Comments on: Tips for Distributing the Workload Among Your Team — Answering a Reader’s Question

By: Snippets Toward a Philosophy of Life | I'd Rather Be Writing - Tom Johnson

Snippets Toward a Philosophy of Life | I'd Rather Be Writing - Tom Johnson — Sat, 29 Nov 2008 07:07:02 +0000

[...] philosophy is actually a quotation from a Saint Francis movie, from a scene where Saint Francis rebuilds a chapel stone by stone. Life is more enjoyable when you don’t overload [...]

By: Tom

Tom — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 04:26:44 +0000

Thanks Dunken. I just posted about Author-it's new blog here.

By: Dunken Francis

Dunken Francis — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 02:56:09 +0000

Great post! With reference to your mention of Author-it – your readers may be interested to know that there is now an official Author-it blog at http://www.author-it.com/blog

Looking forwards to your comments!

regards
Dunken Francis

By: Tips for Distributing the Workload Among Your Team â Answering a Readerâs Question | BlogSparks

Wed, 13 Aug 2008 15:45:22 +0000

[...] Tips for Distributing the Workload Among Your Team â Answering a Readerâs Question Sebastian asks, I have been searching the web for information about how to divide workload among writers as the the workload–and the department itself!–grow. I am thrilled to find your blog! I am a new writer in a Health Information Systems doc group. We write for 120 products, maintain … [...]

By: Rhonda

Rhonda — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 09:37:17 +0000

Hi Tom

Further to the last point about publishing to a place where others can grab the content…

Author-it has some neat features in their Publishing Profiles to automatically publish to an FTP site, copy or move files to another location after publishing, etc. And I think command line publishing still works in v5 (though I’ve never used it), where you can set up a batch file and schedule it to run every night, for example, and upload the published files to central location.

Another suggestion for Sebastian: Consider getting in an Author-it consultant, such as Char, to do the one-off tasks such as setting up templates, importing the most important legacy content, training the writers, etc. If the writers can write and publish in the new tool from the beginning, there’ll be better buy in. If they have to wait any length of time after their training while someone learns how to import, and someone else learns how to set up the templates how they want them, the value of any training they did can be lost.

Rhondas last blog post..Making faces

By: mojo

mojo — Mon, 11 Aug 2008 06:14:24 +0000

Thanks for good information here,keep up the good work.

By: Tips for Distributing the Workload Among Your Team Answering a Reader s Question | Health News | How To Be Healthy

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 15:43:37 +0000

[...] the full post from I’d Rather Be Writing – Tom [...]

By: Weekly link roundup by Communications from DMN

Weekly link roundup by Communications from DMN — Sat, 26 Jul 2008 09:01:43 +0000

[...] Johnson offers some great advice on how to distribute work between members of a technical writing [...]

By: Jason Roosevelt

Jason Roosevelt — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 15:22:08 +0000

Tom – I just wanted to thank you for the great articles. I am half of a two-person tech writing team at my company, and we both really enjoy your articles.

We were both particularly fond of the last paragraph in this article.

By: Alistair Christie

Alistair Christie — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 14:42:09 +0000

I agree with the sentiment of the last part of your post, particularly in terms of work/life balance. The problem for many people (I guess I mean me here) is that you can easily get blinded to what’s a big rock and what’s a grain of sand, and then one day you realise you’ve been spending all your time packing jars with sand and the rocks have been languishing in some corner unattended.

Thanks Tom – keep up the good work.