#difficulty: 100% parametric

[medrec-tech]

How Does Text-to-Speech Work? The Science Behind TTS Technology

Introduction

In the digital age, Text-to-Speech (TTS) technology is transforming the way we interact with devices, making content more accessible, engaging, and convenient. From voice assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant to audiobooks, navigation apps, and accessibility tools, TTS plays a crucial role in everyday life.

But how does this technology work? How can a machine read text aloud in a way that mimics human speech? In this blog, we will explore the science behind TTS technology, its working principles, different synthesis techniques, and real-world applications.

Let’s dive deep into the world of AI-powered speech synthesis!

What is Text-to-Speech (TTS) Technology?

Text-to-Speech (TTS) is an AI-driven technology that converts written text into spoken audio. It enables computers, smartphones, and other digital devices to "speak" by generating human-like speech.

TTS is a crucial tool in assistive technology, helping people with visual impairments, reading difficulties, or language barriers to interact with digital content. However, its applications have expanded beyond accessibility, finding use in marketing, entertainment, education, and automation.

Key Features of TTS Technology

✔ Text Processing: Converts raw text into phonetic symbols for speech generation. ✔ Voice Customization: Allows users to modify pitch, speed, and tone. ✔ Multilingual Support: Many TTS systems support multiple languages. ✔ Natural Speech Synthesis: AI-powered TTS produces lifelike voices with emotional tones. ✔ Cloud & Offline Functionality: Available both online and as built-in device features.

How Does Text-to-Speech Work?

The process of converting text into speech involves multiple complex steps. Here’s a breakdown of how TTS technology works:

Step 1: Text Analysis & Preprocessing

Before a system can generate speech, it must analyze and process the given text. This step involves:

A. Text Normalization (TN)

Converts raw text into a structured format.

Expands abbreviations, numbers, dates, and symbols into readable words.

Example:

"$100" → "one hundred dollars"

"Dr." → "Doctor"

"12/03/2025" → "March twelfth, twenty twenty-five"

B. Linguistic Processing

Analyzes grammar, sentence structure, and word meaning.

Identifies parts of speech (verbs, nouns, adjectives, etc.).

Determines the correct pronunciation based on context.

Step 2: Phonetic Conversion & Prosody Modeling

Once the text is analyzed, it is converted into phonemes—the smallest sound units in speech.

A. Phonetic Transcription

Maps words to their corresponding phonemes (speech sounds).

Example:

"Hello" → /həˈloʊ/

"ChatGPT" → /ʧæt dʒiː piː tiː/

B. Prosody Modeling

Adds intonation, stress, rhythm, and pauses to make speech more natural.

Without prosody, TTS would sound flat and robotic.

Example:

"I didn’t say she stole my money." (Different emphasis changes meaning.)

Step 3: Speech Synthesis – Generating Audio Output

Now that the phonetic and prosodic details are ready, the TTS system generates the actual speech. Different methods are used to synthesize human-like voices.

A. Concatenative Speech Synthesis (Traditional Method)

This method stitches together pre-recorded speech segments to form words and sentences.

✅ Pros:

Produces high-quality sound.

Works well for fixed, repetitive phrases.

❌ Cons:

Limited flexibility (needs large speech databases).

Cannot generate new words dynamically.

B. Parametric Speech Synthesis (Statistical Modeling)

Uses mathematical models to generate speech dynamically instead of using pre-recorded samples.

✅ Pros:

More flexible (can modify speed, pitch, and tone).

Requires less storage than concatenative synthesis.

❌ Cons:

Sounds less natural and robotic.

C. Neural Text-to-Speech (Neural TTS) – AI-Powered Speech

Modern TTS uses deep learning (AI) and neural networks to generate highly realistic speech.

💡 Popular AI TTS Models:

WaveNet (by Google DeepMind)

Tacotron (by Google AI)

Amazon Polly & IBM Watson TTS

✅ Pros:

Produces lifelike, natural voices.

Can mimic human emotions and intonations.

Adapts to different accents and dialects.

❌ Cons:

Requires high computing power for training models.

Applications of Text-to-Speech Technology

TTS is revolutionizing multiple industries with its capabilities.

1. Accessibility & Assistive Technology

Helping Visually Impaired Users read digital content.

Used in screen readers (e.g., JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver).

Converts books, documents, and websites into speech.

2. Voice Assistants & Smart Devices

Powers AI assistants like Google Assistant, Siri, Alexa, and Cortana.

Enhances smart home automation (e.g., voice-controlled appliances).

3. Education & E-Learning

Converts textbooks into audiobooks for students.

Helps in language learning and pronunciation practice.

4. Content Creation & Entertainment

Used in podcasts, voice-overs, and audiobooks.

Converts blog articles into audio blogs for easy listening.

5. Customer Support & IVR Systems

Automates call center responses.

Reduces human workload in customer service.

Future of Text-to-Speech Technology

With advancements in AI, machine learning, and deepfake technology, TTS will continue to evolve.

Upcoming Trends in TTS

🔹 Emotional AI Voices: TTS will soon express happiness, sadness, anger, and excitement. 🔹 Multilingual Speech Synthesis: AI will generate speech in multiple languages instantly. 🔹 Voice Cloning: AI will replicate human voices for personalized experiences. 🔹 More Realistic AI Avatars: TTS will integrate with 3D avatars for virtual interactions.

Conclusion

Text-to-Speech technology has come a long way—from robotic, monotone voices to AI-powered, human-like speech. With its growing applications in accessibility, education, entertainment, and automation, TTS is shaping the future of digital communication.

🚀 Want to try TTS technology? Explore the best AI-powered text-to-speech tools today!

[cmdrkitten]

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[guitareqprocessors-blog]

Electric Guitar EQ

So this began off as an addendum to my piece on Guitar Pedal Tone Control Alternatives, yet then especially turned into an article in its very own right, and now goes before the article it should be a piece of. Most of guitar pedals as a rule have at least one tone control dials or changes to correct/tune the tone of said pedal. I began taking a gander at various types of tone control, before exploring what in reality were the key frequencies for electric guitar, and how was it best to control those.

I kind of have an inclination for pedals with an exemplary 3-Band EQ - for example Bass | Mids | Treble, and in a perfect world of the 'dynamic' sort where you can help just as cut those key frequencies. With your exemplary 'Marshall' Tone Stack you have 3 dials with fixed focus frequencies and regularly genuinely wide data transfer capacity/Q/Frequency Range. As tails I address some key recurrence bunches for electric guitars, and the various sorts of EQs/EQ pedals accessible at present.

The visual above is completely of my own creation, and should speak to a completely parametric 7-band EQ with Spectrum Analyzer show for expanded representation and clearness. At the top you have 7 double concentric pots which enable you to change/move the Center Frequency esteem and modify the Q | Bandwidth around the chose Hz esteem. I've practically duplicated the key qualities from my present most loved EQ - the Boss GE-7. In my visual the lift/cut dials sit underneath the Spectrum Analyzer, with a Level dial to one side, and 3 footswitches a la Boss/Eventide/Strymon. The 3 footswitches should speak to preset choice, however I've not by any means really expounded on precisely how everything functions and should be built. The key parts are the splendid vivid showcase, the parametric capacities and the presets! The innovation definitely exists as of now in segment parts, it's only an issue of who could put such a gadget into generation? Regardless the motivation behind the visual is to kind of feature the key purposes of this article.

Note additionally that inside a band setting this gets perpetually confused as every performer and vocalist works inside set ranges inside compositional setting numerous pieces of which cover - so that for extreme lucidity and constancy to be kept up consistently, noteworthy coordination is vital.

In case you're in a carport band situation, very commonly the yield sounds sloppy and misty in light of the fact that the bass and drums are covering frequencies, and same goes for guitars, keys and vocals. An OK stable specialist with a full blending work area can union, channel and slice frequencies to make even the most flimsy of groups sound better than average. So there are two key contemplations for 'EQ' - how great you and your instrument sound, and how extraordinary that sounds thusly inside the blend of the considerable number of artists inside the band/creation/game plan.

I won't broadly expound on the last mentioned, I am increasingly worried about tuning and sharpening my very own center sound - and would leave it to the sound architects and acing designers to deal with the more extensive cover and blend difficulties.

KEY GUITAR FREQUENCIES

Note that the underneath qualities are estimated, and depend to a degree on what hardware you are playing through, as specific pedals and impacts/circuits will as a matter of course emphasize certain frequencies and lift the recurrence extend tremendously from the spotless electric guitar signal/bed.

Key Audible Electric Guitar Range = c80 Hz - c7,000 Hz

(These are the frequencies a great many people can hear, most everything else is surface and climate.)

20 - 80 Hz : Deep Bass, can include suppress and sloppiness, can likewise thicken sound to a certain extent. 20 Hz for the most part lower kick-drum recurrence, low-end bass is around 60 - 100 hz. For electric guitar you would regularly cut anything beneath 100Hz

80 - 120 Hz : run of the mill low-end guitar frequencies - slice underneath 100hz to offer space to low-end bass and percussion

100 - 300 Hz : used to include totality of sound/thickness and body to guitar, only a little however as a lot here mutes and can make flubbiness/chatter

300 - 1,000 Hz : Liveliness/assault - includes some electrical sizzle

1,000 - 2,000 Hz : 'Blare'/nasally guitar sounds - lift or cut

2,000 - 2,500 Hz : great mid protuberance or scoop

2,500 - 3,000 Hz : boosting here gives you more snap/pick assault

3,000 - 7,000 Hz : Brilliance and Presence/Sparkle

7,000 - 11,000 Hz : Treble lift to complement contortion

10,000 - 20,000 Hz : kind of top of the line textural bubble or 'Air' - essentially quiet to most

OPEN/CLEAN ELECTRIC GUITAR STRING HZ - LOW TO HIGH

Here we have the Hz esteems each open string will create when culled - with a clearn signal:

E2 : 82.41 Hz

A2 : 110.00 Hz

D3 : 146.83 Hz

G3 : 196.00 Hz

B3 : 246.94 Hz

E4 : 329.63 Hz

Essential EQ

The most essential EQ you will discover on a pedal is a solitary Tone control, which is generally a kind of High Pass Filter which cuts frequencies over a specific range, by utilization of electronic limiters, for example, resistors. These solitary tone controls are great rack type EQs where their most extreme qualities are accomplished when channel isn't connected/off. This implies a solitary tone dial of this nature will regularly be set at around half in the center/focus position - completely off when completely clockwise, and completely on (max restricting) when completely counter-clockwise.

2-Band EQs will in general work along these lines - just with Low Pass just as High Pass Filters - focusing on lower frequencies likewise.

Focus FREQUENCY AND BANDWIDTH

The most essential tone controls will in general be of the rack type assortment or constraining channels as talked about. Each will have a range or transfer speed/recurrence group they target. All things considered we can dole out a 'Middle Frequency' worth to where the channel is most dynamic, and the encompassing recurrence groups are characterized as transmission capacity - implying that a low recurrence channel with an inside recurrence of 100 Hz will take out a specific measure of frequencies either side of that state +/ - 5 or 10, implying that you target 100% of 100Hz frequencies, and after that a lesser measure of 95 Hz and 105 Hz and so on in diving dimension of effect. Most Parametric EQs enable you to choose the 'Q' or bandwitch run - eithe by means of dial, or by method for 3-way smaller than expected switches. Basically the less the tone controls, commonly the bigger the data transmission connected as a matter of course.

Run of the mill THREE BAND SHELF EQ - Center FREQUENCIES

As we've referenced previously, the key frequencies for guitar length from 100Hz to around 7,000Hz - so part those into 3 key focus frequencies would mean the tops at either end for Low and High, with the key 2,000 to 2,500 for mid-bump/scoop as the no doubt ideal center worth.

Bass : 100 Hz

Mids : 2,000/2,500 Hz

Treb : 6,000/7,000 Hz

Sovereign THREE BAND PARAMETRIC EQ (+Q-WIDTH/RANGE)

Parametric EQs will in general have covering recurrence reaches to enable you to focus on your accurate required tone - clearly the less the controls, the more prominent the level of cover. For Empress' Parametric EQ, there is a gigantic range secured from 35 to 20,000 Hz. Ruler utilizes 3-way smaller than expected switches for modifying the bandwith run/Q esteems for every one of its 3 key controls.

