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Let's Stop Wasting Time We Don't Have.
Vashte Johnson
May 24, 2024 • Estimated Reading Time: 8 minutes
If you’re always creating reports in a time crunch, and the quality of your deliverables still isn’t as good as you know they can be, giving away time as a concession to win the sale when you have an inefficient report creation process isn't serving you—or your clients.
The impact that’s having on the way your deliverables are turning out is massive.
“But Vash”, you say, “our competitors are promising reports faster than us. How can we win projects? If we don’t agree to the client’s request for a faster turnaround time, we'll lose.”
I hear your concern.
I don’t necessarily want you to tell clients that it’s going to take more time to deliver a high quality deliverable.
Not at the risk of losing the project. We gotta keep the lights on.
I do want you to have a strategy in place that enables you to reclaim and protect what time you do have.
Because, though it's in short supply, time is one of THE key ingredients of a high-quality, impactful deliverable.
It's certainly more important than graphic design concerns, such as color, and style, and all the rest.
A strategy like this helps you in two ways:
✅ you'll produce consistently higher-quality deliverables,
✅ and you and your team will produce them faster.
⬇️
Watch the full interview here.
Read the transcript of this video and my takeaways below.
V: "The reason why I developed the model is because there were...there were some problems I was seeing across the board. So after doing this and working with everybody from smaller shops to bigger insights companies to the client side, just, I was kind of seeing the same problems being repeated over and over and over. And one of them was sacrificing time.
So folks don't leave enough time for deliverables. We come out of field, and then you say, hey, the report's due in two weeks. We've got two weeks to create this thing.
One of the key ingredients to a powerful deliverable is time, because you need time to think and form those connections that we talked about. And you kind of can't force yourself to do it."
Insights Require Deep Thinking...Which Requires Time.
V: "Like, I have some of my biggest aha moments at the gym. Taking a walk, in the shower. Like, making food. So it's just, you have to give yourself the time.
I've come up with solutions to a deck where I couldn't find the connection between three insights and find that framework. I found them in a dream before. And woke up and went, oh, that's it! So, and that's not, that's so esoteric. That's not a thing you can tell your client, 'sorry, I gotta dream about it for a week!' Like, you can't really do that.
And so you have to give yourself the space and the time to be a human being who needs to sit with this stuff and have a life and get enough sleep and eat right and be able to form these connections. So time is so important."
Hold Up:
Some people scoff, and hear "more time" as "goofing off".
Not at all.
When you have an efficient report creation process that reclaims all the massive amounts of time that takes place during project management and fielding, when we come out of fielding, there’s no padding, and there are no "extra" days for lollygagging (as much as I really like lollygagging).
However, there can and should be fewer (or zero, preferably) late nights and weekends.
When I shut down at a decent 5-7pm in the evening, and when I don't work weekends, I don't consider that goofing off.
Sleeping, working out, touching grass, mindfully preparing and eating meals, getting heat shock proteins in the sauna—none of this is synonymous with goofing off.
Those things are biologically necessary for protecting my greatest asset—my mind.
Because as a human being (admit it—you are!), you need to be at your best in order to think, dig in, framework, write, discuss, build your case, edit, and design the best, clearest, most targeted, most gorgeous product you can create to provide value for your client’s research spend.
Or you can stay up until 3am doing all that stuff...and you will not be at your best when you're back at your desk, what, at best 4-6 hours later.
And you will not hit send on your best work.
So jealously protect your time.
It's life itself. It's your greatest, most precious, most finite asset.
Okay. Back to your regularly scheduled podcast transcript:
Multitasking—Which Impedes Deep Thinking—Makes Report Creation Slower, and Diminishes the Quality of Your Deliverables.
V: "The other thing that I was seeing was that folks were relying on design to do the heavy lifting of the Idea Hierarchy, so they weren't giving themselves again—time is that ingredient to dive deep and find those insights and create those frameworks—because they were trying to do that, and design slides at the same time.
So, I was seeing in their process this messiness of, you know, 'I write an outline and then I put all those things on slides, and then I design the slides and I see what fits and what doesn't fit. And then I spend a lot of time designing this slide, and then I find that it doesn't fit. So I throw it away—' and I'm like, wait, 'you spent 3 hours on that slide. You threw it awa—why did you design it?!' You shouldn't have designed it. Don't design anything until you've got your, you know, exactly what you're here to say and what your storyline is.
So I just saw so much messiness in the process that it was taking the short amount of time that people, they already ain't got no time! You already have no time. And so you're staying up late and you're spending time on weekends, and you're still coming out with a product that looks amateurish. Unfortunately."
Clients Deserve Deliverables that are the Tangible Representation of Your Best and Deepest Thinking on the Subject.
V: "If your client spends the equivalent of a BMW on research with you, I feel like, because the deck is the thing that lives on, you know, after the, everybody's drank the wine and have had the snacks in the back room and have seen the focus groups, the deck is what lives on, and that's what everybody's going to remember. And if that doesn't capture the tools that we talked about, they didn't get their $70,000, $100,000 worth out of that research engagement. That, to me, is not a win. And so it's the most important thing. And it was left to the end.
And so I wanted to create a framework that would reclaim some of that time that would enable my clients to form those deep connections, because those deep connections are what drive the beautiful visuals that make it so our clients can see what we're saying.”
So, Make Space for Deep Thinking by Creating Strategic Parts of the Deliverable During Project Management and Fielding.
And so it starts as soon as you win a research engagement, you can start on a deliverable.
Don't wait until the last two weeks."
If you want to have your team create more valuable, more impactful deliverables, just reach out to book some time (zing!) where I’ll help you uncover a strategy to make your team better, faster, and more efficient at creating them using the resources you already have right now.
Send your questions in—I'm always happy to answer them.
Look out for a reply from me answering your question on the Slidedesignr YouTube channel, or right here in this newsletter.
