I am drowning.
Since 2002, I have been in business for myself, operating an independent website, magazine, and general media empire called the "Orange and Brown Report". We focus on providing news, information, and commentary about the NFL's Cleveland Browns each and every day of the year.
I won't go into how I found myself in that business other than to say that I'm from Cleveland, love the Browns and Browns fans, and was either lucky or stupid enough to turn a hobby into a vocation.
Since the OBR is a small business, I don't have an assistant or a team of people to handle problems which crop up every day. They all go through me, and I spend the money we make hiring reporters, writers, columnists, and photographers to make our site, magazine, and radio show better. I get all the customer service emails, write all the checks, and post just about everything that goes onto the site.
Since the Cleveland Browns haven't been a very good team since they returned in 1999, it isn't always easy convincing fans to spend $40 or $100 to learn more about them. My ambitions for the site and magazine have outstripped our revenue, so I took a second job as part of the Network Development team at Scout.com (part of Fox Interactive Media). This gig involves working with publishers on the network, solving technical problems, and helping to improve the network by developing new features.
Managing a small business and working in a communication-intensive second job is probably enough to create a torrent of emails, tasks, nagging half-thoughts of things that should be done, phone calls, instant messages, and so forth.
My situation is complicated further because I'm basically in the business of tracking, creating and passing along information itself. In addition to managing the information related to my business and job, I'm also responsible for tracking the news about the Cleveland Browns.
This means following a staggering array of RSS feeds, web sites, fan blogs, and other sources of information. We also create a tremendous number of digital assets that need to be tracked: photographs (between 50-500 a week during the season and training camp), audio clips, Word documents, PDFs, you name it.
The result is so much information that one's entire day can be spent just reading and organizing it, without actually being able to act on it.
Such has been my lot these last several years. Despite being at my post seven days a week, generally from first thing in the morning to the last thing at night, I continually fall behind. My email box often explodes to more than 500 unread messages, bills, mail, and other paper piles up in boxes, unread RSS feeds swell into the hundreds or thousands.
Meanwhile, I frantically bounce from task to task, and occasionally get so overwhelmed that I simply stare numbly at the computer screen. I've put on about 15 pounds a year since 2002, and spend little time with my wife and children despite working in an office less than twenty feet away from them. Typical "Dad jobs" around the house go undone.
And still the business grows a little each year, but fails to thrive like it should.
Something has to change.
Over the last year, I've tapped into the active "Getting Things Done" community which has built up around David Allen's methodology like strange lifeforms around a deep ocean thermal vent. I've lurked on message boards, surfed the web, and tried to learn what I could, in the time I had, about how people in similar boats manage their time challenges.
Now, I'm ready to adopt, and adapt, their approaches to try to improve my business and my life.
To document this, and to try to help some people who are helping me, I've created this blog.
Welcome to the journey.
Barry McBride
November, 2006