Low : 35 Hz - 500 Hz

Mid : 250 Hz - 5,000 Hz

High : 1,000 Hz - 20,000 Hz

WAMPLER EQUATOR FOUR BAND EQ (PARAMETRIC MIDS)

Wampler's new EQuator pedal is completely dynamic with cut and lift at all dimensions, however just parametric on the two Mid-go controls. Somehow or another it gives better inclusion deeply Middle-band frequencies, however it comes up short on the Q controls of Empress' pedal just as the inside recurrence move for the highs and lows. It's a progressively smaller and simpler to utilize pedal, however not exactly as incredible.

Bass : 130 Hz

Mids 1 : 238 - 5,000 Hz

Mids 2 : 480 - 4,800 Hz

Treble : 7,000 Hz

(Mid-scoop = c2,200 Hz)

Plateau/BOOGIE FIVE BAND EQ

The Mesa 5-Band EQ you see on a considerable lot of its amps and pedals has the incredible advantage of being square on the 2,200 Hz esteem for one of its mid focus frequencies. The recurrence groups here have been all around painstakingly picked.

90 Hz

240 Hz

750 Hz

2,200 Hz

6,600 Hz

MXR M109 SIX BAND EQ

I extremely simply incorporated this for purpose of finishing truly - the MXR 6-Band EQ just cuts of the top recurrence of the Boss identical:

100 Hz

200 Hz

400 Hz

800 Hz

1,600 Hz

3,200 Hz

Manager GE-7 SEVEN BAND EQ

This is my present EQ pedal of decision - in its Alchemy Audio rendition - and 7 Bands is about appropriate for me, whereby by and large I am extremely content with how this pedal functions. Its key drawback in that capacity is that it doesn't have a recurrence band precisely inside the key 2,000 to 2,500 Hz register which is considered ideal for mid-mound and scooped tones!

100 Hz

200 Hz

400 Hz

800 Hz

1,600 Hz

3,200 Hz

6,400 Hz

SOURCE AUDIO EIGHT BAND PROGRAMMABLE EQ

I've since quite a while ago considered this 4-preset empowered 8-Band EQ as a substitution for my Boss GE-7, its incredible preferred position is in the presets. While I locate its general task a touch fiddly and the screen a litte little. Dissimilar to the GE-7 you can't impact prompt changes - looking through line by line or section by segment all things considered and change separately - while on the GE-7 you can move various sliders in a flash and all the while!For more detail click https://www.sustainpunch.com/guitar-eq-pedals/

62 Hz (discretionary)

125 Hz

250 Hz

500 Hz

1,000 Hz

2,000 Hz

4,000 Hz

8,000 Hz

MXR M108 TEN BAND EQ

I've attempted 10-Band EQs and I discover them somewhat over-fiddly truly. I ponder as much as I might want to play with, especially based on Parametric EQ. The two lower recurrence groups and the most astounding one workmanship kind of surplus to necessities for most electric guitar players to the extent I am concerned.

31.25 Hz

62.5 Hz

125 Hz

250 Hz

500 Hz

1,000 Hz

2,000 Hz

4,000 Hz

8,000 Hz

16,000 Hz

Last THOUGHTS

So I am comprehensively happy with my Boss GE-7 - it is outwardly clear, and fast and simple

[actnoweco]

Chasing clouds

Part 1: Why chase clouds

Imagine you would like to have a nice barbeque on Sunday but the weather report seems quite undecided whether it will rain or not. You wonder: “How hard can it be to predict if it rains? It seems like the forecasts are always off!”.

As scientists, we face this challenge on a daily basis. It turns out that the difficulty in predicting rain is due to the massive difference in scales that are involved in its formation: Large cloudy patches can span thousands of kilometers but, at the same time, rain drops form due to the collisions of individual cloud droplets about 1/100 of a millimeter in size. At present, no simulation in the world can resolve both these very large scales and very small scales simultaneously. If one were to capture one cubic centimeter (1 cm x 1 cm x 1 cm) of a typical cloud and took a magnifying glass to it, they would find about 100 cloud droplets in this volume on average! (in reality, it would be difficult to see the particles with a magnifying glass and that is why we use lasers and high-resolution cameras to see the droplets).

One solution to the problem is called “parametrization” which simply means that we compute the large-scale movements of clouds down to a certain size, for example a few kilometers, and then tell the simulation to assume a single number, a parameter, for everything that is smaller. One example for such a parameter is the number of collisions of cloud droplets per volume. It tells us how fast the raindrops would grow from cloud droplets, which are tiny water drops that are not yet large enough to start falling as rain drops due to gravity.

A difficulty here is that clouds are inherently turbulent. Turbulent vortices move the droplets around and force them into clusters or might divert them from their path. Cloud turbulence levels are very high and are notoriously difficult, if not impossible, to replicate in a laboratory or in simulations. The lab would need to be extremely large due to turbulence being driven by the largest length involved in its creation and simulations struggle with a so called “non-linearity” which in practice means that huge amounts of computational power are needed. Therefore, measurements of real clouds are still needed to get these parameters.

Cloud coverage around Barbados as seen from the NOAA GOES satellite. Credit: NOAA

Part 2: Practicalities of chasing clouds

Let’s say that you come up with a neat idea for a new instrument that measures the movement and velocities of cloud droplets and all you need to do for that is get your instrument into a cloud. What is described here is – in somewhat simplified form – the idea of the MPI DS* Cloudkite project (http://eurec4a.eu/index.php?id=5152). You check the average cloudiness (how much of the sky is covered by clouds at a given moment) and learn that at any given time 68 percent of the Earth is covered in clouds. “That’s great!”, you think. “All I need to do is to hang my instrument from a balloon and then wait for the clouds to come to me”.

* Max Planck Institute for Dynamics and Self-Organization, Göttingen, Germany

You then attach your instrument to your balloon, hope that everything runs smoothly (which it usually doesn’t – at least not initially) and wait… Only to find learn that the cloudiness does not tell you the whole story: Clouds come in many different forms, sizes and thicknesses and are found on the surface (as fog) all the way up to about 80 kilometers high (as noctilucent clouds). The mentioned 68 percent contain all clouds on all heights and might include many thin clouds.

Thankfully, the majority of clouds are found in the lower layer of the atmosphere, the troposphere, which ranges from the ground to up about 7-20 km, with the lower value being the minimum around the poles the higher value being the maximum around the equator. Most clouds are found above the planetary boundary layer, a turbulent layer, anywhere between 100 m to 2 km in height, which often marks the cloud base (the bottom border of the clouds). Our balloon is tethered to a long and lightweight line. With it, we can reach up to 2km in height which makes it ideal to measure this lower part of the clouds.

During the Eurec4a campaign, much of our time is spent trying to estimate the current cloud location from radar, lidar and satellite images as well as current predictions for low cloud coverage. We’re typically seeing values between 15 – 25 percent coverage. Battery life is a restricting factor, so care must be taken when choosing to turn on our highest power consuming instruments. Unfortunately, it also takes some minutes to prepare the lasers of those instruments for firing. What we are looking for is a consistent recurrence of clouds, not just a single small puff that is gone as soon as we see it on our screens.

Being on a research ship such as the Maria S. Merian comes with an advantage, as we’re able to actively chase some larger clouds. Often there is a prevailing wind direction, which helps us to estimate the direction a cloud will travel. We’d communicate with the captain and, if lucky, arrive at a given cloud within 10-15 minutes. Quite a bit of guess work is needed to estimate the correct height for the balloon as even if we’re hitting a rain cloud, we want to be in the right height where we can see the creation of the rain drops and not too low or too high where we miss this process. It also takes a lot of commitment to run such an experiment 24/7 and therefore night shifts and lots of coffee/tea are involved in chasing the clouds. In the end, we have been lucky quite a few times by now and looking forward to sharing our results with the scientific community and the public soon!

Expectation vs. (often) reality when chasing clouds. Small dot: Cloudkite balloon

Johannes Güttler

source http://www.oceanblogs.org/msm89/2020/02/18/chasing-clouds/

[pureblink-blog]

Rendering Services in Toronto

Pureblink rendering is a leading Toronto rendering company in Toronto metropolitan with diverse experienced. They claim that their services are not beatable at Toronto’s wide resident and business. Hence, they thank their experience in the field for this success. They are the fully insured and certified Toronto real estate rendering company with the compliance if accredit license by Canadian standards. Their qualified professional, trained, and skillful staff provides the best cement rendering in the entire metropolitan region. 

Pureblink Renderers believes that they deploy their art to their customers with the help of professional and affordable cement rendering services. They provide 100% assurance for work. Canadian climates are harsh and the exteriors of the building and weaken them. Hence, the exterior of the building needs a lot of rendering services. That is the point when you need cement rendering outdoors. 

Their Luxury real estate Toronto rendering has a special formula where they apply a thin layer of the mixture, which sand and lime in a certain proportion. They provide amazing protection of power to the exteriors of the building. They state their rendering will last longer and protect the wall against the odds faced by them because of the weather. They also provide the best advice and free quotes for the cement rendering services.

Hence, here is a list of the services they provide to their customers as follows:

• Cement Rendering

• Acrylic Rendering

• Texture Coating

• Granite Rendering

• Cement Render Repairs

Their professional has committed a fabulous art of work to their customers and has made a huge impact on them with their art. Their affordable rates and admirable services have won the trust of people. Hence, they tend towards their success to lead their brand. Hence, Pureblink rendering has become a brand in the Toronto metropolitan area. They treat the customer with a lot of attention and excitement which has encouraged their customers to believe and to put faith in them. Attention to every minute detail helps them provide the best services in the town. They submit their success to their lovely customers and experience.

Rendering and repairing is not a joke and also gaining a lot of experience and skills to become the best in the town. The best quality of the material has helped them create the best results for cement rendering services. They have hoisted their flag of success with fabulous artwork they provide. They provide free quotes services that help their customers for an easy compare and quick trust. If you do a quick tour of their website, you will find plenty of praise for them by their customer. This shows how strong trust they have built in the client’s heart.

Praises, they receive seems to a very genuine and trustworthy. They are the best makeover for your forbidden house for which you might thank them later. Considering their technicians and professionals and work you cannot say no to them for their rendering services. Pureblink rendering is counted as the topmost company of rendering business in Toronto.

How architectural rendering is done in Toronto?

It can easily be said that 3D designing tools have become a revolution in the way that engineers and architects create their Toronto architectural rendering building designs. For example, parametric modeling has provided Building Teams with a way to incorporate weight tolerances and various other types of information into their finalized plans. However, most designers who utilize 3D technology will tell you that they use this technology in their conceptual design stages too. This is when they don’t require highly detailed building information. This can also provide a plethora of advantages, as well. Using tools, such as Autodesk 3ds MAX, Luxology’s Modo 401, Z Corporation’s 3D printing solutions and Google SketchUp, will allow an architect to form models and Toronto rendering that will demonstrate how a design will appear dynamically to show them to a prospective client along with members of a Building Team. Also, these tools will assist a designer when it comes to their sculpting, painting and 3D environment drawing in a manner that feels more natural in 2019, than in the past. This technology accommodates those who wish to have a simple-to-use tool that transcends the difficulties that once existed between being appealing and having more functionality.

Conceptual Design

Having been originally developed as a generalized 3D content application, SketchUp was introduced in 2002. It was created to provide professional designers with a way to draw on a computer monitor in the same manner as they could through the use of a paper and pen. Its simplistic interface allowed the designer to play around with their designs in a way that just wasn’t possible with previous designing software. It will enable you to draw your plan in style reminiscent of 2D using a patented “push-pull” technology.

Design Printing

Since the availability of technology that will deliver 3D designs, it is no longer necessary to physically shop-build models. This, in essence, has provided a completely different type of designer workflow. Even so, there are still some clients who demand physical models to show interested parties' design intent. You’ll usually find this with clients who are all that familiar with computers. Fortunately, Z Corporation’s product technology provides a way to take 3S files and use them to “print” resin and powder models that are minutely detailed. The best part that this will only take hours, rather than days!

