Ross Kimbarovsky asks: “How do you decide what to do next? Should you write a blog post? Answer emails in your inbox? Make several sales calls? Spend time on Twitter? Or should you call a team meeting to discuss a customer problem?

Ross adds that successful people are successful in part “because they are good at setting priorities. And while there are many different ways to set priorities, I wanted to share how I set my own priorities.”

Getting Things Done – How I Set Priorities from Ross Kimbarovsky on Vimeo.

Getting Things Done: How I Set Priorities

For me, it’s all about planning. And planning, by extension, is decision-making.

1. At the end of every business day, I review what I’ve done. Takes 5 min. What did I forget to do? This goes to the top of next day’s schedule.
2. I get up around 6am to get a head start and beat the kids getting up.
3. I ignore the emails for 1 hour. Nothing is that urgent.
4. I plan my day – what is critical goes first, then what I need to do and the rest can wait
5. When all of this is done, I check emails, watch cats doing ninja tricks and what not
6. I have a super quick review at 11.45 before lunch
7. I have a super quick review at 2.45 to make sure I’m still on track.

All this is done on my pad. Writing it down seems to make it more permanent. I like to cross things off when I’ve conquered a task!

Small rewards as we go along. Nothing fancy.

Closing my inbox during the work day was/is the biggest way to save time. And, of course, turn off the phone.

How do you organize your day?

Do you feel loved? Many technical writers feel unloved. They feel they don’t get the respect they deserve. I hear this on LinkedIn and Facebook: “people don’t respect the work I do.” Well, if that’s the case, here are a few ways to get more respect and move into a more rewarding career.

Signs That You Get No Respect

Are you trying too hard?

Define Respect – first, you need to define what you are really looking for? What in others would demonstrate that they respect you? It is financial rewards, credit, acknowledgment or other things. Check that you’re not being over-sensitive or running yourself down. People who don’t respect themselves, never earn respect from others. It’s one long downward cycle.

Getting Bullied – if you feel you’re the butt of their jokes, getting run down, disrespected and ridiculed, then maybe, maybe, maybe there is some bullying going on here. You need to face these people and assert yourself. If you don’t, the same pattern will repeat itself at the next job.

Office Trolls – these people don’t respect anyone. They’re emotional vampires. Don’t take it personally. Even if you do a great job, you’ll never earn their respect. But here’s the thing. Would you want their respect, anyway?

Lack of recognition – if there is a trend/habit of certain staff getting rewarded, while you continually get overlooked, then flag it (be careful – this can back-fire if you’re seeing to be whining) or find ways to address it.

Or just accept that you work with a bunch of jerks!

What to do next

Be active – if your work environment doesn’t see the value in what you do, then get out there and start looking for alternatives. Remember, it’s always easier to get a job when you have a job.

Re-Positioning Yourself – technical writers with 5+ years experience should/could be looking at re-positioning themselves as Content Strategists, Web Content Consultants and other roles where your ‘knowledge’ in more valued. This is where the real money is. It may take you 12-18 months to make this transition but once there the rewards, respects, and career development make it worthwhile.

Perception – Technical writing is often seen by mgt as a service, in the same way that testing, customer support etc are services, i.e. useful but not *always* essential. As long as you’re a writer, people see you as providing a service. And the services industry is very far down the food chain.

Interesting places to look – if you have a taste for adventure, Brazil, Australia, India, China, Poland, Dubai, and others in the Gulf are actively seeking experienced IT professionals. While there are many barriers to moving to these counties, such as language, food, families, health etc, US multi-nationals with offices in these locations can be very supportive of people willing to give it a try. Google, Oracle, IBM, and most of the Nasdaq 100 have offices in Asia. If you’re interested, call them or visit their website. It can’t hurt to look.

What do you think?

What suggestions would you give to someone who wanted to develop their technical writing career or re-position themselves, for example, to move out of documentation and into a new field?

You’ve just been fired. The Technical Writing Dept is closed. What do you do?  This is a fact of life for many people today. Indeed, there is now a real fear that US technical writers will continue to lose their jobs to offshore companies, e.g. India & Poland. And it’s true; it’s the shape of things to come, I’m afraid. But rather than moan about it, let’s look at what you can do to re-invent yourself and find new, lucrative opportunities.

Ivan Walsh's page on Linkedin

I use LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/in/ivanwalsh) to keep my finger on the pulse with other tech writers. One of the discussions that keeps coming up (in different threads) is the future role of technical writing, especially how they need to ‘re-invent themselves’ or risk getting left behind.

7 Steps to Reinventing Yourself

The first thing is that you have to change your perception of yourself. You’re not a name tag – stop thinking of yourself as a technical writer.

You’re a person who makes a living by developing technical documentation. Stop looking at your job description. Honest, let it go. What services can you offer that others can’t? If you’ve worked in tech comms for 10 years, you must know something that a graduate doesn’t, right? What is it?

1. Define your core strengths – what’s the one skill you have about all others that you can really sell. It may not be writing. For me, it’s creating videos with Camtasia.
2. Develop a social network plan – create base-camps on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and other media channels. But work especially hard on LinkedIn (http://www.linkedin.com/in/ivanwalsh). This is where the real action is, especially if you want to network. I can’t push this enough. You have to be on LinkedIn.
3. Identify three people you trust – create a small team and go hunting for work. It’s easier to combine your strengths than go alone. This is the single biggest mistakes that people make. Don’t go it alone. Find people that you trust (or can learn to trust) and start a dialogue with them. Baby steps.
4. Endorsements – use these to build credibility and attract new clients. Remember LinkedIn, well these go a long way here. Use these recommendations to build trust. There are 3 of you so it should be easier to swap/exchange contacts and make things happen.
5. Differentiate – if everyone is doing social media, you can be sure there is a gap elsewhere. Here are some ideas.
   1. Adobe PageMaker templates development
   2. PDF to Word conversion
   3. Structured Authoring classes (valuable to business analysts)
   4. Visio diagramming (very popular with consultancy firms as they do lots of business process engineering)
6. Find a project – don’t worry about the money. The key is to get a real live project that you can work together as a team. Use this to land future work.
7. Start now – even if you are fully employed now, you can start today. Get networking. See who you can work with and how you can work together.

Opportunities I see in Asia today

I was asked recently if technical writers today are ‘no more than a commodity’? I know what the person meant; they felt they were being treated like one.

My response was that (said in a very gentle way…) they need to redefine their position as a technical writer or they will fall further and further down the food chain. Not nice, but true.

I did some consultancy with for a large US home appliance-maker here (fridges etc) in Beijing to help them knock their docs into shape. Most were written by Chinese university graduates, smart kids, but who’d never lived in an English-speaking country. The docs, reports, & (some marketing) material all reflected this. There was a lot of rework involved.

Despite the poor quality of these docs, the company has committed to this strategy and will continue to invest here. In the end, the documentation will improve.

Why?

Because western tech writers are coming here, learning some Chinese and working in the trenches. What they’ve learnt will be passed to the Chinese writers in time.

But, for US writers (and those in wealthy western countries) , they need to find ways to move out of the services/commodity area fast — otherwise their salary will continue to fall/stagnate and the opportunities will continue to dry up.

Takeaways

Don’t follow the crowds. Find an area where you can specialize and then dominate it. If possible, extend this into your social media network but keep some things to yourself as others may try to come in and steal your thunder.

3 often works quite well, e.g. a designer, coder and writer. Of course, you can always scale up later.

For me it’s all down to where and how you can ‘add value’.

If you don’t make daily efforts to push forward, you’ll fall behind.

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