Organise your update tasks
My main challenge in my every day work is to manage to keep my websites up to date while keeping enough spare time to focus on quality tasks and new projects. Adding a link here and fixing a typo there may be extremely time consuming if not part of a general organisation plan. I’m so kind that I will expose now how I manage to do so.
1- Break down tasks by website / publishing mode. Taking care of one group once at a time will help to spare a lot of time, as you won’t have to switch from one server to an other or so.
2 - Know what type of tasks you have to deal with and how much time it may take to achieve. There are probably different way to build this list, but here is mine, which proved quite operative:
- attached document upload: 5 minutes
- typo correction: 5 minutes
- page information update: 15 minutes
- new page set-up: from 30 minutes
- new sub-section set-up: from 2 hours
- display revamp: from 2 hours
3 - Have an objective, such as ‘deal with any content update request within 2 working days’. Now you can plan your weekly tasks. You could for instance spend 1/2 day on staff intranet and 2 x2 1/2 day on corporate website. In that phase, also take into account your organisation strategy.
4 - Let people know when their request will be dealt with. Believe me, it will keep a lot of them from ringing every second hour to know if you got their e-mail.
5 - Focus. When proceeding, let the phone get voice-mails and don’t deal with any other non urgent incoming request. This is the only way I know to make sure you get rid of these tasks in 1/2 day or 2.
6 - Know your metrics. From time to time, have a count of requests you got to make sure your procedure fits with requests types.