Realistically Rendering

While films, virtual reality, and video games employ 3D architectural rendering, 3D animation has evolved into a far more versatile tool that can also be effectively used in architecture rendering. One of these tools is modo 401, which was recently released by Luxology. It incorporates such features; as 3D painting, subdivision surfaces, sculpting, modeling, animation, rendering, and advanced polygon imaging. One of the advantages of Modo is the ability to combine a smaller number of essential tools to modify them. This is different than other 3D rendering applications that present a large number of devices, in which each one is specific to a particular task.

Human Band: The Best Engineering Tools

The human hand is still considered the most crucial part of the design industry. This is why designers can yet be required to extensively utilize Maya and Autodesk 3ds digital animation, compositing and rendering tools. Philip Ra, the Yazdani senior associate, has pointed out that the company will typically do 20 – 40 single design iterations. In an extreme example, Ra and his team created over 200 designs of a bridge in just one month for the capital of China's Sichuan province. This was accomplished by using Autodesk’s 3ds Max rendering, modeling, and animation package.

About Author

We create desire by meticulously crafting an impactful story. We understand the unrelenting march of technology and are chameleonic in how we adapt. Clever strategic insights, an insatiable thirst for creating something that’s never been done before, and our love for pioneering new tech, allow us to deliver unforgettable, bespoke user experiences—big or small.

[racingtoaredlight]

Guts

*Matchless DC-30 (point-to-point)

Today we’re going to dive into the guts of guitar amplifiers and talk about the differences in construction methods, and how that translates to sound.

Some point soon I’ll be able to speak about the different components and their functions with a more knowledgeable and experienced angle, as I continue to read up on this and begin to start building my Tweed Deluxe.  For now though, I want to talk about how these things are built...for what purpose...and how that translates to producing sound at the end of a signal.  I’ll be speaking on these things from a practical sense.

Lets start off with a super-condensed context before we head to the jump...the earliest amps were handwired point-to-point.  In order to produce more units, and hire more less skilled labor, companies like Fender, Marshall and Vox would use what are called “eyelet boards.”  These boards laid out how to wire and where to solder, and were still handwired.

Then printed circuit board (PCB) came around.  You could take an eyelet board, have machines pre-wire it, then have the whole board dipped in liquid solder, saving time and the cost of human labor, while manufacturing exponentially more units with consistent standards.

The question now is “does it matter?”

***

The Matchless DC-30 at the top is an absolutely stunning piece of amplifier.  I have a good bit of experience with Matchless amps...point-to-point handwired Vox (when they were owned by Jennings Musical Instrument Co., the company owned by the guy who invented the classic Vox circuit, Thomas Walter Jennings) homages...but on the smaller 15-watt Lightning combo that was designed to be a studio amp.

The DC-30 is a battleship amplifier, with a complex interactive circuit (meaning that the EQ and gain/volume knobs interact with each other as they’re adjusted), and the example at the top is about as good as point-to-point wiring gets, beautifully clean workmanship with a high degree of difficulty where every inch of wire length needs to be exactly accounted for and soldered.

...but what does that actually mean?

From a broad standpoint, your tone is a giant variable signal.  It’s absolutely 100% true that things as minor as the type of pick you use...or how long of cables you’re using in your chain...or, yes, even something as granular as type of battery...all can have an impact on your tone.  Laugh, but if you played with a handful of different stlyes of picks made from different materials, you’d be blown away by how different each makes your guitar sound.

Whether you give a shit about that type of granular OCD is a different argument entirely.  But what I want to impress is that everything in your signal has an impact.  And when you’re talking about things like amplifiers and speakers, things like wire length does have a difference.

And if you want the best sounding signal, a technical argument can be made that the best tone comes from amps that are handwired point-to-point, where the signal (the amp receives) has the least amount of time to decay.  You look at the holy grails of amps...Tweed and Blackface Fenders, early Marshalls, JMI Vox’s, Dumbles, Trainwrecks, etc...each grail is point-to-point handwired.

Either because that’s all they could do during the era (Fenders, Marshalls, Vox’s) or because of the belief that the least amount of time signal can be lost, the better your tone will be (Dumble, Trainwreck, Matchless).

***

Which manufacturers who use eyelet boards and PCB would agree with 100%, these camps accurately being able to claim these methods make it more consistent and repeatable.  Both sides have a point.

To cut to the chase...not only are PCB amps as good as point-to-point, they allow for a hugely expanded ability to add on features that would be impossible to design point-to-point.

*Bogner Ecstasy 100b

I’m not even going to try and describe what’s going on with this amp because it’d take easily 1,000 words.  But I’ve played the shit out of these things, and they are MONSTROUS.  The PCB isn’t about mass manufacturing or not having to pay someone...it’s about being able to build multiple different gain structures, EQ sensitivities, circuit paths and buffered effects loops to make sure complicated high-gain metal and rock sounds come through as hi-fi as possible.

Here’s another PCB example that you could hardly say was about cutting manufacturing corners...

*Mesa Boogie Mark V

Three different amps in one, all with individual huge sweeping gain and EQ sections, a parametric EQ on top of all that, variable wattages...the features just go on and on.  You couldn’t do this wiring an amp point-to-point.

While Mesa Boogies and I are like oil and water, I’d be a fool to say they don’t sound great.  In the right hands...guitarists like Carlos Santana, Larry Carlton and John Petrucci (Dream Theater)...they can sound fucking incredible.

There’s a wide marketplace out there to find an amp that fits your style.  Santana isn’t exactly a chameleon when it comes to tone, pretty much using one sound his whole career, but Larry Carlton sure as hell is.  Both used similar styles of Boogies, despite approaching the guitar from philosophically different places.

***

*1957 Fender Tweed Deluxe

One of the things about the early amps that were wired point-to-point by guys who really had no idea what they were doing was their little quirks.  In the video above, go to 0:50 and listen for 30 seconds.  Watch how that amp transforms from something nice and gritty, into this screaming hell beast by turning the knob for the channel not being used.

That’s a quirk that can be deliberately wired into a point-to-point amp...every one of the multitude of Fender 5e3 clones has exactly this...or a handwired amp using an eyelet board can be built to operate like the traditional amps everyone is used to, but still benefit from the sonic benefits of very deliberate construction.

*Dr. Z Maz 38

...or a amp builder could decide to make an amp that has a very wide range of EQ and gain settings, but puts the sausage recipe behind a curtain so the user doesn’t get overwhelmed, only having to turn a volume and tone knob.  Looking at the control panel, you’d never know how much is going on behind the scenes to sculpt the end resulting tone.

*Dr. Z Carmen Ghia

If you go to 1:45 in the video above, you’ll hear how much that tone control changes the guitar’s sound, and you’d never how much thought and deliberate wiring went into the design of that amp if you just looked at the two knobs.

And that’s the thing...you can get great sounds from either one.

***

Lets finally get to the practical differences.  Tone is subjective, and you can get great tone from anything as long as you know how to play.  However there are pro’s and con’s to point-to-point vs. PCB...

Point-to-point is going to give you the purest, highest-quality signal, specifically designed for one or a small handful of purposes.  The easiest tradeoff is expense...you’re not likely to find any point-to-point wired amps suitable for a studio or practice room under $1,000.  None that are the size able to be played in a club for under $2,500.

If they’re lightweight, you’re sacrificing any versatility because you have a one-trick pony.  If they have a lot of versatility, they’re heavy...because a lot of components and big transformers add up quickly.  But you get that incredible tone...

You also get the easiest repairs and longest lasting amp.  There’s no guesswork or any Achilles’ heels in point-to-point amps.  For simple repairs, some vacuum cleaner repair shops are able to handle it.  Soldered connections typically are more solid and last longer.  Construction is typically more robust...if you’re going to take the time and effort to build a point-to-point amp, you want it to last.

For musicians with a defined sound that don’t have to cover a lot of bases, there’s no argument against point-to-point amps.  Economic arguments only last as long as asking these types of musicians how many amps they own.  It’s typically not many.  One point-to-point amp is the same outlay as buying two or three PCB amps, and if you really only use one or two sounds, you don’t need more than a single amp.

***

PCB is a little more complicated.  Yes, you can get great tones out of them, but not all PCB is created equal.  For those high-quality examples above, using thick, hardy circuit board and consciously thinking about the wiring, you have the big boys.

*1981 Marshall JCM800

*2019 Marshall JCM800 reissue

Here are the downsides to PCB.

Firstly, you’re paying more (when adjusted for inflation) for inferior components and subsidizing Marshall’s profits while they sell you a product for the same price that required exponentially less labor costs.  All for a very simple amplifier circuit.

There’s a concept called BIG IRON in the guitar world.  It’s hard to say it’s definite or end-all, because it’s hard to call PCB-based Bogners and Boogies BIG IRON even if they’re more than capable of holding their own in that world.  BIG IRON refers to massive transformers, huge tubes that led to that beautiful overdrive we came to love in the 70′s and 80′s.  Marshall literally is the godfather of BIG IRON.

Well new Marshalls don’t have anywhere near the reputation of their forebears for a pretty easy to spot reason.  Those moves done to save money came at the cost of their soul.  They just don’t sound anywhere near the same.

That alone would be worth enough to slam the book shut on PCB, but the other big problem is durability.  You can’t really tell from pictures, but I’ve touched the Boogie and Marshall PCB’s in real life...the Boogie’s is thick, robust, high quality and proprietary.  Marshall’s is barely thicker than a nice business card.

When you’re mounting tubes onto PCB, quality matters.  Those bottles heat up and can warp the board and dry out the solders leading to cracks.  That method of dipping PCB in liquid solder is great for convenience, but it’s not as durable as doing it by hand.  And if anything goes wrong in the PCB, it’s not a trip to the vacuum repair store...it’s digging a grave.

***

We’ll get into the parts and functions of these things in more detail once I start building my Tweed Deluxe.  I’ll be wiring it by hand using an eyelet board (provided), but the goal is eventually to build one point-to-point.

That’s all i got for today.

[djsamaha-blog]

5 Ways to Harness Time and Data in Your Content Process

November 7th, 2017

“The theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time,” wrote Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. “It appeared that each observer might have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.”

Do you ever feel, in your workplace, like different members of your team are operating from a different perception of time? You say it will take two weeks to get a project done; your colleague says three weeks. You’re both experienced content creators, relying on the same historical experiences in the same workplace. How can you determine who’s right? Or should you just split the difference and get going on the work, figuring a few days doesn’t really matter?

In recent years, content marketing has become increasingly data-driven, at least when it comes to analytics and results. The efficacy of our work is something we can and do measure and manage. But there’s a tendency to avoid content creation data—how much time and resources the work really takes—which can make it difficult to:

Meet deadlines

Accurately forecast future work

Tap into our team’s full potential

Justify new resources

Prove the ROI of our time

Push back against unrealistic requests

Clearly, there are significant downsides to ignoring this front-end data, but it’s something content marketers are almost universally guilty of.

“As content creators, we are very results-focused,” said Todd Patton, content marketing manager at Branch Metrics in Palo Alto. “I’d much rather go to my boss and report that we acquired 100 MQLs from a certain ebook than how long it took me to put that ebook together.”

I think this is partly because not every executive appreciates how much effort it takes to write, design, concept, and create high-quality, original material. We’ve all seen the suspicious looks and heard the disbelieving questions throughout our careers. “It takes how long to produce a blog post? Hmm . . . I can write a 1,000-word email in 10 minutes.”

But pretending to others (and to ourselves) that we churn out the work more quickly than we really can, while still meeting the necessary quality standards, will only hurt us in the long run. It’s time to stop hiding from the truth of our content processes. Here are five ways for any content marketer to be more transparent and successful with project planning for both recurring work and one-off initiatives.

1. Involve the Team Throughout the Content Process

In a recent speech about project planning and forecasting, PMO Manager Eric Lucas of Crowley Maritime Corporation said:

“There’s something I call Mighty Mouse syndrome: There are people who love hiding things and then giving a ‘big reveal’; they love the grandeur of saving the day at the last possible moment. But that’s not how humans are successful. You have to work as teams.”

He offered seven tips for how project managers can improve the accuracy of their forecasts:

Humans learn in iterations—getting better at forecasting is a repetitive process.

