, researching, writing, illustration, design, etc.) to make your future guesstimations even more reliable. When you add up all the time you tracked and build in some buffer time, that’s how you’ll know whether the next project is likely to take two weeks or three—whether you or your colleague was right all along.
If you use a work-management software solution like Workfront, the “adding up” is done for you. Individuals can just navigate to the task and use built-in time-tracking tools—or add in their hours manually. Just don’t fall prey to the temptation to assume you’ll always be able to beat your fastest time on each step. Rely on a padded average instead. Not everyone will be thrilled about tracking their time on projects (see tip 5), but it’s an excellent way to reveal which steps are taking more time than you assumed or expected, where time is being wasted, and how you can work more efficiently.
“When I proactively track my time, it helps me focus more immediately and intensely,” says freelance content marketer Angie Lucas (no relation to Eric). “Any time I’m under the gun, the first thing I do when I sit down at my desk is to open my Paymo time-tracking widget and hit Start. I know every minute I spend from that time forward will be billed to a client, which keeps me laser focused on the task at hand.”
4. Rely on a Single Source of Truth
Even if you use nothing but a spreadsheet, it’s relatively easy to keep track of the quantitative data from your project—things like hours, dates, and hard costs. But your qualitative data—emails, shared documents, instant messaging activity, etc.—can be just as important, revealing how smoothly (or bumpily) the project progressed, what roadblocks you encountered, and more.
But who has time to track all of that? Am I seriously expecting you to file away every email into project-specific folders and copy-and-paste relevant IMs into a post-mortem document? Heck no.
There are work management solutions available that enable all of this communication to happen in the space surrounding the quantitative data. These allow you to visit one online location to not only see how long the last project took and how the schedule played out, but also view the finished assets and deliverables—and you’ll be reminded that design asked for two deadline extensions on the layout phase because they weren’t given enough time in the first place.
A single tool, or at least fewer tools, from which to draw data will give you more power to speak with confidence about what you’re working on, how long it will take, and whether you have the bandwidth for that next upcoming project.
5. Understand Polychronic versus Monochronic Time
Remember when I asked if it ever seems you and your team members are operating from different perceptions of time? The truth is, you probably are. Understanding this can open up windows of insight into how you (and others) approach your work.
We live in a monochronic culture, which sees time as “being divided into fixed elements that can be organized, quantified and scheduled.” Time is linear. Time can and should be organized into a daily routine. “Obviously,” you’re thinking. “Doesn’t everyone think that?”
Actually, no. Not only are there entire polychronic cultures (parts of Latin America, sub-Sahara Africa, and the Middle East), there are polychrons even within monochronic cultures who view time as “a never-ending river, flowing from the infinite past, through the present, into the infinite future.” That’s not just highfalutin nonsense. Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. They prefer task-switching and thrive in environments without a fixed schedule. (Incidentally, these preferences are also exhibited in a growing number of digital natives.) They’re often late because, to them, time is truly relative.
If you and your team members can understand your own natural perception of time, you can harness each individual’s strengths for a stronger, more balanced team. For example, you might not want to put one of your polychrons in charge of project scheduling and forecasting (and they’ll probably thank you for it). But you can and should expect them to track their time and meet deadlines just like their monochronic counterparts, recognizing that some employees will produce their most brilliant work with a little less structure.
Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular.
Click To Tweet
It Takes Time to Make Time
If there’s one thing content marketers are constantly running short on, it’s time. At any given moment, each person on your team might have dozens of projects in the pipeline—all in different stages of planning, ideation, and creation. With so many moving parts, it’s not easy to pause long enough to collect and analyze the up-front data about your content production process. But unless you do—and remember, much of these metrics are available via automated tools—you’ll always be left guessing how long things take, how much bandwidth your team has, and whether you have the resources you need to meet your goals, now and in the future.
This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.
http://ift.tt/2AhhIFG
0 notes
Text
5 Ways to Harness Time and Data in Your Content Process
“The theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time,” wrote Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. “It appeared that each observer might have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.”
Do you ever feel, in your workplace, like different members of your team are operating from a different perception of time? You say it will take two weeks to get a project done; your colleague says three weeks. You’re both experienced content creators, relying on the same historical experiences in the same workplace. How can you determine who’s right? Or should you just split the difference and get going on the work, figuring a few days doesn’t really matter?
