Let me show you how dumb things can happen:

As a freelance copywriter, I frequently collect input from various audiences on issues I write about in my newsletter. A few weeks ago I hired my friend Erin to synthesize comments so I could write an article on the best and worst tradeshow giveaways. The comments came in the form of 40-some-odd emails, and she had to extract the data and organize it into a spreadsheet. It took about 3 hours.

A week or two later, I had to synthesize data from a survey I did of employees for two companies that were merging. There were 25 or so respondents. This time I used my free account with Survey Monkey, an online survey system.  The free account has several limits on it, such as no more than 100 respondents per survey, no more than 10 questions per survey, and you can’t download all the responses at once. Since Erin had done such a good job with the other data, I asked her to download the 25 responses and assemble them. It took her about an hour.

Phase three: I just did yet another survey with Survey Monkey, this time on telecommuting and home offices. I ended up with more than 100 responses, and I actually had to add another survey so I wouldn’t max out my account. I started stressing about synthesizing the data from 100+ responses. Erin’s busy applying to grad schools, so my friend Lynn may start doing side work for me. In my head I guesstimated that Lynn would need 4 or so hours to make sense of all the data.

And then Lynn calls. “Beth, I’d love to take money from you, but why don’t you just upgrade to the next level of Survey Monkey. Then you can download everything all at once, formatted exactly the way you’re asking.”

Uh. Duh. I had locked myself into using a free resource and supplementing it with admin assistance. What I really needed to do, as Lynn immediately recognized, was to go ahead and pay the dang $19.95 for a month and download all my data at once.

Duh again.