For many of us, web work and social media and surfing the internet and blogging are all inextricably linked. Even though we’re theoretically online to work directly for our clients, in fact we spend a good deal of our time and attention making connections with other people and ideas, and then sharing those connections back into the larger pool of web users.
If that describes your day – and it’s accompanied by a dose of guilt about wasting time – take heart! Citizen Agency’s Tara Hunt has taken a deep look at this behavior, which she calls “futzing,” and she suggests that it’s not only useful but, perhaps, the future of work for knowledge workers. What’s futzing? In Tara’s words:
I’m not sure if I am even using the word correctly, but what it means to me is the process by which one wanders around without aim, having conversations (with new and old friends), gathering random information, learning ostensibly useless knowledge and avoiding all tasks/duties clear and present.
For knowledge workers, a sort of directed futzing can be a valuable skill indeed. If you’re familiar with a wide variety of design alternatives, for example, you can take a client’s inchoate ideas about their new web site and marketing campaign and help shape them based on your knowledge of everything that’s going on in social media, cutting edge marketing, and so on. If you hang out on Twitter and read hundreds of interesting tweets a day and follow links, your mental warehouse will fill up with things that you can later pull out when they connect with some other free-floating atom of information. This sort of creative connection between things is so far impossible to automate.
As Tara points out, some futzing may be directly billable: contracts can have research time built in, collaborative futzing with the client can be classed as coaching. But to get to this point, you need to do some futzing on your own time:
But the biggest issue is that you have to do a heckuvalotta free futzing to get to the point that someone will pay you to do it. For example, you have to have an enormous amount of information to give away to demonstrate that you are darned good at futzing. This is why blogging is really valuable. People can display all of the interesting things they’ve learnt and bridges they are able to make from their futzing. By demonstrating this in blog posts, potential clients see their worth. In fact, some of the highest paid futzers give most of their futzing away (which pays for more futzing). We are continuously giving away free information, connections and ideas we gain through our futzing and because of that, we don’t have to go to clients, they come to us.
So if you’re looking for a reason to explain your online work-avoidance behavior, there you have it. You’re not wasting time: you’re building up credibility for the future. The Census Bureau may never recognize this job title, but for Master Futzers, there’s a good living to be made.
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