The Single Most Important Content Metric You Need to Track

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Issue 36 | February 24, 2020 | The Single Most Important Content Metric You Need to Track

On many, many days, I look around my small, cluttered house and think, this place is impossible to keep tidy! There’s too many small children! There’s too much stuff! What can be done?!

This is definitely partly true. But recently, I had a bit of an epiphany: it’s also an unfair assessment. The cluttered closets may annoy me a little bit all the time, but I’m not cleaning them a little bit all the time.

My cleaning-minutes could be higher. My meet-friends-at-playgrounds and try-new-soup-recipes minutes could be lower. Truth be told, I find cleaning-minutes often unsatisfying; as soon as you’re done, it seems to need doing all over again. I’m pushing those minutes aside for easier or more pleasant minutes.

Survey Says: Content-Minutes in Short Supply
Marketers regularly say their biggest problem is that they have trouble finding the time to make content. No real shock there, given that making content is quite time-consuming.

However, I think this time problem is a cover-up for a deeper issue: the deep-work problem. Since I abandoned my general-purpose corporate job and got exclusively into content-making, I’ve had to develop a rigorous process (and the steely will) required to crank out lots of content drafts. And I do mean develop – it’s like training for a marathon. Researching, structuring your thinking and writing: these require laser focus for an extended time, hanging out in that murky, icky territory between “there’s still a lot I don’t know” and “this might be crap when it’s done.”

Some days that’s tough, and some days it’s nearly impossible. That’s exactly why companies pay people like me to do it. It is quite time-consuming – and it gobbles up your limited concentration, too.

This Guy Gets It
I recently read an excellent book by a favorite thinker, Cal Newport, who is a proponent of strict distraction management, digital minimalism and the art of doing what he calls “deep work.” In fact, the book is called Deep Work.

Newport is a professor of computer science at Georgetown who also writes productivity-related books and blogs. He started in his college years by researching and writing about the habits that made some students especially successful in college, and he has since continued that line of inquiry into career success.

Spoiler alert: Newport finds that time invested in deep work is the thing that sets apart the leaders in most modern knowledge-work jobs. Deep work is, as it sounds, the work where you turn off all the distractions and drag yourself through the painful process of learning the most challenging or newest thinking in your field or producing such things yourself.

I loved this book for the concrete tips and useful insights that I have been able to deploy in my own work habits. But it also shines a spotlight on something I think all us content-makers know but may not explicitly recognize: content-making is time-consuming deep work.

It seems like no big deal, but actually it demands the most focused efforts of our day – i.e. the most precious input to knowledge work. I think of these as content-minutes.

Content-minutes are a real drag, and it’s hard to push aside all of your other demands to do something that’s a real drag.

Content-Minutes: The Most Important Metric
Once you see each piece of content as a unit of deep-work hours, it can be a bit of a reality check. For the next few weeks or months, try tracking your content-minutes explicitly.

This will do two valuable things for you. First, it will show you exactly how much time each piece takes, from conception to publication. You may be surprised to see what the average deep-work time investment really is, and that can help you strategize for upcoming projects.

Second, it will show you how much of your working time is actually spent moving those projects forward. In knowledge-work jobs, the goals can be so vague sometimes – “make more content!” or “make better content!” doesn’t translate to how you should change your behavior. Content-minutes, however, are the input you can control.

Or hire someone else to do those minutes for you. Just saying.

Looking for a freelance financial writer who can pick up some of your content-minutes? Reach out and let’s talk about your project needs.