In recent years, content marketing has become increasingly data-driven, at least when it comes to analytics and results. The efficacy of our work is something we can and do measure and manage. But there’s a tendency to avoid content creation data—how much time and resources the work really takes—which can make it difficult to:
Meet deadlines
Accurately forecast future work
Tap into our team’s full potential
Justify new resources
Prove the ROI of our time
Push back against unrealistic requests
Clearly, there are significant downsides to ignoring this front-end data, but it’s something content marketers are almost universally guilty of.
“As content creators, we are very results-focused,” said Todd Patton, content marketing manager at Branch Metrics in Palo Alto. “I’d much rather go to my boss and report that we acquired 100 MQLs from a certain ebook than how long it took me to put that ebook together.”
I think this is partly because not every executive appreciates how much effort it takes to write, design, concept, and create high-quality, original material. We’ve all seen the suspicious looks and heard the disbelieving questions throughout our careers. “It takes how long to produce a blog post? Hmm . . . I can write a 1,000-word email in 10 minutes.”
But pretending to others (and to ourselves) that we churn out the work more quickly than we really can, while still meeting the necessary quality standards, will only hurt us in the long run. It’s time to stop hiding from the truth of our content processes. Here are five ways for any content marketer to be more transparent and successful with project planning for both recurring work and one-off initiatives.
1. Involve the Team Throughout the Content Process
In a recent speech about project planning and forecasting, PMO Manager Eric Lucas of Crowley Maritime Corporation said:
“There’s something I call Mighty Mouse syndrome: There are people who love hiding things and then giving a ‘big reveal’; they love the grandeur of saving the day at the last possible moment. But that’s not how humans are successful. You have to work as teams.”
He offered seven tips for how project managers can improve the accuracy of their forecasts:
Humans learn in iterations—getting better at forecasting is a repetitive process.
Involve all the right people.
Adjust the forecast often.
Ensure the forecast reflects reality, not desire.
Communicate the forecast often—and through multiple channels.
Conduct a “lessons learned” meeting at the end of projects to codify what everyone has learned.
Accept that forecasts are approximations of the future; forecasts have to be “good enough.”
2. Guesstimate Granularly
“When I worked in-house and had limited resources, it always surprised me how long a project would take,” says Megan Maybee, a content marketing strategist at ThomasARTS in Salt Lake City. “Something simple like creating a social contest had so many elements, from design and writing to compliance and legal review. There were a couple times I didn’t give myself enough time, and then it was a huge scramble.”
I, too, am often surprised at how long certain projects take, even those I complete over and over again. It’s because it’s human nature to gloss over the difficulty of the journey mentally and only remember the destination. This tendency to forget accounts for people going through childbirth more than one time (or so I’m told), running more than one marathon, agreeing to more than one dental procedure.
No content marketing project can be predicted or controlled with 100 percent accuracy from the outset, no matter how much experience we have cranking out similar projects. There are always variables, and we must always rely on guesstimation to one degree or another. The key is to get as granular as possible with your project and resource guesstimations—to leave nothing out.
Start by meticulously documenting your workflow, including each little step it takes to execute each content type. Account for every brainstorm meeting, every interview, every individual contribution, every outline, every draft, every proofreading session, and every round of review and approval. Get input from every person who has a role in the production process. Ask questions to understand every aspect.
What I’ve just described is called Bottom-Up Estimating in project management circles. You can also try Analogous Estimating or Parametric Modeling, as described here. But whatever approach you take, be aware of the temptation to underestimate your time in order to appear faster or more competent. It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than to do the opposite.
3. Expect Everyone to Track Their Time
Once you have your repeatable processes granularly documented, start tracking the hours and minutes spent on each project phase (brainstorming, researching, writing, illustration, design, etc.) to make your future guesstimations even more reliable. When you add up all the time you tracked and build in some buffer time, that’s how you’ll know whether the next project is likely to take two weeks or three—whether you or your colleague was right all along.
