I keep needing a refresher

The longer I’ve been in this business the more I realize that having a process for something is really the key to succeeding (I know I’ve talked about this a million times before — but I don’t know about you, I keep needing a refresher).

There are a couple reasons for this:

1. It makes it repeatable. Anything that is repeatable can be optimized and improved with each use.
2. It relieves decision fatigue. I don’t want to know how many hours I’ve spent just trying to figure out what to do without making any progress.
3. It makes things less daunting. Having bite-sized steps to take makes undertaking a big project more manageable.
4. It gives you the ability to outsource. Every time I’ve failed to outsource something, it’s because I had no map of how it should be done.

One of my goals for this quarter is to create more case studies, and rework the ones I’ve done in the past (they are a bit… messy).

This week I decided to get started on my first one and after writing and deleting everything I came up with for about an hour, I was just about ready to cross this off my list of goals and give up on he whole idea.

Later that night it dawned on me… I just needed some kind of process for creating the case study. This way I would have a formula to follow, I wouldn’t be wasting time making decisions, and, if need-be, I could send this over to Abby to write for me if I could at least give her the details.

So, instead of writing a case study, I decided to write a process for a case study.

I thought I’d share it with you today, as it’s not a step-by-step process, really… It’s more of a framework of what needs to go in every case study. This structure allows me to answer simple questions about the project, and turn those answers into a more cohesive story (with a beginning, middle, and end).

Inside this framework are a list of the questions I want to answer along with notes on the strategy behind answering that question and tips on what will make my answers most impactful.

After that, there is a list of elements that I can incorporate into the story to make it more engaging and impactful (screenshots, images, testimonials, etc.).

All of this was made even easier with a little help from ChatGPT who supplemented my ideas with some examples, and descriptions based on what I was trying to achieve (I’ve found CGPT much more useful for these sort of things than publish-ready content).

Here’s what I came up with — I hope it’s helpful.