Day 143: Stop Recreating the Wheel
Are you fighting how you work best because you think you should be able to do things how others do them?
Client work this week was a doozy. I had to pull reports. We’re talking graphs, numbers, words, colors, charts, etc.
To say I pole vaulted over a mouse terd would be an understatement.
I’ve built up so much drama around numbers and stats. Partly because I’m a storyteller and partly because I don’t understand all of them.
Comparing the clients reports for January with previous months got me in my feels. Even though I had no involvement with January I was thinking that the client would see the decreases as fatal and cancel their contract.
Drama.
That’s how it works though right? When we don’t fully understand something and have a lot of negative emotion around it, it can turn into a very polarized situation.
In spite of having increases across multiple channels, that one decrease is going to make them think this work is fraudulent and a scam. They’ll decide it’s time to quit and do it themselves. Or, just quit all together. Who needs marketing anyway?! Absurd!
It’s not just the personalized experiences that I bring to the table it’s also the ADHD. Thinking that results should be happening NOW. Not looking at the big picture or seeing the peaks and valleys while understanding that there is a median in there that hopefully is increasing.
Anyways, after 3 days of drama and unclocked work (I felt like I shouldnt charge my client for things I should have already known how to do), today I printed up multiple previous months of reports.
I HAVE to have paper print ups. Looking at the data on my laptop drives me batshit. But I had my print ups and read each section for the past 3 months, one at a time, and was able to get a clear picture on how to present last months data.
Although I originally defaulted to excuses for decreases (the snow storm, people spending less in January, the political fires happening in our region) I instead reported on the stats.
There was one part, Google Ads, that I literally thought I was going to have a seizure over so I punted that back to the client for her help.
The reports were sent by email and we meet next week to review and move forward.
The meeting with the people, the content creation and ideation, and the producing….that’s what I love. But the things that are difficult, stats/numbers/graphs, at least I have more clarity on the structure that works best for me.
If you are struggling with something that seems like a new situation, think about past experiences and what helped you then. In the past, printing things up and creating a visual map ALWAYS helps me. Maybe you have something like that too?