If you use a work-management software solution like Workfront, the “adding up” is done for you. Individuals can just navigate to the task and use built-in time-tracking tools—or add in their hours manually. Just don’t fall prey to the temptation to assume you’ll always be able to beat your fastest time on each step. Rely on a padded average instead. Not everyone will be thrilled about tracking their time on projects (see tip 5), but it’s an excellent way to reveal which steps are taking more time than you assumed or expected, where time is being wasted, and how you can work more efficiently.
“When I proactively track my time, it helps me focus more immediately and intensely,” says freelance content marketer Angie Lucas (no relation to Eric). “Any time I’m under the gun, the first thing I do when I sit down at my desk is to open my Paymo time-tracking widget and hit Start. I know every minute I spend from that time forward will be billed to a client, which keeps me laser focused on the task at hand.”
4. Rely on a Single Source of Truth
Even if you use nothing but a spreadsheet, it’s relatively easy to keep track of the quantitative data from your project—things like hours, dates, and hard costs. But your qualitative data—emails, shared documents, instant messaging activity, etc.—can be just as important, revealing how smoothly (or bumpily) the project progressed, what roadblocks you encountered, and more.
But who has time to track all of that? Am I seriously expecting you to file away every email into project-specific folders and copy-and-paste relevant IMs into a post-mortem document? Heck no.
There are work management solutions available that enable all of this communication to happen in the space surrounding the quantitative data. These allow you to visit one online location to not only see how long the last project took and how the schedule played out, but also view the finished assets and deliverables—and you’ll be reminded that design asked for two deadline extensions on the layout phase because they weren’t given enough time in the first place.
A single tool, or at least fewer tools, from which to draw data will give you more power to speak with confidence about what you’re working on, how long it will take, and whether you have the bandwidth for that next upcoming project.
5. Understand Polychronic versus Monochronic Time
Remember when I asked if it ever seems you and your team members are operating from different perceptions of time? The truth is, you probably are. Understanding this can open up windows of insight into how you (and others) approach your work.
We live in a monochronic culture, which sees time as “being divided into fixed elements that can be organized, quantified and scheduled.” Time is linear. Time can and should be organized into a daily routine. “Obviously,” you’re thinking. “Doesn’t everyone think that?”
Actually, no. Not only are there entire polychronic cultures (parts of Latin America, sub-Sahara Africa, and the Middle East), there are polychrons even within monochronic cultures who view time as “a never-ending river, flowing from the infinite past, through the present, into the infinite future.” That’s not just highfalutin nonsense. Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. They prefer task-switching and thrive in environments without a fixed schedule. (Incidentally, these preferences are also exhibited in a growing number of digital natives.) They’re often late because, to them, time is truly relative.
If you and your team members can understand your own natural perception of time, you can harness each individual’s strengths for a stronger, more balanced team. For example, you might not want to put one of your polychrons in charge of project scheduling and forecasting (and they’ll probably thank you for it). But you can and should expect them to track their time and meet deadlines just like their monochronic counterparts, recognizing that some employees will produce their most brilliant work with a little less structure.
Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular.
Click To Tweet
It Takes Time to Make Time
If there’s one thing content marketers are constantly running short on, it’s time. At any given moment, each person on your team might have dozens of projects in the pipeline—all in different stages of planning, ideation, and creation. With so many moving parts, it’s not easy to pause long enough to collect and analyze the up-front data about your content production process. But unless you do—and remember, much of these metrics are available via automated tools—you’ll always be left guessing how long things take, how much bandwidth your team has, and whether you have the resources you need to meet your goals, now and in the future.
This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.
http://ift.tt/2AhhIFG
0 notes
Text
5 Ways to Harness Time and Data in Your Content Process
“The theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time,” wrote Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. “It appeared that each observer might have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.”
Do you ever feel, in your workplace, like different members of your team are operating from a different perception of time? You say it will take two weeks to get a project done; your colleague says three weeks. You’re both experienced content creators, relying on the same historical experiences in the same workplace. How can you determine who’s right? Or should you just split the difference and get going on the work, figuring a few days doesn’t really matter?
In recent years, content marketing has become increasingly data-driven, at least when it comes to analytics and results. The efficacy of our work is something we can and do measure and manage. But there’s a tendency to avoid content creation data—how much time and resources the work really takes—which can make it difficult to:
Meet deadlines
Accurately forecast future work
Tap into our team’s full potential
Justify new resources
Prove the ROI of our time
Push back against unrealistic requests
Clearly, there are significant downsides to ignoring this front-end data, but it’s something content marketers are almost universally guilty of.
