What Can’t You See Because You Have Been Looking Too Long?
Posted by Liz Strauss · 2 Comments
I spent a hour this weekend talking to a lovely man from Canada. His blog was almost perfectly there.
He had sent me a message about something else. I had some time so I offered him a service. he accepted.
We worked together on his blog.
What had happened was that he had gotten so used to looking at it that he could no longer see it.
What did I do?
I asked him to look away from the screen and then to look back to see where his eye landed first. Then asked if that was where he wanted his readers to look.
His answer was “no”.
He knew what to do then. He made his orange subscription button slightly smaller and the title of his blog much larger. Now people are more likely to remember where they have been once they have visited him.
They were two small things that he couldn’t see, because he had been looking too long.
Liz Strauss
Behind every Successful business is an Outstanding Manager. — PVM
And sometimes it’s not just about not seeing something as a result of looking at it too long, sometimes it also can be about not prioritizing things.
Your example here is a good one. Someone was trying to make his blog work harder. Somewhere, he saw a checklist of all the things you should have on your blog. Somewhere, he saw a post (here, at Seth Godin’s blog, or elsewhere) about having “bananas” on your blog (or Web site). He went through the list, got most if not everything on his blog. Check check done done. Didn’t even think about what he wanted to give prominence to — the checklists make EVERYTHING seem important when that’s not the case. Some checklist items are mandatory. Some are good-to-have when the time is right (sometime later down the road). Some are and always will be optional.
This is where your PVM service works so well, and why more people need to use it.
Hi Whitmey!
You make an excellent pioint about checkliests — everything we read for that matter. If we don’t engage our thinking when we use information to discriminate what will work best for our situation, then we’ll end up with something that isn’t quite right and doesn’t quite fit. It will always be almost there.
Thank you, Whitney, your insights always take things deeper and to a more interesting place.