Involve all the right people.

Adjust the forecast often.

Ensure the forecast reflects reality, not desire.

Communicate the forecast often—and through multiple channels.

Conduct a “lessons learned” meeting at the end of projects to codify what everyone has learned.

Accept that forecasts are approximations of the future; forecasts have to be “good enough.”

2. Guesstimate Granularly

“When I worked in-house and had limited resources, it always surprised me how long a project would take,” says Megan Maybee, a content marketing strategist at ThomasARTS in Salt Lake City. “Something simple like creating a social contest had so many elements, from design and writing to compliance and legal review. There were a couple times I didn’t give myself enough time, and then it was a huge scramble.”

I, too, am often surprised at how long certain projects take, even those I complete over and over again. It’s because it’s human nature to gloss over the difficulty of the journey mentally and only remember the destination. This tendency to forget accounts for people going through childbirth more than one time (or so I’m told), running more than one marathon, agreeing to more than one dental procedure.

No content marketing project can be predicted or controlled with 100 percent accuracy from the outset, no matter how much experience we have cranking out similar projects. There are always variables, and we must always rely on guesstimation to one degree or another. The key is to get as granular as possible with your project and resource guesstimations—to leave nothing out.

Start by meticulously documenting your workflow, including each little step it takes to execute each content type. Account for every brainstorm meeting, every interview, every individual contribution, every outline, every draft, every proofreading session, and every round of review and approval. Get input from every person who has a role in the production process. Ask questions to understand every aspect.

What I’ve just described is called Bottom-Up Estimating in project management circles. You can also try Analogous Estimating or Parametric Modeling, as described here. But whatever approach you take, be aware of the temptation to underestimate your time in order to appear faster or more competent. It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than to do the opposite.

3. Expect Everyone to Track Their Time

Once you have your repeatable processes granularly documented, start tracking the hours and minutes spent on each project phase (brainstorming, researching, writing, illustration, design, etc.) to make your future guesstimations even more reliable. When you add up all the time you tracked and build in some buffer time, that’s how you’ll know whether the next project is likely to take two weeks or three—whether you or your colleague was right all along.

If you use a work-management software solution like Workfront, the “adding up” is done for you. Individuals can just navigate to the task and use built-in time-tracking tools—or add in their hours manually. Just don’t fall prey to the temptation to assume you’ll always be able to beat your fastest time on each step. Rely on a padded average instead. Not everyone will be thrilled about tracking their time on projects (see tip 5), but it’s an excellent way to reveal which steps are taking more time than you assumed or expected, where time is being wasted, and how you can work more efficiently.

“When I proactively track my time, it helps me focus more immediately and intensely,” says freelance content marketer Angie Lucas (no relation to Eric). “Any time I’m under the gun, the first thing I do when I sit down at my desk is to open my Paymo time-tracking widget and hit Start. I know every minute I spend from that time forward will be billed to a client, which keeps me laser focused on the task at hand.”

4. Rely on a Single Source of Truth

Even if you use nothing but a spreadsheet, it’s relatively easy to keep track of the quantitative data from your project—things like hours, dates, and hard costs. But your qualitative data—emails, shared documents, instant messaging activity, etc.—can be just as important, revealing how smoothly (or bumpily) the project progressed, what roadblocks you encountered, and more.

But who has time to track all of that? Am I seriously expecting you to file away every email into project-specific folders and copy-and-paste relevant IMs into a post-mortem document? Heck no.

There are work management solutions available that enable all of this communication to happen in the space surrounding the quantitative data. These allow you to visit one online location to not only see how long the last project took and how the schedule played out, but also view the finished assets and deliverables—and you’ll be reminded that design asked for two deadline extensions on the layout phase because they weren’t given enough time in the first place.

A single tool, or at least fewer tools, from which to draw data will give you more power to speak with confidence about what you’re working on, how long it will take, and whether you have the bandwidth for that next upcoming project.

5. Understand Polychronic versus Monochronic Time

Remember when I asked if it ever seems you and your team members are operating from different perceptions of time? The truth is, you probably are. Understanding this can open up windows of insight into how you (and others) approach your work.

We live in a monochronic culture, which sees time as “being divided into fixed elements that can be organized, quantified and scheduled.” Time is linear. Time can and should be organized into a daily routine. “Obviously,” you’re thinking. “Doesn’t everyone think that?”

Actually, no. Not only are there entire polychronic cultures (parts of Latin America, sub-Sahara Africa, and the Middle East), there are polychrons even within monochronic cultures who view time as “a never-ending river, flowing from the infinite past, through the present, into the infinite future.” That’s not just highfalutin nonsense. Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. They prefer task-switching and thrive in environments without a fixed schedule. (Incidentally, these preferences are also exhibited in a growing number of digital natives.) They’re often late because, to them, time is truly relative.

If you and your team members can understand your own natural perception of time, you can harness each individual’s strengths for a stronger, more balanced team. For example, you might not want to put one of your polychrons in charge of project scheduling and forecasting (and they’ll probably thank you for it). But you can and should expect them to track their time and meet deadlines just like their monochronic counterparts, recognizing that some employees will produce their most brilliant work with a little less structure.

Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. Click To Tweet

It Takes Time to Make Time

If there’s one thing content marketers are constantly running short on, it’s time. At any given moment, each person on your team might have dozens of projects in the pipeline—all in different stages of planning, ideation, and creation. With so many moving parts, it’s not easy to pause long enough to collect and analyze the up-front data about your content production process. But unless you do—and remember, much of these metrics are available via automated tools—you’ll always be left guessing how long things take, how much bandwidth your team has, and whether you have the resources you need to meet your goals, now and in the future.

This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.

http://www.successwize.com/5-ways-to-harness-time-and-data-in-your-content-process/

[byronheeutgm]

5 Ways to Harness Time and Data in Your Content Process

“The theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time,” wrote Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. “It appeared that each observer might have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.”

Do you ever feel, in your workplace, like different members of your team are operating from a different perception of time? You say it will take two weeks to get a project done; your colleague says three weeks. You’re both experienced content creators, relying on the same historical experiences in the same workplace. How can you determine who’s right? Or should you just split the difference and get going on the work, figuring a few days doesn’t really matter?

In recent years, content marketing has become increasingly data-driven, at least when it comes to analytics and results. The efficacy of our work is something we can and do measure and manage. But there’s a tendency to avoid content creation data—how much time and resources the work really takes—which can make it difficult to:

Meet deadlines

Accurately forecast future work

Tap into our team’s full potential

Justify new resources

Prove the ROI of our time

Push back against unrealistic requests

Clearly, there are significant downsides to ignoring this front-end data, but it’s something content marketers are almost universally guilty of.

“As content creators, we are very results-focused,” said Todd Patton, content marketing manager at Branch Metrics in Palo Alto. “I’d much rather go to my boss and report that we acquired 100 MQLs from a certain ebook than how long it took me to put that ebook together.”

I think this is partly because not every executive appreciates how much effort it takes to write, design, concept, and create high-quality, original material. We’ve all seen the suspicious looks and heard the disbelieving questions throughout our careers. “It takes how long to produce a blog post? Hmm . . . I can write a 1,000-word email in 10 minutes.”

But pretending to others (and to ourselves) that we churn out the work more quickly than we really can, while still meeting the necessary quality standards, will only hurt us in the long run. It’s time to stop hiding from the truth of our content processes. Here are five ways for any content marketer to be more transparent and successful with project planning for both recurring work and one-off initiatives.

1. Involve the Team Throughout the Content Process

In a recent speech about project planning and forecasting, PMO Manager Eric Lucas of Crowley Maritime Corporation said:

“There’s something I call Mighty Mouse syndrome: There are people who love hiding things and then giving a ‘big reveal’; they love the grandeur of saving the day at the last possible moment. But that’s not how humans are successful. You have to work as teams.”

He offered seven tips for how project managers can improve the accuracy of their forecasts:

Humans learn in iterations—getting better at forecasting is a repetitive process.

Involve all the right people.

Adjust the forecast often.

Ensure the forecast reflects reality, not desire.

Communicate the forecast often—and through multiple channels.

Conduct a “lessons learned” meeting at the end of projects to codify what everyone has learned.

Accept that forecasts are approximations of the future; forecasts have to be “good enough.”

2. Guesstimate Granularly

“When I worked in-house and had limited resources, it always surprised me how long a project would take,” says Megan Maybee, a content marketing strategist at ThomasARTS in Salt Lake City. “Something simple like creating a social contest had so many elements, from design and writing to compliance and legal review. There were a couple times I didn’t give myself enough time, and then it was a huge scramble.”

I, too, am often surprised at how long certain projects take, even those I complete over and over again. It’s because it’s human nature to gloss over the difficulty of the journey mentally and only remember the destination. This tendency to forget accounts for people going through childbirth more than one time (or so I’m told), running more than one marathon, agreeing to more than one dental procedure.

No content marketing project can be predicted or controlled with 100 percent accuracy from the outset, no matter how much experience we have cranking out similar projects. There are always variables, and we must always rely on guesstimation to one degree or another. The key is to get as granular as possible with your project and resource guesstimations—to leave nothing out.

Start by meticulously documenting your workflow, including each little step it takes to execute each content type. Account for every brainstorm meeting, every interview, every individual contribution, every outline, every draft, every proofreading session, and every round of review and approval. Get input from every person who has a role in the production process. Ask questions to understand every aspect.

What I’ve just described is called Bottom-Up Estimating in project management circles. You can also try Analogous Estimating or Parametric Modeling, as described here. But whatever approach you take, be aware of the temptation to underestimate your time in order to appear faster or more competent. It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than to do the opposite.

3. Expect Everyone to Track Their Time

Once you have your repeatable processes granularly documented, start tracking the hours and minutes spent on each project phase (brainstorming, researching, writing, illustration, design, etc.) to make your future guesstimations even more reliable. When you add up all the time you tracked and build in some buffer time, that’s how you’ll know whether the next project is likely to take two weeks or three—whether you or your colleague was right all along.

If you use a work-management software solution like Workfront, the “adding up” is done for you. Individuals can just navigate to the task and use built-in time-tracking tools—or add in their hours manually. Just don’t fall prey to the temptation to assume you’ll always be able to beat your fastest time on each step. Rely on a padded average instead. Not everyone will be thrilled about tracking their time on projects (see tip 5), but it’s an excellent way to reveal which steps are taking more time than you assumed or expected, where time is being wasted, and how you can work more efficiently.

“When I proactively track my time, it helps me focus more immediately and intensely,” says freelance content marketer Angie Lucas (no relation to Eric). “Any time I’m under the gun, the first thing I do when I sit down at my desk is to open my Paymo time-tracking widget and hit Start. I know every minute I spend from that time forward will be billed to a client, which keeps me laser focused on the task at hand.”

4. Rely on a Single Source of Truth

Even if you use nothing but a spreadsheet, it’s relatively easy to keep track of the quantitative data from your project—things like hours, dates, and hard costs. But your qualitative data—emails, shared documents, instant messaging activity, etc.—can be just as important, revealing how smoothly (or bumpily) the project progressed, what roadblocks you encountered, and more.

But who has time to track all of that? Am I seriously expecting you to file away every email into project-specific folders and copy-and-paste relevant IMs into a post-mortem document? Heck no.

There are work management solutions available that enable all of this communication to happen in the space surrounding the quantitative data. These allow you to visit one online location to not only see how long the last project took and how the schedule played out, but also view the finished assets and deliverables—and you’ll be reminded that design asked for two deadline extensions on the layout phase because they weren’t given enough time in the first place.

A single tool, or at least fewer tools, from which to draw data will give you more power to speak with confidence about what you’re working on, how long it will take, and whether you have the bandwidth for that next upcoming project.

5. Understand Polychronic versus Monochronic Time

Remember when I asked if it ever seems you and your team members are operating from different perceptions of time? The truth is, you probably are. Understanding this can open up windows of insight into how you (and others) approach your work.

We live in a monochronic culture, which sees time as “being divided into fixed elements that can be organized, quantified and scheduled.” Time is linear. Time can and should be organized into a daily routine. “Obviously,” you’re thinking. “Doesn’t everyone think that?”