“As content creators, we are very results-focused,” said Todd Patton, content marketing manager at Branch Metrics in Palo Alto. “I’d much rather go to my boss and report that we acquired 100 MQLs from a certain ebook than how long it took me to put that ebook together.”
I think this is partly because not every executive appreciates how much effort it takes to write, design, concept, and create high-quality, original material. We’ve all seen the suspicious looks and heard the disbelieving questions throughout our careers. “It takes how long to produce a blog post? Hmm . . . I can write a 1,000-word email in 10 minutes.”
But pretending to others (and to ourselves) that we churn out the work more quickly than we really can, while still meeting the necessary quality standards, will only hurt us in the long run. It’s time to stop hiding from the truth of our content processes. Here are five ways for any content marketer to be more transparent and successful with project planning for both recurring work and one-off initiatives.
1. Involve the Team Throughout the Content Process
In a recent speech about project planning and forecasting, PMO Manager Eric Lucas of Crowley Maritime Corporation said:
“There’s something I call Mighty Mouse syndrome: There are people who love hiding things and then giving a ‘big reveal’; they love the grandeur of saving the day at the last possible moment. But that’s not how humans are successful. You have to work as teams.”
He offered seven tips for how project managers can improve the accuracy of their forecasts:
Humans learn in iterations—getting better at forecasting is a repetitive process.
Involve all the right people.
Adjust the forecast often.
Ensure the forecast reflects reality, not desire.
Communicate the forecast often—and through multiple channels.
Conduct a “lessons learned” meeting at the end of projects to codify what everyone has learned.
Accept that forecasts are approximations of the future; forecasts have to be “good enough.”
2. Guesstimate Granularly
“When I worked in-house and had limited resources, it always surprised me how long a project would take,” says Megan Maybee, a content marketing strategist at ThomasARTS in Salt Lake City. “Something simple like creating a social contest had so many elements, from design and writing to compliance and legal review. There were a couple times I didn’t give myself enough time, and then it was a huge scramble.”
I, too, am often surprised at how long certain projects take, even those I complete over and over again. It’s because it’s human nature to gloss over the difficulty of the journey mentally and only remember the destination. This tendency to forget accounts for people going through childbirth more than one time (or so I’m told), running more than one marathon, agreeing to more than one dental procedure.
No content marketing project can be predicted or controlled with 100 percent accuracy from the outset, no matter how much experience we have cranking out similar projects. There are always variables, and we must always rely on guesstimation to one degree or another. The key is to get as granular as possible with your project and resource guesstimations—to leave nothing out.
Start by meticulously documenting your workflow, including each little step it takes to execute each content type. Account for every brainstorm meeting, every interview, every individual contribution, every outline, every draft, every proofreading session, and every round of review and approval. Get input from every person who has a role in the production process. Ask questions to understand every aspect.
What I’ve just described is called Bottom-Up Estimating in project management circles. You can also try Analogous Estimating or Parametric Modeling, as described here. But whatever approach you take, be aware of the temptation to underestimate your time in order to appear faster or more competent. It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than to do the opposite.
3. Expect Everyone to Track Their Time
Once you have your repeatable processes granularly documented, start tracking the hours and minutes spent on each project phase (brainstorming, researching, writing, illustration, design, etc.) to make your future guesstimations even more reliable. When you add up all the time you tracked and build in some buffer time, that’s how you’ll know whether the next project is likely to take two weeks or three—whether you or your colleague was right all along.
If you use a work-management software solution like Workfront, the “adding up” is done for you. Individuals can just navigate to the task and use built-in time-tracking tools—or add in their hours manually. Just don’t fall prey to the temptation to assume you’ll always be able to beat your fastest time on each step. Rely on a padded average instead. Not everyone will be thrilled about tracking their time on projects (see tip 5), but it’s an excellent way to reveal which steps are taking more time than you assumed or expected, where time is being wasted, and how you can work more efficiently.
