Don't Overthink It - Anne Bogel Page 0,36
got someone else to do it, I could retain the bandwidth to keep writing books and blog posts and creating bookish classes.
So I hired my friend and fellow podcaster Knox McCoy to talk me through proof of concept, teach me about advertising possibilities, and guide me in equipment choices. He’d already learned how to do all this; I didn’t see the point in replicating his efforts. He created sample scripts to show me how I could begin and end each episode, and though I edited his drafts to make the voice my own, those scripts were enormously valuable because they gave me something to react to.
After I recorded my guest interviews, Knox edited the show to my specifications and created the final version of each episode. The first two episodes took serious work, but after that I was able to streamline my workflow, reserving my focus for creating the show, and let Knox focus on producing it.
Outsourcing the technical aspects of podcasting freed me up to focus on the things I was best at, the things only I could do, like researching books to discuss, finding potential guests, and preparing excellent interview questions, in addition to my other work. With the help of a good team, I could see more projects through to completion, projects I wouldn’t have had the capacity to take on if I were working solo.
It’s Not All Up to You
Most of us intuitively understand we don’t need to do everything ourselves, so we outsource in different ways, for different reasons. You may not think of yourself as a “delegator,” per se, but you almost certainly are. Maybe you don’t think twice when the air conditioner starts making funny noises; you pick up the phone and call your favorite service company. Maybe you don’t want to think so hard about what’s for dinner each night, so you rely on a meal-planning service or a weekly plan on a blog or in a magazine. Maybe you swear by a cleaning schedule from Pinterest so you no longer need to think about when to change the sheets or how often to clean out the fridge—you just do what the checklist says.
When we outsource these tasks—and their corresponding decisions—we may save time, we may save money, we may get a better outcome, but most pertinent to overthinking, we save our mental processing power.
Deciding What to Outsource
Strategic outsourcing helps us deal with the onslaught of decisions that come at us every day. There’s always so much to decide, and it’s easy for the cumulative effect to become overwhelming. (And we know from chapter 3 that feeling overwhelmed is a sure sign of decision fatigue.) It can be liberating to realize you don’t have to manage everything yourself, nor do you have to make all those decisions. Looking to other sources lightens the mental load.
Different people will outsource different things, for different reasons. You won’t find hard-and-fast rules here for what to consider taking off your plate. There’s no one-size-fits-all checklist, because we all have different talents, interests, skill sets, and resources. But you can ask yourself the following questions when considering what to take off your plate.
Am I Able to Do It?
The simplest question to answer is this: Are you able to do it? If you can’t do it yourself, of course it makes sense to get help—whether that’s from a friend or a professional. Depending on your situation and your skill set, this might mean getting help with tutoring in math, painting a high ceiling, or putting on makeup for a media appearance.
(Sometimes we might suspect we could take on the project but find the idea so daunting that we feel like we can’t. More on that in a minute.)
What if you’re not able to do it right now but like the idea of learning how? Read on.
Do I Want to Do It?
When my friend Meg started her podcast, she didn’t know anything about audio production—but she was highly motivated to learn. She wanted to retain total control over the listening experience she was creating for her audience, which meant being hands-on with each episode, from start to finish. But her decision to do it herself was also driven by a deeper purpose. She told me that when she first began the show, “I was coming out of a dark season of postpartum depression, and the choice to allow myself to be a beginner, to learn some new skills, and to see a thing through from idea to end product