Thanks for turning up to like and comment on my posts. It is a huge motivation.

This comment came from a friend who has recently started writing more. When he writes. I show up, and he likes that!

“Can I go “I am a nice guy” and share some platitudes?” I wonder.

“But you aren’t such a nice guy, and you don’t turn up for everyone!” chips in the Math guy. This guy has a habit of turning up at the wrong time, every time!

Anyway, since I can no longer blow my trumpet, I’ll let you in on the secret. It’s a manager secret – boring but effective. Here is that magic technique:

Turn it into a checklist.

Before I go further, let me acknowledge that the math guy is right. I do not comment on everybody’s posts by default. This is the criteria I use for deciding who to turn up for:

1. Someone who writes well, is very committed but is just starting on a platform (LinkedIn/ Twitter/WordPress). So she doesn’t get the engagement she deserves, and I turn up to encourage her. This is not altruism (though it’s fun to paint it that way!) – it’s the sheer joy of seeing a rocket ship in its infancy.
2. Someone who has excellent content but is still working on the articulation. This person is searching for her voice and will benefit from some support until she finds it.
3. Someone who requests you to be an accountability partner.
4. My favourite authors including Mentor posts.

Once you have the list (and it’s less than 5 people at a given time), here’s what I do. I create the checklist. In this case it’s a repeating task on my ToDo system (it happens to be Things) based on the frequency at which they ship.

And then everyday, when it matters, I show up. The ToDos in fact even allow me to nudge them when they are falling behind. It works like magic.The rest automatically lands in a separate hey.com folder I read at my leisure. I’ll expand on this one in a subsequent post if you are interested.

Do you use a similar hack?