Actually, no. Not only are there entire polychronic cultures (parts of Latin America, sub-Sahara Africa, and the Middle East), there are polychrons even within monochronic cultures who view time as “a never-ending river, flowing from the infinite past, through the present, into the infinite future.” That’s not just highfalutin nonsense. Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. They prefer task-switching and thrive in environments without a fixed schedule. (Incidentally, these preferences are also exhibited in a growing number of digital natives.) They’re often late because, to them, time is truly relative.

If you and your team members can understand your own natural perception of time, you can harness each individual’s strengths for a stronger, more balanced team. For example, you might not want to put one of your polychrons in charge of project scheduling and forecasting (and they’ll probably thank you for it). But you can and should expect them to track their time and meet deadlines just like their monochronic counterparts, recognizing that some employees will produce their most brilliant work with a little less structure.

Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. Click To Tweet It Takes Time to Make Time

If there’s one thing content marketers are constantly running short on, it’s time. At any given moment, each person on your team might have dozens of projects in the pipeline—all in different stages of planning, ideation, and creation. With so many moving parts, it’s not easy to pause long enough to collect and analyze the up-front data about your content production process. But unless you do—and remember, much of these metrics are available via automated tools—you’ll always be left guessing how long things take, how much bandwidth your team has, and whether you have the resources you need to meet your goals, now and in the future.

This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.

http://ift.tt/2AhhIFG

[cmdrkitten]

[maryhare96]

5 Ways to Harness Time and Data in Your Content Process

“The theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time,” wrote Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. “It appeared that each observer might have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.”

Do you ever feel, in your workplace, like different members of your team are operating from a different perception of time? You say it will take two weeks to get a project done; your colleague says three weeks. You’re both experienced content creators, relying on the same historical experiences in the same workplace. How can you determine who’s right? Or should you just split the difference and get going on the work, figuring a few days doesn’t really matter?

In recent years, content marketing has become increasingly data-driven, at least when it comes to analytics and results. The efficacy of our work is something we can and do measure and manage. But there’s a tendency to avoid content creation data—how much time and resources the work really takes—which can make it difficult to:

Meet deadlines

Accurately forecast future work

Tap into our team’s full potential

Justify new resources

Prove the ROI of our time

Push back against unrealistic requests

Clearly, there are significant downsides to ignoring this front-end data, but it’s something content marketers are almost universally guilty of.

“As content creators, we are very results-focused,” said Todd Patton, content marketing manager at Branch Metrics in Palo Alto. “I’d much rather go to my boss and report that we acquired 100 MQLs from a certain ebook than how long it took me to put that ebook together.”

I think this is partly because not every executive appreciates how much effort it takes to write, design, concept, and create high-quality, original material. We’ve all seen the suspicious looks and heard the disbelieving questions throughout our careers. “It takes how long to produce a blog post? Hmm . . . I can write a 1,000-word email in 10 minutes.”

But pretending to others (and to ourselves) that we churn out the work more quickly than we really can, while still meeting the necessary quality standards, will only hurt us in the long run. It’s time to stop hiding from the truth of our content processes. Here are five ways for any content marketer to be more transparent and successful with project planning for both recurring work and one-off initiatives.

1. Involve the Team Throughout the Content Process

In a recent speech about project planning and forecasting, PMO Manager Eric Lucas of Crowley Maritime Corporation said:

“There’s something I call Mighty Mouse syndrome: There are people who love hiding things and then giving a ‘big reveal’; they love the grandeur of saving the day at the last possible moment. But that’s not how humans are successful. You have to work as teams.”

He offered seven tips for how project managers can improve the accuracy of their forecasts:

Humans learn in iterations—getting better at forecasting is a repetitive process.

Involve all the right people.

Adjust the forecast often.

Ensure the forecast reflects reality, not desire.

Communicate the forecast often—and through multiple channels.

Conduct a “lessons learned” meeting at the end of projects to codify what everyone has learned.

Accept that forecasts are approximations of the future; forecasts have to be “good enough.”

2. Guesstimate Granularly

“When I worked in-house and had limited resources, it always surprised me how long a project would take,” says Megan Maybee, a content marketing strategist at ThomasARTS in Salt Lake City. “Something simple like creating a social contest had so many elements, from design and writing to compliance and legal review. There were a couple times I didn’t give myself enough time, and then it was a huge scramble.”

I, too, am often surprised at how long certain projects take, even those I complete over and over again. It’s because it’s human nature to gloss over the difficulty of the journey mentally and only remember the destination. This tendency to forget accounts for people going through childbirth more than one time (or so I’m told), running more than one marathon, agreeing to more than one dental procedure.

No content marketing project can be predicted or controlled with 100 percent accuracy from the outset, no matter how much experience we have cranking out similar projects. There are always variables, and we must always rely on guesstimation to one degree or another. The key is to get as granular as possible with your project and resource guesstimations—to leave nothing out.

Start by meticulously documenting your workflow, including each little step it takes to execute each content type. Account for every brainstorm meeting, every interview, every individual contribution, every outline, every draft, every proofreading session, and every round of review and approval. Get input from every person who has a role in the production process. Ask questions to understand every aspect.

What I’ve just described is called Bottom-Up Estimating in project management circles. You can also try Analogous Estimating or Parametric Modeling, as described here. But whatever approach you take, be aware of the temptation to underestimate your time in order to appear faster or more competent. It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than to do the opposite.

3. Expect Everyone to Track Their Time

Once you have your repeatable processes granularly documented, start tracking the hours and minutes spent on each project phase (brainstorming, researching, writing, illustration, design, etc.) to make your future guesstimations even more reliable. When you add up all the time you tracked and build in some buffer time, that’s how you’ll know whether the next project is likely to take two weeks or three—whether you or your colleague was right all along.

If you use a work-management software solution like Workfront, the “adding up” is done for you. Individuals can just navigate to the task and use built-in time-tracking tools—or add in their hours manually. Just don’t fall prey to the temptation to assume you’ll always be able to beat your fastest time on each step. Rely on a padded average instead. Not everyone will be thrilled about tracking their time on projects (see tip 5), but it’s an excellent way to reveal which steps are taking more time than you assumed or expected, where time is being wasted, and how you can work more efficiently.

“When I proactively track my time, it helps me focus more immediately and intensely,” says freelance content marketer Angie Lucas (no relation to Eric). “Any time I’m under the gun, the first thing I do when I sit down at my desk is to open my Paymo time-tracking widget and hit Start. I know every minute I spend from that time forward will be billed to a client, which keeps me laser focused on the task at hand.”

4. Rely on a Single Source of Truth

Even if you use nothing but a spreadsheet, it’s relatively easy to keep track of the quantitative data from your project—things like hours, dates, and hard costs. But your qualitative data—emails, shared documents, instant messaging activity, etc.—can be just as important, revealing how smoothly (or bumpily) the project progressed, what roadblocks you encountered, and more.

But who has time to track all of that? Am I seriously expecting you to file away every email into project-specific folders and copy-and-paste relevant IMs into a post-mortem document? Heck no.

There are work management solutions available that enable all of this communication to happen in the space surrounding the quantitative data. These allow you to visit one online location to not only see how long the last project took and how the schedule played out, but also view the finished assets and deliverables—and you’ll be reminded that design asked for two deadline extensions on the layout phase because they weren’t given enough time in the first place.

A single tool, or at least fewer tools, from which to draw data will give you more power to speak with confidence about what you’re working on, how long it will take, and whether you have the bandwidth for that next upcoming project.

5. Understand Polychronic versus Monochronic Time

Remember when I asked if it ever seems you and your team members are operating from different perceptions of time? The truth is, you probably are. Understanding this can open up windows of insight into how you (and others) approach your work.

We live in a monochronic culture, which sees time as “being divided into fixed elements that can be organized, quantified and scheduled.” Time is linear. Time can and should be organized into a daily routine. “Obviously,” you’re thinking. “Doesn’t everyone think that?”

Actually, no. Not only are there entire polychronic cultures (parts of Latin America, sub-Sahara Africa, and the Middle East), there are polychrons even within monochronic cultures who view time as “a never-ending river, flowing from the infinite past, through the present, into the infinite future.” That’s not just highfalutin nonsense. Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. They prefer task-switching and thrive in environments without a fixed schedule. (Incidentally, these preferences are also exhibited in a growing number of digital natives.) They’re often late because, to them, time is truly relative.

If you and your team members can understand your own natural perception of time, you can harness each individual’s strengths for a stronger, more balanced team. For example, you might not want to put one of your polychrons in charge of project scheduling and forecasting (and they’ll probably thank you for it). But you can and should expect them to track their time and meet deadlines just like their monochronic counterparts, recognizing that some employees will produce their most brilliant work with a little less structure.

Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. Click To Tweet It Takes Time to Make Time

If there’s one thing content marketers are constantly running short on, it’s time. At any given moment, each person on your team might have dozens of projects in the pipeline—all in different stages of planning, ideation, and creation. With so many moving parts, it’s not easy to pause long enough to collect and analyze the up-front data about your content production process. But unless you do—and remember, much of these metrics are available via automated tools—you’ll always be left guessing how long things take, how much bandwidth your team has, and whether you have the resources you need to meet your goals, now and in the future.

This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.

http://ift.tt/2AhhIFG

[kraussoutene]

5 Ways to Harness Time and Data in Your Content Process

“The theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time,” wrote Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. “It appeared that each observer might have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.”

Do you ever feel, in your workplace, like different members of your team are operating from a different perception of time? You say it will take two weeks to get a project done; your colleague says three weeks. You’re both experienced content creators, relying on the same historical experiences in the same workplace. How can you determine who’s right? Or should you just split the difference and get going on the work, figuring a few days doesn’t really matter?

In recent years, content marketing has become increasingly data-driven, at least when it comes to analytics and results. The efficacy of our work is something we can and do measure and manage. But there’s a tendency to avoid content creation data—how much time and resources the work really takes—which can make it difficult to:

Meet deadlines

Accurately forecast future work

Tap into our team’s full potential

Justify new resources

Prove the ROI of our time

Push back against unrealistic requests

Clearly, there are significant downsides to ignoring this front-end data, but it’s something content marketers are almost universally guilty of.

“As content creators, we are very results-focused,” said Todd Patton, content marketing manager at Branch Metrics in Palo Alto. “I’d much rather go to my boss and report that we acquired 100 MQLs from a certain ebook than how long it took me to put that ebook together.”

I think this is partly because not every executive appreciates how much effort it takes to write, design, concept, and create high-quality, original material. We’ve all seen the suspicious looks and heard the disbelieving questions throughout our careers. “It takes how long to produce a blog post? Hmm . . . I can write a 1,000-word email in 10 minutes.”

But pretending to others (and to ourselves) that we churn out the work more quickly than we really can, while still meeting the necessary quality standards, will only hurt us in the long run. It’s time to stop hiding from the truth of our content processes. Here are five ways for any content marketer to be more transparent and successful with project planning for both recurring work and one-off initiatives.

1. Involve the Team Throughout the Content Process

In a recent speech about project planning and forecasting, PMO Manager Eric Lucas of Crowley Maritime Corporation said:

“There’s something I call Mighty Mouse syndrome: There are people who love hiding things and then giving a ‘big reveal’; they love the grandeur of saving the day at the last possible moment. But that’s not how humans are successful. You have to work as teams.”

He offered seven tips for how project managers can improve the accuracy of their forecasts:

Humans learn in iterations—getting better at forecasting is a repetitive process.

Involve all the right people.

Adjust the forecast often.

Ensure the forecast reflects reality, not desire.

Communicate the forecast often—and through multiple channels.

Conduct a “lessons learned” meeting at the end of projects to codify what everyone has learned.

Accept that forecasts are approximations of the future; forecasts have to be “good enough.”

2. Guesstimate Granularly

“When I worked in-house and had limited resources, it always surprised me how long a project would take,” says Megan Maybee, a content marketing strategist at ThomasARTS in Salt Lake City. “Something simple like creating a social contest had so many elements, from design and writing to compliance and legal review. There were a couple times I didn’t give myself enough time, and then it was a huge scramble.”

