It’s slowly become my secret weapon; my strongest talent.
The binary tasks // The cut-and-paste projects // The mundane metrics collection.
💩 work
The dregs.
It may sound strange to admit, but I enjoy this type of endeavor. As a solo builder, I feel it’s necessary. Not easy, but necessary … and [oddly] satisfying.
Peter … I don’t think you realize, though … you can outsource this to Mechanical Turk … to an overseas VA … to an intern. Really. To anyone …
🤫 sssshhh, shhh, shh …
To me, those routes are overkill for my type of scenarios – ie. a proof of concept; identifying product/market fit; or simply knocking out small projects. Why waste time on vetting VA’s or verifying other’s work when I can simply bang it out myself.
And over the years, the more I did this 💩 work, the more I got used to it. And the more I got used to it, the more I incorporated it into my daily activity.
And then
it slowly
seeped into my identity.
It doesn’t consume all my time. Just a fraction of my day. And I feel an inch of pride each day when my monkey work is complete.
Nowadays, when I’m in gritty gutter mode, the idea of outsourcing reeks of an insult.
That frame of mind … the binary robot mode … I can get so much accomplished. In those times, here’s a common conversation my brain has with my awareness:
🧠 Hmm, it looks like I need to perform some data entry on this spreadsheet of information I collected.
👌 Sweet, gimme that garbage, I’ll verify its accuracy first, and then input into the database. One by one, if necessary.
🧠 Agh, I forgot I have 500 raw images we need to edit …
👍 Give them to me, I’ll re-size every single one, and compress so they load well on a mobile phone with junk internet connection.
🧠 Hmmm, I need to append 225 unique utm parameters to these URLs for proper tracking & attribution …
🙋♂️ 🙋♂️ 🙋♂️
🧠 I’d be really nice if this data point was reflected on the site – but prob is, we’d have to manually collect – there is no normalized data set available
✌️ Hand it over – I’ll go line by line & collect it all …
Call me Charlie if you want. This is the kind of work that stomps out delays and launches projects.
Grunt work makes the world go round.
~ ~ click, highlight, cmd+c; cmd+v ~ ~
~ ~ click, highlight, cmd+c; cmd+v ~ ~
Add some [music] in the background, and hours will melt away.
🧘 It’s meditation, is what it really is. Serene meditation. 🧘
Once a project proves itself, paying customers help me balance the load of 💩 work, allowing me time to vet a VA, or a freelancer, or consider MTurk.
I’m not there yet, on this project specifically.
So …
back to basics.
I’ll be in the slop if you need me.
My strongest talent?
grunt work
give me all the data entry, the online research, the low level graphic design. all of it.
"But Peter, you can outsource tha…." Sshh Ssh Ssshh Sshh
— Peter Askew (@searchbound) August 23, 2019
and Jordan’s right:
Nothing.
— Jordan O'Connor (@jdnoc) November 15, 2019
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