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Ship It

Stop Thinking and Ship it Baby!

by JimRaffel on June 1, 2010

Last night while watching a mindless episode of tosh.0 with my family I grabbed my MacBook and wrote the previous post Watch Your Thoughts. It took about 20 minutes and about half my attention was devoted to writing the post.

Ship It BabyYou don’t know what will resonate. I stopped thinking and started writing the post. I didn’t really realize what I had done until this morning when I sat with my friend Phil Gerbyshak and discussed the success the post was enjoying in the retweet universe. During the discussion he said multiple times just “ship it baby!”

The ideas don’t always have to be new. Nothing in Watch Your Thoughts was new. I just added mine and my wife’s real life perspective to something we all already know and repackaged it. In reminding myself I reminded all of you and that resonated. Once I started typing that post I stopped thinking, which considering half my brain was watching tosh.0 makes sense. Without even realizing it I took Phil’s advice to ship it baby!

Lots of “ship it baby” can be repackaging. I’m starting to copy some of my more popular printing related posts from this blog to the ColorMetrix blog. While I am not re-writing the posts I am revising and updating them. Until this morning I didn’t see this activity as fitting the ship it baby mentality but it does. A revised post cross linked to an original post does good things with Google, if you do it right.

Just do what comes naturally. The two more surprising successes I have had in the video world happened by accident. First, I filmed a bunch of Fit Milwaukee runners at an indoor marathon earlier this year. I combined all the footage into a mashup that was then viewed several hundred times. I was just making a video for friends. More recently I shot some video of FourSquare fun being had by a group of Milwaukee folks headed to the SXSW conference. The video has been watched more than 5000 times. In neither case was I trying to make a video to be watched by the masses. I was having fun filming friends.

It’s like when you are single and don’t want to be. The moment you throw you hands up and give up, you meet “that person.” Seems to me my best published works come when I least expect it.

Are your experiences similar? Jump in let me know what you think.

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Produce and Ship Daily

by JimRaffel on March 2, 2010

With the release of Seth Godin’s Linchpin (which I have yet to read) there has been a whole lot of buzz in the Blogosphere about “shipping it.” It’s good talk folks about the need to produce deliverable product each day and you should be paying close attention if you are not already doing so.

Ask yourself the questions what do I produce and do I ship it daily? When I answered these questions, my thinking once again went radical on me. My daily priorities have changed so much it makes me wonder how I was even modestly successful up to this point. Answer: I was working hard but not smart most of the time.

I have three priorities in my life;

  • ColorMetrix CEO
  • JimRaffel.com brand manager
  • Most important, husband and father

Above all else and before the rest of my daily tasks, I must ship daily something of value to the constituents of each priority in my life.

In the case of ColorMetrix the highest value item I can produce is an engagement proposal. Buying into our ProofPass solution is a long-term (averaging 3+ years now) two-way commitment and nothing happens at ColorMetrix until an engagement proposal is accepted. The second most valuable item I ship for the company is communications (email and otherwise) related to completing engagement proposals or resolving existing client issues (happy customers are my number one priority).

Writing posts is the A #1 Priority for this blog. Without quality content you have no reason to visit and more importantly return again and again. I can only generate so much traffic with my email signature and witty tweets on Twitter. So, each day I focus on writing one quality post for the blog. In January I managed to produce one every other day. In February I churned out  17 posts in 28 days. With the new “ship it” mentality, March will be the month of 31 posts.

My family comes before my work. They may not always see it that way. Take a look at item #2 from My Top 10 Personal Development Tips.  What they need is what we all need; love, support, attention, and sometimes direction. It’s so simple that sometimes I forget to gaze into my wife’s eyes and ask the question “How was your day sweetheart?” What I then need to produce and ship is kind and patient attention while I listen to the good the bad and the ugly of her day. For the kids it’s a simple “Can I help you with that?” Mine are teenagers now but when they were younger it was showing up for Cub Scouts, Father/Daughter events, and sporting events. Well, more than showing up, being present. I wish I could have some of those moments back to have been more present than I was.

Is it reasonable to ignore all the noise in your daily grind until you produce and ship what provides maximum value to your audience? Is it alright to have only one or two A #1 priorities each day and all the rest of the list falls where it may? Please let me know what you think in the comments, I promise to respond!

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