“When I proactively track my time, it helps me focus more immediately and intensely,” says freelance content marketer Angie Lucas (no relation to Eric). “Any time I’m under the gun, the first thing I do when I sit down at my desk is to open my Paymo time-tracking widget and hit Start. I know every minute I spend from that time forward will be billed to a client, which keeps me laser focused on the task at hand.”
4. Rely on a Single Source of Truth
Even if you use nothing but a spreadsheet, it’s relatively easy to keep track of the quantitative data from your project—things like hours, dates, and hard costs. But your qualitative data—emails, shared documents, instant messaging activity, etc.—can be just as important, revealing how smoothly (or bumpily) the project progressed, what roadblocks you encountered, and more.
But who has time to track all of that? Am I seriously expecting you to file away every email into project-specific folders and copy-and-paste relevant IMs into a post-mortem document? Heck no.
There are work management solutions available that enable all of this communication to happen in the space surrounding the quantitative data. These allow you to visit one online location to not only see how long the last project took and how the schedule played out, but also view the finished assets and deliverables—and you’ll be reminded that design asked for two deadline extensions on the layout phase because they weren’t given enough time in the first place.
A single tool, or at least fewer tools, from which to draw data will give you more power to speak with confidence about what you’re working on, how long it will take, and whether you have the bandwidth for that next upcoming project.
5. Understand Polychronic versus Monochronic Time
Remember when I asked if it ever seems you and your team members are operating from different perceptions of time? The truth is, you probably are. Understanding this can open up windows of insight into how you (and others) approach your work.
We live in a monochronic culture, which sees time as “being divided into fixed elements that can be organized, quantified and scheduled.” Time is linear. Time can and should be organized into a daily routine. “Obviously,” you’re thinking. “Doesn’t everyone think that?”
Actually, no. Not only are there entire polychronic cultures (parts of Latin America, sub-Sahara Africa, and the Middle East), there are polychrons even within monochronic cultures who view time as “a never-ending river, flowing from the infinite past, through the present, into the infinite future.” That’s not just highfalutin nonsense. Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. They prefer task-switching and thrive in environments without a fixed schedule. (Incidentally, these preferences are also exhibited in a growing number of digital natives.) They’re often late because, to them, time is truly relative.
If you and your team members can understand your own natural perception of time, you can harness each individual’s strengths for a stronger, more balanced team. For example, you might not want to put one of your polychrons in charge of project scheduling and forecasting (and they’ll probably thank you for it). But you can and should expect them to track their time and meet deadlines just like their monochronic counterparts, recognizing that some employees will produce their most brilliant work with a little less structure.
Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular.
Click To Tweet
It Takes Time to Make Time
If there’s one thing content marketers are constantly running short on, it’s time. At any given moment, each person on your team might have dozens of projects in the pipeline—all in different stages of planning, ideation, and creation. With so many moving parts, it’s not easy to pause long enough to collect and analyze the up-front data about your content production process. But unless you do—and remember, much of these metrics are available via automated tools—you’ll always be left guessing how long things take, how much bandwidth your team has, and whether you have the resources you need to meet your goals, now and in the future.
This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.
http://ift.tt/2AhhIFG
0 notes
Link
Updated
June 02, 2017 10:33:59
Billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk and Disney chief executive Bob Iger say they will leave President Donald Trump’s advisory councils after he confirmed the United States would withdraw from the Paris climate accord.
Mr Trump announced he would pull the US from the landmark global agreement to fight climate change, saying that the Paris agreement was “unfair” to the US and would cause jobs to move overseas.
But several business leaders, including Mr Musk and Mr Iger, as well as US allies and state politicians, have spoken out against the decision.
“Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world,” Mr Musk said in a Twitter post.
External Link:
Elon Musk tweet: Am departing presidential councils. Climate change is real. Leaving Paris is not good for America or the world.
Mr Musk, who founded SpaceX and Tesla among other companies, had been a member of Mr Trump’s infrastructure council, manufacturing jobs council and his strategic and policy forum.
The day before the announcement, Mr Musk said he had done “all I can” to convince the US President to stay in the accord and threatened to leave presidential advisory councils if the departure went ahead.
A couple of hours after Mr Musk’s announcement, Mr Iger also said he will be stepping down from the advisory council “as a matter of principle”.
External Link:
Robert Iger tweet: As a matter of principle, I’ve resigned from the President’s Council over the #ParisAgreement withdrawal.
