What’s better; Quality or Quantity?

Ahh, the age old question; quality or quantity…

Obviously we’re talking about creating online content in this context. What should we do, churn something out every day? Or are we better to focus our entire week/month on one item?

Personally, I am focussing on a high quantity of material (YouTube and written articles). That said, it still needs to be to a decent standard. But why I hear you say, well I thought you’d never ask…

90% of our work will be rubbish, but we don’t know which 10% is good.

Austin Kleon said this in his book ‘Show Your Work!’ (see my article for more of his gems). His point is that if we hold our work back, how are we meant to know what will be rubbish, and what will be that 1 item that goes viral. The more we create, and more importantly share, the higher the chances of finding the 10% of good work

As content creators, it is our job to create; it is then our consumer’s job to decide what is good or not…

Learn as you go

I’ve already learnt loads about writing that I could only learn while writing.

Now, this isn’t because of the period of time I’ve been doing it, but more because of the amount of articles I’ve been writing. So if something takes you 10 articles to learn, would you rather learn it in 10 days or 10 months? So the process of Create / Share / Review / Repeat will only work as quickly as you’re creating.

I know, simple. The quicker we create, the quicker we learn.

Finding your style

Now this is something that I have battled with a bit.

My style (as your’s will be too) is pretty unique to me. At first, I found myself being very rigid, and would overly edit my work. But this just made it more time consuming and difficult to get work out.

After writing daily for weeks now, I feel confident and comfortable with my work, so am much happier to hit the publish button!

Now all of this makes sense, at least to me it does. But, there is no point releasing work that you’re not happy with. If we all did that, we would just be spamming our consumers, and ultimately turning them off our work.

So, how do we ensure our work is good enough to be out there?

I ask myself a couple of questions to start;

1. Have I learnt something from this article/video?
2. Did I enjoy the article/video?
3. Would I read/watch this if someone else made it?

If the answer is not to more than one of these, I don’t publish it…

Perfect is the enemy of good

Voltaire

This was my weekly quote drop a couple of weeks ago, and it’s a beauty!

We could spend weeks chasing the perfect article, only to never quite get there, so we never hit publish. But if we concentrate on making a good article, we can ensure this does get published. Guaranteed, you’ll miss 100% of the shots you never take.

So, don’t let perfection get in the way, and hit publish…

Use your time efficiently

The Pareto Principle states the roughly 80% of our outcomes are derived from 20% of our effort.

So, if we put in 20% effort, we will get something that is 80% of the maximum output. That’s pretty good in my books. But conversely, why would we waste the other 80% of our time to only increase our output by 20%. Seems ridiculous really…

Use your time effectively and get good work out, as quickly as possible.

Hopefully this all makes sense.

I’ll continue (for now anyway) to keep publishing work as often as I can. But I’ll also make sure that I keep creating work that I would read/watch, as there really is no point otherwise. And if you concentrate on creating good work, instead of perfect, you’ll free yourself to maximise your productivity.

So, don’t hold back, start to share, share, share!