The Power Of Wonky
Why not doing things straight can save you time, energy and look better.
Please forgive the sloppy wording, spelling mistakes and anything else suggesting I’m too knackered to be writing anything.
Last Thursday was the annual Women In Business Big Show - it’s very big. It involved corralling 100 plus exhibitors, 20 speakers, visitors, VIP’s etc into a very large building for a massive networking and business event. It’s followed by a regular small Sunday event, which this time was at a brand new venue and without enough support as our table humper was away.
So a physically and mentally exhausting few days.
In the run-up to the big event, I decided to publish an event programme, a mini magazine—a biography of all the speakers and exhibitors and what’s happening on the day. When I say run-up, I mean five days before, not five months before. There were more than a few raised eyebrows when I told the sponsors what I was doing and asked them for a special event offer to pop in.
The problem with my brain is it thinks everything will take 5 minutes, when the reality is days. For instance, each magazine took 9 minutes to print. 15 hours solid, non-stop printing to publish only 100 copies.
Back to the wonky. My brain loves to deep-dive into a problem and the stumbling block for this was getting the entries for each exhibitor lined up square on the page. They all had different-sized logos and profile pictures, and I was fiddling around for hours trying to get them all straight. It was like that rat-and-trap game at the village fair; as soon as I got one sorted, another popped up out of place.
Then it struck me - the key question - why do they have to line up?
Well, of course, they didn’t. I dragged them all around, randomly on the page, and a few minutes later, the job was done.
How often does this stuckness happen and steal hours away from us for no good reason?
What other tracks am I running along that I need to derail?
The other thing is, they looked much better wonky.
I wish I could share how to easily wake yourself up from running along a pointless groove. I guess asking yourself the question, why is it done like this? Perhaps starting with a routine task that takes longer than 1 hour and reviewing why it’s done and why is it done in this way? What’s the outcome? What’s the objective?
For the magazine I was glued to the objective of creating lined-up lists of exhibitors. The better objective is to create an event magazine programme highlighting our exhibitors, what they do and how to connect with them; making our exhibitors feel special, and extending the community inclusion beyond one day.
An unexpected outcome was its impact. To me it was a little magazine for the day, thrown together with amateur publishing. Imagine my surprise when posts, which included the magazine, like the one below from a speaker, started appearing social media.
This could be the start of a new publishing career. The thing is, if I had carried on trying to make it all line up perfectly, it would never have even made it to the printer.