Other business leaders, such as Google chief executive Sundar Pichai, Microsoft president Brad Smith and General Electric CEO Jeff Immelt have tweeted that they were “disappointed” with the decision.
Meanwhile, the governors of three US states — New York, California and Washington — announced they would form a “United States Climate Alliance” to convene states “committed to upholding the Paris climate agreement”.
“If the President is going to be AWOL in this profoundly important human endeavour, then California and other states will step up,” a joint statement read.
Mr Trump’s announcement in the White House Rose Garden this morning capped days of speculation about whether he would fulfil his campaign pledge to “cancel” the deal, ratified by nearly 200 nations in the French capital in 2015.
He said the agreement as it stands would make it “very hard” for the US “to compete with the rest of the world”, and said the deal is “less about the climate and more about other countries gaining an advantage over the United States”.
Pushes from both sides
General Motors Co said chief executive Mary Barra would not leave a presidential advisory panel, saying her participation “provides GM a seat at an important table to contribute to a constructive dialogue about key policy issues”.
In 2013, GM signed a declaration joining other major companies arguing that responding to climate change was good business.
The carmaker said despite today’s withdrawal it “will not waver from our commitment to the environment”.
The White House is planning to a hold a meeting with technology leaders on June 19, an administration spokesman said.
The decision to leave the Paris climate accord was foreshadowed during Mr Trump’s presidential campaign. He said yesterday he was “hearing from a lot of people, both ways”.
Conservative groups, among them the National Mining Association, at least 22 Senate and 12 House Republicans, chief strategist Steve Bannon and Environmental Protection Agency chief Scott Pruitt were all part of the push to leave the agreement.
After the announcement Mr Pruitt said that Mr Trump “made a hard decision, but one that put America first”.
External Link:
Administrator Pruitt tweet: President Trump made a hard decision today, but one that puts America first.
“This is a historic restoration of American economic independence — one that will benefit the working class, the working poor, and working people of all stripes,” he said in a statement.
“With this action, you have declared that people are the rulers of this country once again.”
The Paris deal aimed to limit planetary warming in part by slashing carbon dioxide and other emissions from the burning of fossil fuels.
When announcing the decision to withdraw from the deal, Mr Trump said he was willing to sit down with Democrats and negotiate a different deal.
Senior White House Officials said the desire to renegotiate is sincere and the President wants to figure out if there is a more “rational approach” to climate and energy policy.
ABC and wires
Topics:
climate-change,
environment,
foreign-affairs,
world-politics,
donald-trump,
united-states
First posted
June 02, 2017 07:58:08
1 June 2017 | 9:58 pm
Source : ABC News
>>>Click Here To View Original Press Release>>>
(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});
June 02, 2017 at 04:28AM
0 notes
Text
Misinterpreting The Custom
Prompt 1: "You hear me. Take It. Off."
Pairing: Stiles Stilinski/Thor Odinson
Summary: Sometimes wearing each other's clothes meant something more, especially when you're the lover of an extraterrestrial prince.
Follow me on AO3 : Yoru_Lun
It is official.
Stiles hates Clint and Tony.
He would totally kick their asses the next time he sees them or better yet, send Natasha over to deal with their scheming asses. He is pretty sure the Black Widow would be having so much fun in whipping those two assholes.
And he is totally striking their names off his Christmas gift list, or any other lists that involves anything pleasant.
If you are wondering what brought up this sudden bout of hate toward the two superheroes, well it started with Clint and Tony putting the ideas in Thor’s head that lovers should be wearing each other’s clothes and now, the God of Thunder is bulldozing his way through Stiles’ paltry wardrobe.
Normally he wouldn’t mind having his lovers wearing his clothes, encouraged it even, and Thor totally gave the plaid more justice than he would ever be able to but none of his clothes had made it intact after being worn by the hulking mass of muscles that is the Asgardian’s body.
At first, he had indulged the Aesir Prince with this whim of his but after having many of his limited-edition T-shirt be torn off its seams, he finally decided that enough is enough.
So now here he is, trying to stand firm against the hulking figure of his lover and trying with all of his might to not be distracted by the very much visible contours of the Aesir’s muscles beneath the fabric of the white Henley that was pulled taut on the wide expanse of Thor’s chest. Those bulging muscled arms are so totally not helping him in his cause.
