Are You Wasting Precious Time and Energy Chasing Alligators?

This week I’m sharing a reminder about the difference between doing and leading.

As part of setting up 2024 in my business, we have some updates we need to do to our website. A pretty normal activity we complete on a regular basis.

Typically, I don’t get involved in doing website updates. Although I can find my way around the back end of the website, I am by no measure an expert. I have people in my team who are far more expert than I am. And maintaining our website is part of their roles.

My role is to set the strategic direction and priorities. And with relation to the website, I request the changes I would like made. Usually, these regular updates relate to the launch of a new service offering, updates to our testimonials, or involve adding some new information.

For some reason though, last weekend I decided that maybe I could do a little bit of work on the website. Just to experiment! I wanted to try out a couple of new ways of presenting information on a website page. I wanted to add a background image to a particular page, to see how it would look.

This is a relatively minor update.

Is this something I needed to do? No, it’s not, but I thought I’d have a go anyway.

What I discovered when I tried to make this change, was it was not that easy after all. I just could not quite figure out how to do it.

I watched a YouTube video. Then I watched another one … and another one. But I could not solve the problem I was having with making this page update.

Next, I read some tutorial information. Still, I could not get the outcome that I wanted.

So I went back to YouTube. Still no joy. Not only that, but I also realised that I did not have all of the options I needed in the website editor. My website editor did not look the same as those showing on the videos. So I thought, maybe our website editor was not at the current release.

So I kept researching and I kept watching YouTube videos.

After 4 hours, I could not solve this problem myself. I came to the conclusion there was something wrong with our website editor. This was strange because it had always worked before.

So now I needed help to get the website editor fixed. I needed to get some technical support.

So my next activity was finding technical support. Another hour.

So five hours after my initial thought of “Oh, I’ll just add a background image to a page to see what it looks like,” I had found myself a technical expert to solve my bigger problem, which was that my website editor was not operating as expected.

And then I had a BFO, Blinding Flash of the Obvious. I had been chasing alligators for 5 hours. And let’s be honest, I am not qualified.

My job is to drain the swamp.

I’d love to know your thoughts.