Microtasking

Today I started learning the Dvorak simplified keyboard layout. Presumably, since the most commonly used keys are in the "home row", typing with Dvorak results in less hand movement, and thus lowers the likelihood of Repetitive Stress Injury.

I learned quickly that it has another effect - a HUGE drop in typing efficiency. I went from 75 wpm using QWERTY to just about 9 wmp in Dvorak. Now, of course, as I get better this number will go up, or I will develop RSI anyway from pulling my hair out.

Nevertheless, my first response to this setback was to focus on becoming faster at typing. Because more is better, right? Having made slow progress in the few hours since I started, it got me thinking that maybe my focus was wrong. Maybe I should take the opportunity to rethink the goal. Maybe I shouldn't work so hard to increase my Words Per Minute, but instead decrease my Words Per Message.

Now, I'm not saying that every message ought to fit in 140 characters (that would just be silly). There are plenty of reasons to write more, but I've found that there is often a lot of benefit to writing less, especially in a business context.

Generally speaking there is an inverse relationship between the message length you can get away with and the distance (hierarchically) between yourself and your target audience. For example, if you're writing an email to your good friend, you can make it pretty long - they'll probably read most of it.

On the other hand, if you're writing an email to your boss, keep to the facts. Too much cruft will leave your email stagnating in a growing stack of "to do" items that never seems to decay.

If you're writing an email to your boss's boss, be as brief as possible. More than a few sentences and you've already lost them. Not only will your email be unlikely to be read, too many of these and your name will become an Outlook rule synonymous with "automatically discard".

You get the gist. Extrapolating to the far end of the spectrum, if you want to contact someone who is well respected that you've never met, keep it to two sentences with a clear "next step". Give them a question they can answer quickly, or don't bother. Make them think, but not too hard.

The rule works the other way as well. If you're sending a note to someone who is lower down in the hierarchy (whether they report to you or not), you can be as lengthy as you want, and they'll probably have to read it, lest they suffer the consequences. Oh, they'll lament your having wasted their time, but they'll read it nonetheless.

Virtual assistants fall into this category. Since you're paying them to work for you, they'll at least read through your message, regardless of how long it happens to be. It's a poor choice to give more information than necessary to solve the problem, but you certainly can if you so choose.

Given all of this, you can see that if you keep it short with everyone, it's a clear sign of respect. It's a sign that you understand the value of their time, and want to make the most of it having already grabbed their attention. It's a sign that you are sensitive to their need to quickly incorporate your message into their thinking or ignore it completely in the shortest possible time. Because time is the ultimate scarcity - there's only so much, and we're not getting any younger.

So the next time you find yourself running on and on about this or that, consider trimming it down. Reduce your words per message and we'll all thank you.

(This blog post was written in QWERTY).

"Why should I pay someone to do something that I can do myself?"

Of all the questions we regularly receive, this is one of the easiest to answer, but yet the toughest to explain. Once you've adopted a broader mindset of what outsourcing really is, the question becomes superfluous, rhetorical. Getting to that broader mindset, however, can be a little jarring.

The simple truth of the matter is that you're already quite comfortable with paying other people to do work for you - you may just not realize it. To take an extreme example, consider your shoes. You could make your own shoes. You could buy yards of leather and rubber, cut them to the shape of your feet and sew them together with tough thread. Ostensibly this would be cheaper than buying shoes because you'd be buying the materials in bulk and using your own labor to assemble them.

But you don't make your own shoes. You outsource that task, opting instead to buy your shoes prefabricated, distributed and resold by a retailer. Why is that? We've established that you could, in principle, construct your own shoes cheaper by doing it yourself. So what keeps you from doing it? What stops you from checking out a book on leather work and getting started?

Time. You value your time more than the difference between the cost of the retail shoes and the hypothetical cost you'd incur sewing your own.

Ok, maybe cobbling is a bad example - I mean, who would challenge the necessity of specialization when a manufacturer can obviously achieve much lower aggregate costs than you could ever expect to.

Let's pick an example a little closer to home. Presuming you have a car, do you change your own oil? Why not? You could acquire the blocks to put your car up (fixed cost), buy the oil, drip pans and tools and do it yourself. It'd be cheaper in the long run than the chain store mechanics. What's stopping you? Why don't you read an article online about how to properly drain a car's oil and get to it?

Time again. Learning to change your car's oil takes time, which you don't care to spend. And even if you get good at it, there's a fair chance you'll never be faster at it than the specialty shops with all their fine machinery.

Then again, maybe that's a bad example too since vehicle maintenance is a specialized skill, just like cobbling. Let's see if we can find an activity you probably outsource that doesn't require a great degree of skill.

How about food preparation? Tossing a salad, boiling some noodles and heating up some sauce are not difficult tasks. In fact, if you follow the instructions on the packaging, it's pretty difficult to mess up. Given that basic food preparation is so easy, and that raw materials are so cheap, why are companies like McDonald's and Pizza Hut so effective?

Of course, the answer again is the value of time. Fast food companies allow you to exchange money for time - it takes them less time to provide you with what you want than you would take making it yourself. Even in the case of an actual fancy restaurant, it's quicker to have the chef prepare you a high quality meal than for you to purchase all the requisite ingredients, follow a recipe, and clean up afterwards.

Once you realize that you're already paying people to do things for you, the "why" becomes obvious. It's because you value your time. Having other people work for you is not just for the rich, it's an everyday fact of life.

One question remains: now that you're comfortable with the idea of trading money for time (which you do daily), what other kinds of tasks can you offload? What, in your life, takes up time but doesn't require your own personal creative expertise?

That's what you should microtask.

Now, why buy a CD, when you can have a virtual assistant call you and tell you how great you are!



(FYI - this was kind of a joke. Hopefully we provide more value than this)

This is where we'll talk about Microtasking. Think tiny tasks that you can pay someone else to do. Like make restaurant reservations. Or do research for a book report. Whatever - as long as your assistant doesn't need to be nearby. Hopefully, as we write more about it, you'll get the idea.