Six Weeks In, What Actually Stuck

The review nobody does

New tools get adopted with enthusiasm and abandoned without ceremony.

Nobody sits down six weeks later and asks what actually changed, so the impression persists that everything was tried and nothing came of it, or that everything was transformed.

Neither is usually true, and the accurate picture is available in about fifteen minutes.

It is also the input to every decision about what to pay for and what to tell your staff.

Look at last week, not at February

Since intentions are not evidence.

Write down what you actually used it for in the last seven days, from your history rather than memory.

That list is short and it is the truthful answer.

Compare it against what you tried in the first fortnight, which will be considerably longer.

The gap between those two lists is the whole finding, and it is the same shape for almost everybody.

A handful of uses survive and the rest were experiments, which is how adopting anything works.

What usually survives

• Drafting something you were avoiding.
• Summarising a long document.
• Rewriting something to be shorter.
• Explaining a technical thing plainly.
• Getting past a blank page.

What these share is that they are all production rather than judgement, and all of them are checkable. The uses that do not survive are the ones where checking the output took as long as doing the work.

What usually did not

Worth naming, since the failures are as informative.

Anything needing current information, which it does not have.

Anything needing your prices, your area, or your specifics, unless you supplied them.

Anything where the answer had to be right and you could not check it easily.

And the ambitious plans: the automated content programme, the chat widget, the newsletter that writes itself.

Those failed for a reason rather than through lack of effort, and knowing which reason stops you attempting the same thing again in June.

A worked example

A business listed eleven things they had tried since the start of February.

Looking at the last week, two were still in use: drafting replies to detailed enquiries, and turning long supplier documents into a page of extracted points.

Both saved real time weekly and both had been checkable.

Of the nine abandoned, four had needed information it did not have, three had produced output that took longer to verify than to write, and two had simply been curiosity.

They kept the subscription on the strength of the two, wrote both up as short procedures, and stopped attempting the other nine.

The fifteen minutes of review was worth more than most of the six weeks.

Write down the two that worked

Which is what converts a habit into a process.

For each surviving use, write three lines: what it is for, what you supply, and what you check afterwards.

That makes it something a member of staff can do rather than something only you know how to do.

It also means you notice when the tool changes and the procedure stops producing the same result.

Three lines each, in the same document as everything else you have written down about how the business works.

Businesses that do this get compounding value and businesses that do not repeat the discovery every few months.

Count the actual saving

Since this is where expectations were set unrealistically.

For the two things that stuck, estimate the time saved per week honestly.

It is usually between twenty minutes and two hours, which is worth having and is not the transformation the coverage described.

Compare that against the subscription and against the time spent on the nine that failed.

For most small businesses the answer is a modest positive, which is a perfectly good outcome and worth stating plainly.

Overstating it now makes the next honest assessment harder.

Decide what to try next

Since the review should produce one action.

Pick one thing that failed for a reason you can now address, usually because you can supply the information it lacked.

Or pick one adjacent task similar in shape to the ones that worked, since that is where the odds are best.

One experiment for the next six weeks, with a date to review it.

That is a considerably better pattern than either abandoning the subject or trying eleven more things, and it is the one that compounds over a year.

Check what it did to your output, not just your time

A second question worth asking, since time saved is only half of it.

Look at what actually went out in the last six weeks: the pages, the quotes, the replies, and ask whether they are better, worse, or the same as the ones from December.

A tool that saves two hours a week and produces slightly blander correspondence has a cost that does not appear in any time calculation.

Equally, a business that published four pages it would otherwise never have written has gained something no saving figure captures.

Read six things you sent in December beside six from March and judge them, which takes ten minutes and answers a question the usage history cannot.

The counter-case

Six weeks may be too early.

Some uses only become obvious once a habit has formed, and a tool judged in March can become central by September as capabilities change.

The tools are also moving quickly enough that a use which failed in February may work now, which is an argument for retrying rather than for concluding.

And a business that tried nothing has nothing to review, which is its own answer and worth noticing rather than defending against the coverage.

Look at last week rather than at your intentions, write up the two that survived, and pick one thing to try next.

The fifteen minutes

1. List what you tried in February.
2. List what you used last week.
3. Note why each was abandoned.
4. Write up the survivors in three lines.
5. Estimate the weekly saving honestly.
6. Compare against the cost.
7. Pick one thing to try next.

Step two is the only honest input, since what you used last week is a fact and what you intended to use it for is a memory of enthusiasm.

The general principle is covered in spending a hundred dollars to learn something.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.