Friday is report and document creation day. I’m seriously considering outsourcing Friday.
Each time I have to rip through email to pick out highlights from the past week, open and modify a template document and summarize for upper management* I keep thinking back to “Step III: A is for Automation” in Tim Ferris’ The 4-Hour Workweek
.
If the task you are doing can be outsourced to personal assistant companies anywhere in the world for $5/hour, why on earth are you doing this task yourself? Outsource it and use the hour to learn something, take a walk, have a conversation with someone you’ve never spoken to before or go and spend time with your family.
That’s where my head was when I knocked this tweet out. Too many reports that could be done by someone else in time that I should be using to change the world.
* the higher up the ladder you’re talking to, the more succinct and direct your message must be. Is it because they’re stupid at the top and need simple words? Hell no. You are one of hundreds of demands on their attention in any given day. It’s not that the big guns don’t have time for you (we all have the same amount of time handed to us), it’s that they usually only lack the capability to give lots of attention. Present what you need to say and what needs done about it in one or two lines (preferably verbal, not email or Powerpoint karaoke). Really, only one line.
From Pascal’s Lettres Provinciales:
“My Reverend Fathers, my letters have not usually followed so closely,
nor been so long. The small amount of time that I have is the cause of
both. I would not have made this so long except that I do not have the
leisure to make it shorter.”
It takes time and is a minor art to be able to summarize and still achieve the decision/opinion/result you are aiming for.
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