Sometime in the next day or two, my newsletter Where’s Your Ed At will hit 14,000 subscribers, which is roughly 300% more than I had a year ago. I have put out 180,000 words across 80 articles, and I have been on top of most of the major trends in tech and business while also running a PR firm and living a normal life. I’m regularly asked how I possibly have time to do this, and the answer is very simple: I have found the easiest possible ways to do everything related to my process.
The reason I’m able to do this is that everything I do is built to be as easy as humanely possible.
I am sorry. I know business leaders or “experts” of any kind are meant to have a big secret that changes the way you look at the world. I know it’s meant to be complex, but the answer is that I want to be able to do the most amount of work for the minimum amount of effort. To be clear, this doesn’t mean that I am half-assing anything, or putting out an inferior product, or not doing my absolute best. It just means that whatever I do — whatever I take on — I attempt to cater to not just what I’m best at, but what tasks are the easiest for me to perform.
My job, for example, requires me to pitch the media for clients. It is, I’d argue, the most profitable part of the PR industry, and it’s also the easiest one to generate objective results for. I’d also argue that I’m one of the best media relations people in the world, and that’s partly because the actual tasks — talking to reporters, reading their work, pitching them on clients, and so on — are not hard tasks for me. I enjoy doing the work, but I also do not have to walk somewhere to do it, or have to read anything I don’t want to read. The main tenets of my job — reading and socializing with reporters — are things I would do if I was not running a PR firm, and thus the actual work itself feels almost entirely bereft of friction. It’s work — don’t get me wrong — but it is not work that I have to force myself to do any particular day.
The same goes for the newsletter. I write at about 120 words-per-minute, and if I have an idea, it’s very easy to just start typing it out. I don’t know why this is — it’s perhaps the thing I traded my ability to catch things for (I cannot catch objects in motion) — but if I have an idea in my head, it is simply a case of writing it out.
This is also because I don’t force myself to write about anything I don’t want to. I grew my newsletter by writing a…