I, too, am often surprised at how long certain projects take, even those I complete over and over again. It’s because it’s human nature to gloss over the difficulty of the journey mentally and only remember the destination. This tendency to forget accounts for people going through childbirth more than one time (or so I’m told), running more than one marathon, agreeing to more than one dental procedure.

No content marketing project can be predicted or controlled with 100 percent accuracy from the outset, no matter how much experience we have cranking out similar projects. There are always variables, and we must always rely on guesstimation to one degree or another. The key is to get as granular as possible with your project and resource guesstimations—to leave nothing out.

Start by meticulously documenting your workflow, including each little step it takes to execute each content type. Account for every brainstorm meeting, every interview, every individual contribution, every outline, every draft, every proofreading session, and every round of review and approval. Get input from every person who has a role in the production process. Ask questions to understand every aspect.

What I’ve just described is called Bottom-Up Estimating in project management circles. You can also try Analogous Estimating or Parametric Modeling, as described here. But whatever approach you take, be aware of the temptation to underestimate your time in order to appear faster or more competent. It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than to do the opposite.

3. Expect Everyone to Track Their Time

Once you have your repeatable processes granularly documented, start tracking the hours and minutes spent on each project phase (brainstorming, researching, writing, illustration, design, etc.) to make your future guesstimations even more reliable. When you add up all the time you tracked and build in some buffer time, that’s how you’ll know whether the next project is likely to take two weeks or three—whether you or your colleague was right all along.

If you use a work-management software solution like Workfront, the “adding up” is done for you. Individuals can just navigate to the task and use built-in time-tracking tools—or add in their hours manually. Just don’t fall prey to the temptation to assume you’ll always be able to beat your fastest time on each step. Rely on a padded average instead. Not everyone will be thrilled about tracking their time on projects (see tip 5), but it’s an excellent way to reveal which steps are taking more time than you assumed or expected, where time is being wasted, and how you can work more efficiently.

“When I proactively track my time, it helps me focus more immediately and intensely,” says freelance content marketer Angie Lucas (no relation to Eric). “Any time I’m under the gun, the first thing I do when I sit down at my desk is to open my Paymo time-tracking widget and hit Start. I know every minute I spend from that time forward will be billed to a client, which keeps me laser focused on the task at hand.”

4. Rely on a Single Source of Truth

Even if you use nothing but a spreadsheet, it’s relatively easy to keep track of the quantitative data from your project—things like hours, dates, and hard costs. But your qualitative data—emails, shared documents, instant messaging activity, etc.—can be just as important, revealing how smoothly (or bumpily) the project progressed, what roadblocks you encountered, and more.

But who has time to track all of that? Am I seriously expecting you to file away every email into project-specific folders and copy-and-paste relevant IMs into a post-mortem document? Heck no.

There are work management solutions available that enable all of this communication to happen in the space surrounding the quantitative data. These allow you to visit one online location to not only see how long the last project took and how the schedule played out, but also view the finished assets and deliverables—and you’ll be reminded that design asked for two deadline extensions on the layout phase because they weren’t given enough time in the first place.

A single tool, or at least fewer tools, from which to draw data will give you more power to speak with confidence about what you’re working on, how long it will take, and whether you have the bandwidth for that next upcoming project.

5. Understand Polychronic versus Monochronic Time

Remember when I asked if it ever seems you and your team members are operating from different perceptions of time? The truth is, you probably are. Understanding this can open up windows of insight into how you (and others) approach your work.

We live in a monochronic culture, which sees time as “being divided into fixed elements that can be organized, quantified and scheduled.” Time is linear. Time can and should be organized into a daily routine. “Obviously,” you’re thinking. “Doesn’t everyone think that?”

Actually, no. Not only are there entire polychronic cultures (parts of Latin America, sub-Sahara Africa, and the Middle East), there are polychrons even within monochronic cultures who view time as “a never-ending river, flowing from the infinite past, through the present, into the infinite future.” That’s not just highfalutin nonsense. Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. They prefer task-switching and thrive in environments without a fixed schedule. (Incidentally, these preferences are also exhibited in a growing number of digital natives.) They’re often late because, to them, time is truly relative.

If you and your team members can understand your own natural perception of time, you can harness each individual’s strengths for a stronger, more balanced team. For example, you might not want to put one of your polychrons in charge of project scheduling and forecasting (and they’ll probably thank you for it). But you can and should expect them to track their time and meet deadlines just like their monochronic counterparts, recognizing that some employees will produce their most brilliant work with a little less structure.

Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. Click To Tweet It Takes Time to Make Time

If there’s one thing content marketers are constantly running short on, it’s time. At any given moment, each person on your team might have dozens of projects in the pipeline—all in different stages of planning, ideation, and creation. With so many moving parts, it’s not easy to pause long enough to collect and analyze the up-front data about your content production process. But unless you do—and remember, much of these metrics are available via automated tools—you’ll always be left guessing how long things take, how much bandwidth your team has, and whether you have the resources you need to meet your goals, now and in the future.

This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.

http://ift.tt/2AhhIFG

[dainiaolivahm]

5 Ways to Harness Time and Data in Your Content Process

“The theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time,” wrote Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. “It appeared that each observer might have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.”

Do you ever feel, in your workplace, like different members of your team are operating from a different perception of time? You say it will take two weeks to get a project done; your colleague says three weeks. You’re both experienced content creators, relying on the same historical experiences in the same workplace. How can you determine who’s right? Or should you just split the difference and get going on the work, figuring a few days doesn’t really matter?

In recent years, content marketing has become increasingly data-driven, at least when it comes to analytics and results. The efficacy of our work is something we can and do measure and manage. But there’s a tendency to avoid content creation data—how much time and resources the work really takes—which can make it difficult to:

Meet deadlines

Accurately forecast future work

Tap into our team’s full potential

Justify new resources

Prove the ROI of our time

Push back against unrealistic requests

Clearly, there are significant downsides to ignoring this front-end data, but it’s something content marketers are almost universally guilty of.

“As content creators, we are very results-focused,” said Todd Patton, content marketing manager at Branch Metrics in Palo Alto. “I’d much rather go to my boss and report that we acquired 100 MQLs from a certain ebook than how long it took me to put that ebook together.”

I think this is partly because not every executive appreciates how much effort it takes to write, design, concept, and create high-quality, original material. We’ve all seen the suspicious looks and heard the disbelieving questions throughout our careers. “It takes how long to produce a blog post? Hmm . . . I can write a 1,000-word email in 10 minutes.”

But pretending to others (and to ourselves) that we churn out the work more quickly than we really can, while still meeting the necessary quality standards, will only hurt us in the long run. It’s time to stop hiding from the truth of our content processes. Here are five ways for any content marketer to be more transparent and successful with project planning for both recurring work and one-off initiatives.

1. Involve the Team Throughout the Content Process

In a recent speech about project planning and forecasting, PMO Manager Eric Lucas of Crowley Maritime Corporation said:

“There’s something I call Mighty Mouse syndrome: There are people who love hiding things and then giving a ‘big reveal’; they love the grandeur of saving the day at the last possible moment. But that’s not how humans are successful. You have to work as teams.”

He offered seven tips for how project managers can improve the accuracy of their forecasts:

Humans learn in iterations—getting better at forecasting is a repetitive process.

Involve all the right people.

Adjust the forecast often.

Ensure the forecast reflects reality, not desire.

Communicate the forecast often—and through multiple channels.

Conduct a “lessons learned” meeting at the end of projects to codify what everyone has learned.

Accept that forecasts are approximations of the future; forecasts have to be “good enough.”

2. Guesstimate Granularly

“When I worked in-house and had limited resources, it always surprised me how long a project would take,” says Megan Maybee, a content marketing strategist at ThomasARTS in Salt Lake City. “Something simple like creating a social contest had so many elements, from design and writing to compliance and legal review. There were a couple times I didn’t give myself enough time, and then it was a huge scramble.”

I, too, am often surprised at how long certain projects take, even those I complete over and over again. It’s because it’s human nature to gloss over the difficulty of the journey mentally and only remember the destination. This tendency to forget accounts for people going through childbirth more than one time (or so I’m told), running more than one marathon, agreeing to more than one dental procedure.

No content marketing project can be predicted or controlled with 100 percent accuracy from the outset, no matter how much experience we have cranking out similar projects. There are always variables, and we must always rely on guesstimation to one degree or another. The key is to get as granular as possible with your project and resource guesstimations—to leave nothing out.

Start by meticulously documenting your workflow, including each little step it takes to execute each content type. Account for every brainstorm meeting, every interview, every individual contribution, every outline, every draft, every proofreading session, and every round of review and approval. Get input from every person who has a role in the production process. Ask questions to understand every aspect.

What I’ve just described is called Bottom-Up Estimating in project management circles. You can also try Analogous Estimating or Parametric Modeling, as described here. But whatever approach you take, be aware of the temptation to underestimate your time in order to appear faster or more competent. It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than to do the opposite.

3. Expect Everyone to Track Their Time

Once you have your repeatable processes granularly documented, start tracking the hours and minutes spent on each project phase (brainstorming, researching, writing, illustration, design, etc.) to make your future guesstimations even more reliable. When you add up all the time you tracked and build in some buffer time, that’s how you’ll know whether the next project is likely to take two weeks or three—whether you or your colleague was right all along.

If you use a work-management software solution like Workfront, the “adding up” is done for you. Individuals can just navigate to the task and use built-in time-tracking tools—or add in their hours manually. Just don’t fall prey to the temptation to assume you’ll always be able to beat your fastest time on each step. Rely on a padded average instead. Not everyone will be thrilled about tracking their time on projects (see tip 5), but it’s an excellent way to reveal which steps are taking more time than you assumed or expected, where time is being wasted, and how you can work more efficiently.

“When I proactively track my time, it helps me focus more immediately and intensely,” says freelance content marketer Angie Lucas (no relation to Eric). “Any time I’m under the gun, the first thing I do when I sit down at my desk is to open my Paymo time-tracking widget and hit Start. I know every minute I spend from that time forward will be billed to a client, which keeps me laser focused on the task at hand.”

4. Rely on a Single Source of Truth

Even if you use nothing but a spreadsheet, it’s relatively easy to keep track of the quantitative data from your project—things like hours, dates, and hard costs. But your qualitative data—emails, shared documents, instant messaging activity, etc.—can be just as important, revealing how smoothly (or bumpily) the project progressed, what roadblocks you encountered, and more.

But who has time to track all of that? Am I seriously expecting you to file away every email into project-specific folders and copy-and-paste relevant IMs into a post-mortem document? Heck no.

There are work management solutions available that enable all of this communication to happen in the space surrounding the quantitative data. These allow you to visit one online location to not only see how long the last project took and how the schedule played out, but also view the finished assets and deliverables—and you’ll be reminded that design asked for two deadline extensions on the layout phase because they weren’t given enough time in the first place.

A single tool, or at least fewer tools, from which to draw data will give you more power to speak with confidence about what you’re working on, how long it will take, and whether you have the bandwidth for that next upcoming project.

5. Understand Polychronic versus Monochronic Time

Remember when I asked if it ever seems you and your team members are operating from different perceptions of time? The truth is, you probably are. Understanding this can open up windows of insight into how you (and others) approach your work.

We live in a monochronic culture, which sees time as “being divided into fixed elements that can be organized, quantified and scheduled.” Time is linear. Time can and should be organized into a daily routine. “Obviously,” you’re thinking. “Doesn’t everyone think that?”

Actually, no. Not only are there entire polychronic cultures (parts of Latin America, sub-Sahara Africa, and the Middle East), there are polychrons even within monochronic cultures who view time as “a never-ending river, flowing from the infinite past, through the present, into the infinite future.” That’s not just highfalutin nonsense. Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. They prefer task-switching and thrive in environments without a fixed schedule. (Incidentally, these preferences are also exhibited in a growing number of digital natives.) They’re often late because, to them, time is truly relative.

If you and your team members can understand your own natural perception of time, you can harness each individual’s strengths for a stronger, more balanced team. For example, you might not want to put one of your polychrons in charge of project scheduling and forecasting (and they’ll probably thank you for it). But you can and should expect them to track their time and meet deadlines just like their monochronic counterparts, recognizing that some employees will produce their most brilliant work with a little less structure.

Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. Click To Tweet It Takes Time to Make Time

If there’s one thing content marketers are constantly running short on, it’s time. At any given moment, each person on your team might have dozens of projects in the pipeline—all in different stages of planning, ideation, and creation. With so many moving parts, it’s not easy to pause long enough to collect and analyze the up-front data about your content production process. But unless you do—and remember, much of these metrics are available via automated tools—you’ll always be left guessing how long things take, how much bandwidth your team has, and whether you have the resources you need to meet your goals, now and in the future.

This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.

http://ift.tt/2AhhIFG

[christinesumpmg1]

5 Ways to Harness Time and Data in Your Content Process

“The theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time,” wrote Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. “It appeared that each observer might have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.”

Do you ever feel, in your workplace, like different members of your team are operating from a different perception of time? You say it will take two weeks to get a project done; your colleague says three weeks. You’re both experienced content creators, relying on the same historical experiences in the same workplace. How can you determine who’s right? Or should you just split the difference and get going on the work, figuring a few days doesn’t really matter?

In recent years, content marketing has become increasingly data-driven, at least when it comes to analytics and results. The efficacy of our work is something we can and do measure and manage. But there’s a tendency to avoid content creation data—how much time and resources the work really takes—which can make it difficult to:

Meet deadlines

Accurately forecast future work

Tap into our team’s full potential

Justify new resources

Prove the ROI of our time

Push back against unrealistic requests

Clearly, there are significant downsides to ignoring this front-end data, but it’s something content marketers are almost universally guilty of.

“As content creators, we are very results-focused,” said Todd Patton, content marketing manager at Branch Metrics in Palo Alto. “I’d much rather go to my boss and report that we acquired 100 MQLs from a certain ebook than how long it took me to put that ebook together.”

I think this is partly because not every executive appreciates how much effort it takes to write, design, concept, and create high-quality, original material. We’ve all seen the suspicious looks and heard the disbelieving questions throughout our careers. “It takes how long to produce a blog post? Hmm . . . I can write a 1,000-word email in 10 minutes.”

But pretending to others (and to ourselves) that we churn out the work more quickly than we really can, while still meeting the necessary quality standards, will only hurt us in the long run. It’s time to stop hiding from the truth of our content processes. Here are five ways for any content marketer to be more transparent and successful with project planning for both recurring work and one-off initiatives.

1. Involve the Team Throughout the Content Process

In a recent speech about project planning and forecasting, PMO Manager Eric Lucas of Crowley Maritime Corporation said:

“There’s something I call Mighty Mouse syndrome: There are people who love hiding things and then giving a ‘big reveal’; they love the grandeur of saving the day at the last possible moment. But that’s not how humans are successful. You have to work as teams.”

He offered seven tips for how project managers can improve the accuracy of their forecasts:

Humans learn in iterations—getting better at forecasting is a repetitive process.

Involve all the right people.

Adjust the forecast often.

Ensure the forecast reflects reality, not desire.

Communicate the forecast often—and through multiple channels.

Conduct a “lessons learned” meeting at the end of projects to codify what everyone has learned.

Accept that forecasts are approximations of the future; forecasts have to be “good enough.”

2. Guesstimate Granularly

“When I worked in-house and had limited resources, it always surprised me how long a project would take,” says Megan Maybee, a content marketing strategist at ThomasARTS in Salt Lake City. “Something simple like creating a social contest had so many elements, from design and writing to compliance and legal review. There were a couple times I didn’t give myself enough time, and then it was a huge scramble.”

I, too, am often surprised at how long certain projects take, even those I complete over and over again. It’s because it’s human nature to gloss over the difficulty of the journey mentally and only remember the destination. This tendency to forget accounts for people going through childbirth more than one time (or so I’m told), running more than one marathon, agreeing to more than one dental procedure.

No content marketing project can be predicted or controlled with 100 percent accuracy from the outset, no matter how much experience we have cranking out similar projects. There are always variables, and we must always rely on guesstimation to one degree or another. The key is to get as granular as possible with your project and resource guesstimations—to leave nothing out.

Start by meticulously documenting your workflow, including each little step it takes to execute each content type. Account for every brainstorm meeting, every interview, every individual contribution, every outline, every draft, every proofreading session, and every round of review and approval. Get input from every person who has a role in the production process. Ask questions to understand every aspect.

What I’ve just described is called Bottom-Up Estimating in project management circles. You can also try Analogous Estimating or Parametric Modeling, as described here. But whatever approach you take, be aware of the temptation to underestimate your time in order to appear faster or more competent. It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than to do the opposite.

3. Expect Everyone to Track Their Time

Once you have your repeatable processes granularly documented, start tracking the hours and minutes spent on each project phase (brainstorming, researching, writing, illustration, design, etc.) to make your future guesstimations even more reliable. When you add up all the time you tracked and build in some buffer time, that’s how you’ll know whether the next project is likely to take two weeks or three—whether you or your colleague was right all along.

If you use a work-management software solution like Workfront, the “adding up” is done for you. Individuals can just navigate to the task and use built-in time-tracking tools—or add in their hours manually. Just don’t fall prey to the temptation to assume you’ll always be able to beat your fastest time on each step. Rely on a padded average instead. Not everyone will be thrilled about tracking their time on projects (see tip 5), but it’s an excellent way to reveal which steps are taking more time than you assumed or expected, where time is being wasted, and how you can work more efficiently.

“When I proactively track my time, it helps me focus more immediately and intensely,” says freelance content marketer Angie Lucas (no relation to Eric). “Any time I’m under the gun, the first thing I do when I sit down at my desk is to open my Paymo time-tracking widget and hit Start. I know every minute I spend from that time forward will be billed to a client, which keeps me laser focused on the task at hand.”

4. Rely on a Single Source of Truth

Even if you use nothing but a spreadsheet, it’s relatively easy to keep track of the quantitative data from your project—things like hours, dates, and hard costs. But your qualitative data—emails, shared documents, instant messaging activity, etc.—can be just as important, revealing how smoothly (or bumpily) the project progressed, what roadblocks you encountered, and more.

But who has time to track all of that? Am I seriously expecting you to file away every email into project-specific folders and copy-and-paste relevant IMs into a post-mortem document? Heck no.

There are work management solutions available that enable all of this communication to happen in the space surrounding the quantitative data. These allow you to visit one online location to not only see how long the last project took and how the schedule played out, but also view the finished assets and deliverables—and you’ll be reminded that design asked for two deadline extensions on the layout phase because they weren’t given enough time in the first place.

A single tool, or at least fewer tools, from which to draw data will give you more power to speak with confidence about what you’re working on, how long it will take, and whether you have the bandwidth for that next upcoming project.

5. Understand Polychronic versus Monochronic Time

Remember when I asked if it ever seems you and your team members are operating from different perceptions of time? The truth is, you probably are. Understanding this can open up windows of insight into how you (and others) approach your work.

We live in a monochronic culture, which sees time as “being divided into fixed elements that can be organized, quantified and scheduled.” Time is linear. Time can and should be organized into a daily routine. “Obviously,” you’re thinking. “Doesn’t everyone think that?”

Actually, no. Not only are there entire polychronic cultures (parts of Latin America, sub-Sahara Africa, and the Middle East), there are polychrons even within monochronic cultures who view time as “a never-ending river, flowing from the infinite past, through the present, into the infinite future.” That’s not just highfalutin nonsense. Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. They prefer task-switching and thrive in environments without a fixed schedule. (Incidentally, these preferences are also exhibited in a growing number of digital natives.) They’re often late because, to them, time is truly relative.

If you and your team members can understand your own natural perception of time, you can harness each individual’s strengths for a stronger, more balanced team. For example, you might not want to put one of your polychrons in charge of project scheduling and forecasting (and they’ll probably thank you for it). But you can and should expect them to track their time and meet deadlines just like their monochronic counterparts, recognizing that some employees will produce their most brilliant work with a little less structure.

Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. Click To Tweet It Takes Time to Make Time

If there’s one thing content marketers are constantly running short on, it’s time. At any given moment, each person on your team might have dozens of projects in the pipeline—all in different stages of planning, ideation, and creation. With so many moving parts, it’s not easy to pause long enough to collect and analyze the up-front data about your content production process. But unless you do—and remember, much of these metrics are available via automated tools—you’ll always be left guessing how long things take, how much bandwidth your team has, and whether you have the resources you need to meet your goals, now and in the future.

This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.

http://ift.tt/2AhhIFG

[mariasolemarionqi]

5 Ways to Harness Time and Data in Your Content Process

“The theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time,” wrote Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. “It appeared that each observer might have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.”

Do you ever feel, in your workplace, like different members of your team are operating from a different perception of time? You say it will take two weeks to get a project done; your colleague says three weeks. You’re both experienced content creators, relying on the same historical experiences in the same workplace. How can you determine who’s right? Or should you just split the difference and get going on the work, figuring a few days doesn’t really matter?

In recent years, content marketing has become increasingly data-driven, at least when it comes to analytics and results. The efficacy of our work is something we can and do measure and manage. But there’s a tendency to avoid content creation data—how much time and resources the work really takes—which can make it difficult to:

Meet deadlines

Accurately forecast future work

Tap into our team’s full potential

Justify new resources

Prove the ROI of our time

Push back against unrealistic requests

Clearly, there are significant downsides to ignoring this front-end data, but it’s something content marketers are almost universally guilty of.

“As content creators, we are very results-focused,” said Todd Patton, content marketing manager at Branch Metrics in Palo Alto. “I’d much rather go to my boss and report that we acquired 100 MQLs from a certain ebook than how long it took me to put that ebook together.”

I think this is partly because not every executive appreciates how much effort it takes to write, design, concept, and create high-quality, original material. We’ve all seen the suspicious looks and heard the disbelieving questions throughout our careers. “It takes how long to produce a blog post? Hmm . . . I can write a 1,000-word email in 10 minutes.”

But pretending to others (and to ourselves) that we churn out the work more quickly than we really can, while still meeting the necessary quality standards, will only hurt us in the long run. It’s time to stop hiding from the truth of our content processes. Here are five ways for any content marketer to be more transparent and successful with project planning for both recurring work and one-off initiatives.

1. Involve the Team Throughout the Content Process

In a recent speech about project planning and forecasting, PMO Manager Eric Lucas of Crowley Maritime Corporation said:

“There’s something I call Mighty Mouse syndrome: There are people who love hiding things and then giving a ‘big reveal’; they love the grandeur of saving the day at the last possible moment. But that’s not how humans are successful. You have to work as teams.”

He offered seven tips for how project managers can improve the accuracy of their forecasts:

Humans learn in iterations—getting better at forecasting is a repetitive process.

Involve all the right people.

Adjust the forecast often.

Ensure the forecast reflects reality, not desire.

Communicate the forecast often—and through multiple channels.

Conduct a “lessons learned” meeting at the end of projects to codify what everyone has learned.

Accept that forecasts are approximations of the future; forecasts have to be “good enough.”

2. Guesstimate Granularly

“When I worked in-house and had limited resources, it always surprised me how long a project would take,” says Megan Maybee, a content marketing strategist at ThomasARTS in Salt Lake City. “Something simple like creating a social contest had so many elements, from design and writing to compliance and legal review. There were a couple times I didn’t give myself enough time, and then it was a huge scramble.”

I, too, am often surprised at how long certain projects take, even those I complete over and over again. It’s because it’s human nature to gloss over the difficulty of the journey mentally and only remember the destination. This tendency to forget accounts for people going through childbirth more than one time (or so I’m told), running more than one marathon, agreeing to more than one dental procedure.

No content marketing project can be predicted or controlled with 100 percent accuracy from the outset, no matter how much experience we have cranking out similar projects. There are always variables, and we must always rely on guesstimation to one degree or another. The key is to get as granular as possible with your project and resource guesstimations—to leave nothing out.

Start by meticulously documenting your workflow, including each little step it takes to execute each content type. Account for every brainstorm meeting, every interview, every individual contribution, every outline, every draft, every proofreading session, and every round of review and approval. Get input from every person who has a role in the production process. Ask questions to understand every aspect.

What I’ve just described is called Bottom-Up Estimating in project management circles. You can also try Analogous Estimating or Parametric Modeling, as described here. But whatever approach you take, be aware of the temptation to underestimate your time in order to appear faster or more competent. It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than to do the opposite.

