You’re a successful person. I know, because you’re listening to me, which all successful people do. And being amazingly talented naturally means that people often seek your help. Since you love helping others—it’s how you pay it forward, in appreciation for those who help you from your humble beginnings–you say “Yes” to all those requests. And you say “Yes” some more. And some more. And pretty soon, you’re buried under a gigantic pile of requests. Yes, you’re overcommitted.
But giving back is important, and there’s a way to do it without overcommitting. Develop hurdles for your help. Make it just a little bit difficult for other people to dip into your well of advice and feedback.
Bernice loves to help fellow plant-lovers. It’s what she’s been doing thanklessly for years at the Green Growing Things Shop. But now she’s buried between questions about moss, guest bloggers who want to contribute essays on the ethics of selling carnivorous plants, and budding young entrepreneurs who want advice on how to grow their own businesses. Bernice would never, ever, stop helping people, but with this new flood of requests, she needs a way to decide who to respond to. This means finding out who’s serious about getting help, and who just wants some face time with an expert like Bernice.
Decide How Much Time You Can Give
You lead a busy life! But if you’re going to give back, the first step is deciding how much time you have to give.
Say you set aside five hours a month to work with your followers. That could mean helping five people for one hour each. Or it could mean working closely with one person for a solid five hour block. Whichever it is, block it out on your calendar as “giving back time.” Not only is that explicit time to give back, but that’s also all the time you’ll use to give back. It’s both a placeholder and an upper limit! You could even schedule a work-related meeting immediately after your giving back time to force you back into your main work.
Bernice chooses eight hours per month—one work day–as a good benchmark for her time. Capping her pro bono at a day insures Bernice won’t run herself ragged each month. As much as she likes helping others, Bernice also has to run her business, encourage her employees, feed her Venus Flytraps, and moisturize the glands on her Pitcher plants.
Build Criteria for Who Is Worth Your Time
Now you have a limit for how much time you can spend giving help. The next step is to decide who deserves that time. After all, you’re pretty awesome, You don’t want to give your awesome to just anyone. Build criteria for who’s worth your attention. You want to weed out anyone who doesn’t seem serious about using your advice. Especially those vile souls who prefer to bug you with simple questions, when they could get the answer from Google with a tap of their fingers.
Choose criteria that lets you know who actually needs your time and advice. Among the requests that people have sent Bernice about gardening, there are plenty of journalists and aspiring writers who have questions about the fonts she used for the Green Growing Things logo. While she admits that her logo is beautiful beyond all imagining, a veritable tribute to the beauty of nature, those are questions for a graphic designer, not a gardener extraordinaire.
A criterion that is worth her time is speaking only with other plant entrepreneurs or people who have a green thumb and want gardening advice.
Apply Your Criteria to Create Hurdles
Use an online survey to screen out the people who don’t meet your criteria. You can create one in mere minutes!
Design questions that test the criteria you identified. Bernice chooses questions like, “How long have you had a passion for plants?” and “What’s the most difficult plant challenge you’re dealing with?” People who don’t fit her ideal giving-back profile won’t be able to give very good answers to those questions and may self-select out of asking for Bernice’s time.
The goal of your survey is to get people to decide they don’t want to do the work to earn the right to some of your pro bono work.
By filling the survey with short-answer questions—not multiple choice or fill-in-the blanks—Bernice makes sure her people go out of their way to prove they really need her help. They should think critically about what they want from her, and provide an idea as to how she will give it to them.
You should do this, too. The goal of your survey is to get people to decide they don’t want to do the work to earn the right to some of your pro bono work. If they aren’t willing to take the time to fill out a survey, why should you be willing to give them your time for free? Just don’t do it!
Once you have a survey constructed, when people write, asking for help or a favor, direct the sender to the online survey, and let them “apply” for your time.
Let Them Handle All the Scheduling
As people make it through your obstacle course of hurdles, give them one more that will make your life easier too: have them set their own appointment.
Managing a tight schedule is difficult as is. But when you have this many people to help, you need to make sure you’re spending time helping people, and not taking weeks of phone or email tag just to plan for a half-hour meetup.
I like to use the scheduling app ScheduleOnce.com. It lets people see my availability and pencil themselves directly into my calendar.
With a service like this, you can even limit the available time blocks just to the time you’ve blocked off for your pro bono time.
Put People Off Automatically
The other nice things about using a scheduling tool is that they can only sign up for your next free time block. If all your pro bono hours are taken this month, they are only giving options for next month. It’s much easier to let your computer put them off than to do it yourself. If you say you can’t meet until next month, they might beg. And when they beg, it’s awkward. How do you tell someone nicely that, as reasonable as it may seem in the movies, it just isn’t very impressive when they drop to their knees and lick your shoes?
Now, whenever somebody asks Bernice for help, all she has to do is send them the links to her survey and her online schedule. With this new system, the average message in her inbox has changed from “Let’s grab coffee soon” to “Thank you so much! I’ve booked five minutes on your calendar six months from now, I’m looking forward to it so much!!!”
When you want to give back, but keep it within bounds, build hurdles. Use online surveys so you meet only with serious, determined people who can truly benefit from your advice. Use a scheduling system so people don’t spend your time on their administrivia, and let the system enforce your availability. You get to spend your time running your life, and also give back enough to feel great.
This is Stever Robbins. Follow GetItDoneGuy on Twitter and Facebook. I run webinars and other programs to help people be Extraordinarily Productive, and build extraordinary careers. If you want to know more, visit SteverRobbins.com.
Work Less, Do More, and Have a Great Life!
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