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Question of the week: How could I have managed my work to complete the 10-Day Challenge?

I write this article based on the insight of my conversation with my team in our monthly 1-on-1 call. I speak with each one of my team members. This article is to share the question of this week and our method to work on it. You can subscribe to the Building Our Team newsletter (2100+ subscribers)

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How could I have managed my work to complete the 10-Day Challenge?

Here are some textbook answers to this question.?

You could have planned nine weeks and dedicated One Challenge per week and given blogged enough time to complete it.

You could at least have read all the ten challenges from the book, maybe a couple of times and could do the one which is easiest to do in no particular order.

The first challenge would have been done easily by everyone because each one of you has been logging time for many years now. So logging 24 hours would have been a manageable task for me, and within a day or two, it should have been knocked out. Could you ask for help from your team lead, not peers but your team lead, because they are also responsible for your growth and development?

The fifth option would be to ask for help from Gautam or me to guide or advise you on something together.?

You needed to find this task more important, and that's the only reason you couldn't complete it. Otherwise, I don't see that time was the real reason or work pressure was the real reason for completing it because more than half of the team managed to do it within a week or two.?

If work pressure was really that, you couldn't take 1.5 hours per challenge. That means you have been unable to manage your time because I cannot believe that continuously for two months you had such a work pressure load that you couldn't cool some pressure off or ask for help for two months.

It also means that you need to gain the skill of negotiation and ask for help. This means that you needed 13 hours in two months, that's approximately 1.5 hr which says you lack huge negotiation skills.

The third one is that you have to accept that you need to be more skilled to do your day-to-day work under pressure within a time constraint. You could have asked for additional help and used the leverage of delegation, and we already had ten interns ready to work for us, but we could not delegate the work to them.

The last reason would be to drop the act of perfection and hiding behind the excuses that only you in the whole world can do your particular task and stop taking more work than you can deliver and get your standards corrected, which means that you accept your capacity and your delivery capabilities for which we can negotiate on the compensation as well.?

Here are some quick solutions I would have given you if you had asked me the same question at the beginning of the two months or after the first 15 days of time pressure.

Put a note to the team that you are away 2 hrs a week for some personal reasons and complete the task because people have taken leaves during the last two months, they have fallen sick, and they have some planned leave as well. You could have done this for two hours per week.

Calling a sick day every 15 days, focusing on 10 days Challenge, and getting it done. Ask for help from your family members or friends, even your old schoolmates, classmates or college mates and share this assignment with them and complete it with their help on your behalf.

Very tricky, but it gets the task done. With the help of Juniors that just joined the team and are already completing the lessons, you can delegate the assignment to them and take help in terms of formatting, Installation of the required software or any dictation you want to do.?

The fifth core key was if you believe there is value in a system that will bring to your life and change your career for real, you could have invested weekends for it; 13 hours in two months for self-development means you missed web series on one of the OTT platforms. So that's a bargain. If you asked me, I could have made it work for you.?

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