Time Leadership for Bloggers - a case study

 

If you don’t crack the shell, you can’t eat the nut. - Persian Proverb

Cracking the shell is a necessary activity to find the nut and eat it. The same goes for theories and concepts. Applying it to a real life situation is like cracking the shell of that theory. And the lessons you learn are the golden nut of insight you find inside that shell.

Cracking the shell is exactly what this post is about, and the nut we’re cracking is the theory of the Time Leadership matrix (or Eisenhower matrix). In this article, I’m going to present a case study on how to use this technique. I took my own blogging activities as the subject.

Time Leadership - a short recap

Time Leadership is a term coined by Stephen Covey and it’s about taking control of your activities by determining their relative importance and urgency. I’ve written about this concept before when I discussed Covey’s habits and I even made a sketchcast about it.

For a quick recap: The Eisenhower Matrix has two axes:

• Importance
  Do you regard the activities as important? This is defined by you: What’s important with respect to your values, ambitions and goals?
• Urgency
  Is there time pressure to do the activities? Time pressure is often applied by others, or by circumstances.

Combined, these two axes create a matrix with four quadrants:

• I: Quadrant of Stress
  Activities are both important and urgent.
• II: Quadrant of Value
  Activities are important but not urgent.
• III: Quadrant of Deception
  Activities are not important, yet they are urgent.
• IV: Quadrant of Regret
  Activities are neither important nor urgent.

The Time Leadership Matrix for my Blogging Activities 

I’m going to discuss all the topics in the matrix briefly, but for your overview I present the entire matrix beforehand (click for a larger version).

 

I: The Quadrant of Stress

Upgrading blogging platform to latest version 

Why it’s important:
Having my blog up and running is important to me. The blogging platform is an essential part in accomplishing that, and having the latest release is essential in security.

Why it’s urgent:
I use WordPress as my (self-hosted) blogging platform and most of the releases are security releases. I don’t want my blog to be vulnerable to attacks, so there’s some urgency.

Responding to comments 

Why it’s important:
Interaction with readers, especially the active ones, is important to me. I like interacting about the topics I write about, because I want to learn and grow. And besides that, it’s good for building a sense of community, which in turn helps grow the blog.

Why it’s urgent:
The time gap between the comment and the response shouldn’t be too big, to keep the discussion alive.

Making value comments on relevant articles on other blogs 

Why it’s important:
Learning from other bloggers helps me grow. Adding value content in the comment section lets me add to that learning experience, both for me and others. And value comments are good exposure for you and your blog as well.

Why it’s urgent:
The most effect will come from comments made early on new articles. Being there as one of the first is important in securing the exposure and for setting the tone of the discussion.

II: The Quadrant of Value

Writing pillar content 

Why it’s important:
Pillar content is the foundation for your blog. Quality articles that are well researched and well thought through and add to the main focus of your blog are real assets. They satisfy your writing need, they satisfy your readers, they attract new traffic, readers and links.

Why it’s not urgent:
Quality is far more important than timing in this case. It’s better to post a couple of days later and do it really good, than to post early with less quality.

Tweaking design and SEO 

Why it’s important:
I want to grow my blog. Having an accessible and appealing design of your blog is an important factor in the conversion of first time visitors into returning or even into loyal visitors. SEO work on the other hand, makes sure that search engines like your site, and that in turn makes them send new visitors over.

Why it’s not urgent:
There’s simply no time pressure to do this. Search engines are not going to cross you out of their lists for not doing SEO. And improving the conversion is a nice bonus, but there’s no time pressure in doing it.

Reading relevant blogs 

Why it’s important:
This is important to for several reasons. Other people’s ideas help you grow, they might inspire articles you want to write and they provide context links for further reading for your readers. And by doing so, you add to your network of blogging friends.

Why it’s not urgent:
Relationships grow over time. And it doesn’t really matter to other bloggers that there’s a period of silence every now and then. And if you have plenty of inspiration, you might just be writing instead of reading.

Analyze statistics 

Why it’s important:
Understanding where your traffic is coming from, knowing who your visitors are, where they live can help you to adjust your articles a little to make them even more appealing. But also on a technical level it’s important, what’s the distribution of browsers and screen resolutions. Do you know what your site looks like in those browser/resolution combinations?

Why it’s not urgent:
This is an activity that tweaks and optimizes your blog. It makes things more professional, more appealing. But there’s no real time pressure.