Damnit.
Thor looked so hot wearing it and something inside of him just preened at the sight of his lover wearing his clothes. Perhaps Lydia is right, he is more wolf than human after running with them for years.
But the thought of his dissipating wardrobe had him steeling himself against the very much mouthwatering temptation that is his lover wearing his clothes.
“You heard me. Take. It. Off.”
He tried to keep his eyes on Thor’s face but it is proving to be a hard challenge to him at every passing second because those rippling muscles are too eye catching for him to keep his eyes off from. Thor frowned and crossed his arms over his chest, which made the fabric of his Henley be pulled thinner to encompass the sheer thickness of the Thunderer’s arms. And that is very much distracting for Stiles.
“I do not understand why you would demand such a thing. Friend Barton and Man of Iron told me it is a custom here for you mortal to wear each other’s garments if you are a lover. I even saw Man of Iron himself wearing the good Captain’s clothes and I saw the same thing with Steven too.”
Shit.
Thor is already bringing out the bug gun in the form of confused puppy dog eyes that Stiles had never managed to grew an immunity of despite spending years with the pack of literal puppies. If Thor decided to bring out the tears, then Stiles would be going down in two second flat.
“And I am not a loaded like them dude. I don’t have enough money to be spending it on the clothes you destroyed with those muscles of yours and my wardrobe is already measly as it is.”
The frown on Thor’s face deepened and it took all of Stiles restraint to not give in at the sight of it.
“Does this mean you wish to nullify our bond?”
His voice sound so soft and meek that Stiles was caught off guard by it. Thor is anything but soft-spoken and to hear the usually exuberant God of Thunder sounding so timid is like a punch to the gut.
“What? Dude no! Why would you think that?! Which part did I said made you think I want to break up with you?!”
Stiles could not help the shouting because he totally did not mean to make Thor think he is breaking up with him when he decided to confront him for the sake of his decimating wardrobe.
“But you said you wished to stop this custom. We would not be lovers anymore if I am not wearing your garments and you yourself stated that you would not wear my own. I was only trying to convince you that I still loves you.”
A sudden pang of realization hit him and the argument that he had built up during the last few months about his clothes just stuck and wither away in his throat.
How had he missed that? How had he missed the desperation in Thor’s action when the man had slipped into his clothes? How had he missed the increased amount of PDA from Thor? How had he missed all those romancing that Thor had been doing these past few months?
But worst of all, how had he missed the desperate plea that the Aesir had been giving him through his action?
Wow, he suddenly realized just how much of a douchebag he must have been to Thor during the last few months when he had argued with him about his clothes, especially when the God of Thunder had gotten it in his head that sharing clothes is something like the solidifying point of a relationship.
Now he finally realized what all of that bordering smothering clinginess that Thor had been projecting these past few months.
Thor had been thinking that Stiles was trying to break up with him for months now.
It was like a slap to the face to be reminded of it and Stiles felt his heart ache at the sight of Thor’s hunched shoulders. Thor should not look like this. The Aesir should be brimming with confidence. He should be off prancing around with another entertaining tales to be told to the rest of the team. He should not be this stooped figure who looked like all fight had fled him.
And Stiles had played a huge part in causing this.
“Thor…”
Stiles whispered his name softly and closed the distance between them with rushed steps. He wrapped his arms around the wide breadth of Thor’s shoulders and did not care that he would have to be on the tips of his toes for hours to maintain this position. He owed Thor at least this much for all of the heartache that he had undoubtedly caused unknowingly for the past few months.
“I thought there was something wrong with me when you do not wish to wear my garments and I tried to be more insistent with this custom by wearing your attires but I only seemed to aggravate you more by doing so. I gave my all to strengthen our bond, to convince you that my love for you is still burning strong but it never seemed to be enough because you always demanded that I take off your apparels. I thought you had fallen out of love with me when you refused to go along with this custom.”
A wave of anger rise up inside of him but he tampered it down because now is not the time for him to get angry, especially when the anger was not directed at Thor. He is angry at Tony and Clint for making Thor think it to be like this and most of all, he is angry at himself for missing this huge elephant that had been weighing down on Thor’s shoulders.
