Why Aren't I Progressing Faster?
I've been a bit dissatisfied lately with the speed of my progress through the training and building out my website, so this week I decided to spend a little time figuring out why.
Since progress is oftentimes a function of the amount of time and effort one puts into a project, I decided to try to answer questions like:
- Am I putting in enough time, and
- Am I using the time I am putting in to greatest advantage?
I'm a linear thinker and a statistician by inclination so, in order to answer these questions, the first thing that occurred to me was -- I need some data!
I'm familiar with Teamwork.com, so the first thing I did was set up a free account to manage my WA project. Using Teamwork allowed me to not only set up what I thought were realistic performance goals, but it also has an easy-to-use timer that allowed me to keep track of the time I spend on various tasks.
And the insights from the information I gathered were amazing:
1. I'm not spending anywhere near enough time working on WA to meet my performance goals. I was shocked to realize that, in the entire week, I'd only devoted 8 hours and 25 minutes on the tasks I'd set out to accomplish! While it "felt" like I had worked more, I realized that things like answering personal emails, reading the news, and just general surfing were stealing a lot of time away from my real goals.
2. Some of my goals did not have realistic timelines. I noticed that, particularly with respect to training, I had anticipated spending much less time on each lesson than was actually required. (NOTE: I am generally a bit slow, but I'm totally okay with that so long as I know how long it will take me at my pace.)
3. I was spending too much time on things I wanted to do and not enough time on tasks that I didn't want to do. I had included spending some time on community involvement in my goals, but I find you all so interesting and your posts so helpful that I was spending a disproportionately large amount of time on community and not enough on training tasks that scared me a little bit and which I didn't want to do.
4. I learned exactly how long certain tasks take. I learned, for example, that it takes me on average 15 minutes to make a Comment, 30 minutes to leave Feedback, and an hour to write a blog post here -- and that those times declining!
It's been said "If you can measure it, you can manage it," and measuring my time has led to many insights that will help me manage this limited and valuable resource better. Now that I know what I need to tweak, I'm really looking forward to seeing "measurable" progress in the weeks to come.
P.S. It took me 56 minutes and 9 seconds to write this blog post!
Thank you for reading this blog post! Best wishes to all for your continued success.
Recent Comments
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I really appreciate the insight you have revealed here. I'm willing to bet that your time evaluation applies to a lot of people, including me more than likely) Okay, this reply is eating up almost 3 minutes already. I'm movin' on - Thx!
I am glad you figured out why you are not progressing as fast as you want it to. Most of the time we try to find some external reason or cause for what happens in our life but ultimately, we are in control. And if we want something to change, we might discover that what/who we have to change is ourselves.
GPM56, you are way smarter than me. I have some of the same problems with my site. I seem to spend the majority of my time here with the community, which I enjoy but the site is going begging and that is what I'm going to be doing too if I don't devote more time on my site. I must allocate my time; the majority on building my business and less time socializing. I'm too much of a socializer. I just like people and talking with them. And, hopefully helping too.
Wishing you the best in building your site.