Building strong profile on one or two social media sites 

Why it’s important:
Having a strong profile on one or two social media sites, gives you great contacts and enables you to send a lot of traffic to other blogs and to your own blog every now and then. Sending a lot of traffic to other blogs will often lead that blogger to your site, with a possible new contact, new reader or a link in one of the upcoming articles.

Why it’s not urgent:
You can’t build a strong profile overnight. It takes time to build it, and it has small increments. Nobody will really care if there are gaps in your profile, as long as you’re a sustained and participating member of the community.

III: The Quadrant of Deception

Keeping up to date on the latest and greatest in blogging 

Why it’s not important:
Building a blog and a readership is something that takes time. In the end it’s all about the content of your blog and a sustained rhythm of publishing new content. The latest and greatest often hold promises that are likely to go unfulfilled.

Why it’s urgent:
Well the fact that you want to be up to date implies time pressure. News is only news for a short period of time.

Commenting on other blogs for the purpose of commenting 

Why it’s not important:
Commenting for the purpose of commenting doesn’t really add value. It’s not a bad thing to leave a small comment every now and then, when you don’t really have something to add to the article, but you really liked it anyway. Comments like “great article, very inspirational” simply don’t really add to a discussion, and should be used in moderation. They most certainly won’t make people visit your blog for your insightful comment.

Why it’s urgent:
For the same reasons as described in quadrant 1 (Making value comments).

Most blog memes 

Why it’s not important:
Most blog memes are unrelated or only slightly related to your main topics. Posting off topic is not a sin, but should also be done in moderation. Once in a while there’s a meme though that hits your topic dead on, and it would be a shame not to participate. They can be very beneficial if used in a good way.

Why it’s urgent:
Since you’re asked directly by another blogger, there’s a barrier to say you’re not going to participate. And being early in a blog meme is important, because they will get the most traffic and links.

IV: The Quadrant of Regret

Excessively checking stats 

Why it’s not important:
Looking at stats doesn’t drive visitors to your site. It also doesn’t add content to your site. It also doesn’t optimize your site. And when you look too often and too close, you won’t be able to see the big picture (hint: that’s where the information is hidden).

Why it’s not urgent:
The fact that the traffic is happening now (there’s even a WordPress plugin for watching your traffic live) doesn’t make it urgent. Nobody applies pressure on you to look at your stats so often.

Reading too many blogs 

Why it’s not important:
Having a real interaction with a couple of bloggers and adding value to their sites is beneficial. Following and reading too many blogs makes the dangers of information overload very imminent. Following 100 blogs can give you over 500 unread blog posts in a week, and if you need to divide your time over so many blogs to follow, comment on, build relationships with, you’re going to fail just because of lack of time (I would anyway).

Why it’s not urgent:
Nothing bad will happen if you don’t read all those blogs for weeks in a row. It simply won’t affect your blog, you’re not going to miss out on a lot, nobody will get angry. It does free up time though.

Building profiles on all social media sites 

Why it’s not important:
Most social media sites have a user base with specific characteristics. If the main characteristics of that userbase don’t match with the audience you are targeting, than there’s no (mutual) benefit in building a strong profile on that site. Reddit for instance has a mismatch with my topics, political and news value items do good over there, and I don’t write about those. I have nothing to add, they have not a lot to give me.

Why it’s not urgent:
For much of the same reason that building a strong profile on a relevant site is not urgent as well.

Implications of this analysis

Applying the matrix to these activities is half the lesson already. Placing them in context and discovering that something is unimportant to you, is the first step in changing your behavior. Specific lessons I learned:

• Checking stats is a pitfall for me.
  It’s not a coincidence that I know about that particular plugin in WordPress. I deactivated that plugin and removed it from my WordPress installation recently.
• Most Social Media profiles are in Quadrant IV.
  I didn’t spend time on most of them anyway, but now I can be proud for not spending time on them That was very refreshing, my lack of activity just changed from a nagging feeling into a proud feeling.
• Identifying urgent stuff in Quadrant III.
  This discovery effectively cuts my urgent activities in half, leaving me plenty of time to do the Quadrant I activities better (like responding to comments on my own blog), with probably time to spare for more Quadrant II work.

And those are definitely nuts I’ve cracked the shell, and I hope this helps you in applying this wonderful theory as well. Don’t hesitate to ask questions if something is unclear or if you want further explanation. I’ll be more than happy to answer them or to help you think along.

Further reading elsewhere:

• Scaling yourself by Chris Brogan (he touches on a lot of points I wrote about recently in his post)
• The Curse of the ProBlogger - Time Management and Scaling Yourself Up (Darren Rowse’s take on Chris’ post)