3. Expect Everyone to Track Their Time

Once you have your repeatable processes granularly documented, start tracking the hours and minutes spent on each project phase (brainstorming, researching, writing, illustration, design, etc.) to make your future guesstimations even more reliable. When you add up all the time you tracked and build in some buffer time, that’s how you’ll know whether the next project is likely to take two weeks or three—whether you or your colleague was right all along.

If you use a work-management software solution like Workfront, the “adding up” is done for you. Individuals can just navigate to the task and use built-in time-tracking tools—or add in their hours manually. Just don’t fall prey to the temptation to assume you’ll always be able to beat your fastest time on each step. Rely on a padded average instead. Not everyone will be thrilled about tracking their time on projects (see tip 5), but it’s an excellent way to reveal which steps are taking more time than you assumed or expected, where time is being wasted, and how you can work more efficiently.

“When I proactively track my time, it helps me focus more immediately and intensely,” says freelance content marketer Angie Lucas (no relation to Eric). “Any time I’m under the gun, the first thing I do when I sit down at my desk is to open my Paymo time-tracking widget and hit Start. I know every minute I spend from that time forward will be billed to a client, which keeps me laser focused on the task at hand.”

4. Rely on a Single Source of Truth

Even if you use nothing but a spreadsheet, it’s relatively easy to keep track of the quantitative data from your project—things like hours, dates, and hard costs. But your qualitative data—emails, shared documents, instant messaging activity, etc.—can be just as important, revealing how smoothly (or bumpily) the project progressed, what roadblocks you encountered, and more.

But who has time to track all of that? Am I seriously expecting you to file away every email into project-specific folders and copy-and-paste relevant IMs into a post-mortem document? Heck no.

There are work management solutions available that enable all of this communication to happen in the space surrounding the quantitative data. These allow you to visit one online location to not only see how long the last project took and how the schedule played out, but also view the finished assets and deliverables—and you’ll be reminded that design asked for two deadline extensions on the layout phase because they weren’t given enough time in the first place.

A single tool, or at least fewer tools, from which to draw data will give you more power to speak with confidence about what you’re working on, how long it will take, and whether you have the bandwidth for that next upcoming project.

5. Understand Polychronic versus Monochronic Time

Remember when I asked if it ever seems you and your team members are operating from different perceptions of time? The truth is, you probably are. Understanding this can open up windows of insight into how you (and others) approach your work.

We live in a monochronic culture, which sees time as “being divided into fixed elements that can be organized, quantified and scheduled.” Time is linear. Time can and should be organized into a daily routine. “Obviously,” you’re thinking. “Doesn’t everyone think that?”

Actually, no. Not only are there entire polychronic cultures (parts of Latin America, sub-Sahara Africa, and the Middle East), there are polychrons even within monochronic cultures who view time as “a never-ending river, flowing from the infinite past, through the present, into the infinite future.” That’s not just highfalutin nonsense. Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. They prefer task-switching and thrive in environments without a fixed schedule. (Incidentally, these preferences are also exhibited in a growing number of digital natives.) They’re often late because, to them, time is truly relative.

If you and your team members can understand your own natural perception of time, you can harness each individual’s strengths for a stronger, more balanced team. For example, you might not want to put one of your polychrons in charge of project scheduling and forecasting (and they’ll probably thank you for it). But you can and should expect them to track their time and meet deadlines just like their monochronic counterparts, recognizing that some employees will produce their most brilliant work with a little less structure.

Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. Click To Tweet It Takes Time to Make Time

If there’s one thing content marketers are constantly running short on, it’s time. At any given moment, each person on your team might have dozens of projects in the pipeline—all in different stages of planning, ideation, and creation. With so many moving parts, it’s not easy to pause long enough to collect and analyze the up-front data about your content production process. But unless you do—and remember, much of these metrics are available via automated tools—you’ll always be left guessing how long things take, how much bandwidth your team has, and whether you have the resources you need to meet your goals, now and in the future.

This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.

http://ift.tt/2AhhIFG

[mercedessharonwo1]

5 Ways to Harness Time and Data in Your Content Process

“The theory of relativity put an end to the idea of absolute time,” wrote Stephen Hawking in A Brief History of Time. “It appeared that each observer might have his own measure of time, as recorded by a clock carried with him, and that identical clocks carried by different observers would not necessarily agree.”

Do you ever feel, in your workplace, like different members of your team are operating from a different perception of time? You say it will take two weeks to get a project done; your colleague says three weeks. You’re both experienced content creators, relying on the same historical experiences in the same workplace. How can you determine who’s right? Or should you just split the difference and get going on the work, figuring a few days doesn’t really matter?

In recent years, content marketing has become increasingly data-driven, at least when it comes to analytics and results. The efficacy of our work is something we can and do measure and manage. But there’s a tendency to avoid content creation data—how much time and resources the work really takes—which can make it difficult to:

Meet deadlines

Accurately forecast future work

Tap into our team’s full potential

Justify new resources

Prove the ROI of our time

Push back against unrealistic requests

Clearly, there are significant downsides to ignoring this front-end data, but it’s something content marketers are almost universally guilty of.

“As content creators, we are very results-focused,” said Todd Patton, content marketing manager at Branch Metrics in Palo Alto. “I’d much rather go to my boss and report that we acquired 100 MQLs from a certain ebook than how long it took me to put that ebook together.”

I think this is partly because not every executive appreciates how much effort it takes to write, design, concept, and create high-quality, original material. We’ve all seen the suspicious looks and heard the disbelieving questions throughout our careers. “It takes how long to produce a blog post? Hmm . . . I can write a 1,000-word email in 10 minutes.”

But pretending to others (and to ourselves) that we churn out the work more quickly than we really can, while still meeting the necessary quality standards, will only hurt us in the long run. It’s time to stop hiding from the truth of our content processes. Here are five ways for any content marketer to be more transparent and successful with project planning for both recurring work and one-off initiatives.

1. Involve the Team Throughout the Content Process

In a recent speech about project planning and forecasting, PMO Manager Eric Lucas of Crowley Maritime Corporation said:

“There’s something I call Mighty Mouse syndrome: There are people who love hiding things and then giving a ‘big reveal’; they love the grandeur of saving the day at the last possible moment. But that’s not how humans are successful. You have to work as teams.”

He offered seven tips for how project managers can improve the accuracy of their forecasts:

Humans learn in iterations—getting better at forecasting is a repetitive process.

Involve all the right people.

Adjust the forecast often.

Ensure the forecast reflects reality, not desire.

Communicate the forecast often—and through multiple channels.

Conduct a “lessons learned” meeting at the end of projects to codify what everyone has learned.

Accept that forecasts are approximations of the future; forecasts have to be “good enough.”

2. Guesstimate Granularly

“When I worked in-house and had limited resources, it always surprised me how long a project would take,” says Megan Maybee, a content marketing strategist at ThomasARTS in Salt Lake City. “Something simple like creating a social contest had so many elements, from design and writing to compliance and legal review. There were a couple times I didn’t give myself enough time, and then it was a huge scramble.”

I, too, am often surprised at how long certain projects take, even those I complete over and over again. It’s because it’s human nature to gloss over the difficulty of the journey mentally and only remember the destination. This tendency to forget accounts for people going through childbirth more than one time (or so I’m told), running more than one marathon, agreeing to more than one dental procedure.

No content marketing project can be predicted or controlled with 100 percent accuracy from the outset, no matter how much experience we have cranking out similar projects. There are always variables, and we must always rely on guesstimation to one degree or another. The key is to get as granular as possible with your project and resource guesstimations—to leave nothing out.

Start by meticulously documenting your workflow, including each little step it takes to execute each content type. Account for every brainstorm meeting, every interview, every individual contribution, every outline, every draft, every proofreading session, and every round of review and approval. Get input from every person who has a role in the production process. Ask questions to understand every aspect.

What I’ve just described is called Bottom-Up Estimating in project management circles. You can also try Analogous Estimating or Parametric Modeling, as described here. But whatever approach you take, be aware of the temptation to underestimate your time in order to appear faster or more competent. It’s always better to under-promise and over-deliver than to do the opposite.

3. Expect Everyone to Track Their Time

Once you have your repeatable processes granularly documented, start tracking the hours and minutes spent on each project phase (brainstorming, researching, writing, illustration, design, etc.) to make your future guesstimations even more reliable. When you add up all the time you tracked and build in some buffer time, that’s how you’ll know whether the next project is likely to take two weeks or three—whether you or your colleague was right all along.

If you use a work-management software solution like Workfront, the “adding up” is done for you. Individuals can just navigate to the task and use built-in time-tracking tools—or add in their hours manually. Just don’t fall prey to the temptation to assume you’ll always be able to beat your fastest time on each step. Rely on a padded average instead. Not everyone will be thrilled about tracking their time on projects (see tip 5), but it’s an excellent way to reveal which steps are taking more time than you assumed or expected, where time is being wasted, and how you can work more efficiently.

“When I proactively track my time, it helps me focus more immediately and intensely,” says freelance content marketer Angie Lucas (no relation to Eric). “Any time I’m under the gun, the first thing I do when I sit down at my desk is to open my Paymo time-tracking widget and hit Start. I know every minute I spend from that time forward will be billed to a client, which keeps me laser focused on the task at hand.”

4. Rely on a Single Source of Truth

Even if you use nothing but a spreadsheet, it’s relatively easy to keep track of the quantitative data from your project—things like hours, dates, and hard costs. But your qualitative data—emails, shared documents, instant messaging activity, etc.—can be just as important, revealing how smoothly (or bumpily) the project progressed, what roadblocks you encountered, and more.

But who has time to track all of that? Am I seriously expecting you to file away every email into project-specific folders and copy-and-paste relevant IMs into a post-mortem document? Heck no.

There are work management solutions available that enable all of this communication to happen in the space surrounding the quantitative data. These allow you to visit one online location to not only see how long the last project took and how the schedule played out, but also view the finished assets and deliverables—and you’ll be reminded that design asked for two deadline extensions on the layout phase because they weren’t given enough time in the first place.

A single tool, or at least fewer tools, from which to draw data will give you more power to speak with confidence about what you’re working on, how long it will take, and whether you have the bandwidth for that next upcoming project.

5. Understand Polychronic versus Monochronic Time

Remember when I asked if it ever seems you and your team members are operating from different perceptions of time? The truth is, you probably are. Understanding this can open up windows of insight into how you (and others) approach your work.

We live in a monochronic culture, which sees time as “being divided into fixed elements that can be organized, quantified and scheduled.” Time is linear. Time can and should be organized into a daily routine. “Obviously,” you’re thinking. “Doesn’t everyone think that?”

Actually, no. Not only are there entire polychronic cultures (parts of Latin America, sub-Sahara Africa, and the Middle East), there are polychrons even within monochronic cultures who view time as “a never-ending river, flowing from the infinite past, through the present, into the infinite future.” That’s not just highfalutin nonsense. Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. They prefer task-switching and thrive in environments without a fixed schedule. (Incidentally, these preferences are also exhibited in a growing number of digital natives.) They’re often late because, to them, time is truly relative.

If you and your team members can understand your own natural perception of time, you can harness each individual’s strengths for a stronger, more balanced team. For example, you might not want to put one of your polychrons in charge of project scheduling and forecasting (and they’ll probably thank you for it). But you can and should expect them to track their time and meet deadlines just like their monochronic counterparts, recognizing that some employees will produce their most brilliant work with a little less structure.

Those with polychronic tendencies actually see time as circular. Click To Tweet It Takes Time to Make Time

If there’s one thing content marketers are constantly running short on, it’s time. At any given moment, each person on your team might have dozens of projects in the pipeline—all in different stages of planning, ideation, and creation. With so many moving parts, it’s not easy to pause long enough to collect and analyze the up-front data about your content production process. But unless you do—and remember, much of these metrics are available via automated tools—you’ll always be left guessing how long things take, how much bandwidth your team has, and whether you have the resources you need to meet your goals, now and in the future.

This post is part of a paid sponsorship between Workfront and Convince & Convert.

http://ift.tt/2AhhIFG