Sometime he forgot that under all of those thickheaded exuberance, Thor is a sharp minded strategist who was trained from birth to understand the unspoken tactics of wars.
“You oaf, I would still love you no matter what. Even if you decided to prance around naked than wearing my clothes, I would still love you. Custom be damned because I will not stop loving you just because of some stupid made up custom. Don’t you ever dare to doubt that.”
Stiles tightened his arms around Thor’s neck and tried to not cry when Thor finally wrapped his thick arms around him.
“Truly?”
The arms felt vulnerable despite the coiling muscles rippling under the skin and the hesitancy in it made Stiles feel like the world’s biggest douchebag.
“Of course, you big buffoon. Nothing can make me stop loving you, well except for hurting my Baby Roscoe. Other than that, nothing can make me not to be in love with you. Why else do you think I put up with your off-chart loudness for years now?”
He could not help adding the humorous jab because he wants to hear Thor laugh, anything is better than this hesitant man that the misunderstanding had rendered the God of Thunder to be. And Thor’s chest rumbled with laughter that he muffled into Stiles’ hair.
“This is not a dream? You still do love me?”
The awe in Thor’s voice made this all the more bittersweet and Stiles made a mental note to enlist Pepper’s and Natasha’s help in punishing Tony and Clint for this.
“Yes. A million yes and I am totally telling you that every day until you finally get it through this thick head of yours.”
Stiles was caught off guard by the sudden crash of warm lips against his own but he is not complaining about it because Thor gave the best kisses and he fully intend to make Thor feels as loved as the Thunderer made him feel. He broke the kiss for a moment to jump up so that he could wrap his legs around Thor’s waist and the big hands of the Aesir instinctively cupped his hips to support his weight.
Their lips met again but it is more deeper than the desperate kisses that Thor had peppered his lips with. It is filled with an all consuming passion that Stiles had never felt for anyone, not even toward Lydia, whom he had been in love for more than a decade. Stiles caressed Thor’s face with one his hands and ran a hand through the silky strands of golden hair, fully trusting the God of Thunder to hold him secure and not drop him.
“I love you.”
He breathed it out against Thor’s lips when they finally break apart for air and their eyes met, seeing only utter love and adoration for each other.
“And I you.”
Thor pressed his lips against Stiles’ in a chaste kiss and Stiles is reminded once again why he is so in love with this brute. They both stayed like that for what felt like an eternity, wrapped around each other and simply sharing breathing space with the other as their forehead met together like their eyes. Thor’s hands are a comforting weight on his hips and Stiles love running his fingers through Thor’s hair.
He would not mind staying like this forever.
“You never did tell me why you refused to wear my garments.”
Thor’s question break through the comfortable silence between them and Stiles’ face exploded in a mess of blotchy red spots. He had hoped that Thor would just let it go and forget about it.
But Thor’s imploring blue eyes had him caving in before his brain could fully be on board with it.
“Yours were too big. Those shirt-”
“Tunic. They are called tunic.”
“Whatever, of yours were too big and it looked like a dress on me. I never felt more emasculated than when I was wearing your clothes.”
A smirk made itself present on Thor’s lips and the danger instinct that Stiles had honed for decades blared at the back of his mind.
“Don’t you dare go over there. Thor, I’m not kidding. Don’t you dare do it. Thor!”
His protests were ignored as Thor carried him to their shared bedroom and his further objections was muffled by the soundproofed door of their room.
Hours later, when they laid cuddled on the damp bed with Thor’s bare chest plastered to Stiles’ sweaty back, the God of Thunder had leaned down to whisper into the ears of a twitchy and overstimulated Stiles.
“You made a fetching lady.”
“I hate you.”
“You don’t.”
“You’re right. I don’t.”
“I love you Mieczysław Stilinski.”
“Yeah, yeah. Love you too oaf. Now sleep.”
0 notes
Last Seen Blogs
ladysunkiss
𝐒𝐔𝐍 𝐊𝐈𝐒𝐒𝐄𝐃
a-breathy-one
A Killing Eve blog
paranoiastudio
paranoia_studio
angis-things
vida Amor e sexo
sell-my-soul-to-you-blog
Slightly_Tainted