Learnings for 2023

After almost a full year into a new role and job, after 3 months of 'purposeful unemployment,' I find myself looking back at the year I had, and the things I vowed to maintain NOT to do again after unraveling bad habits during my time away from the workforce (like multi-tasking!).

Some of the things I've learned and observed this year?

There is a huge difference between urgency and importance.

Not everything is urgent. A rare few things are, and the rest can wait. It is easy to get sucked into someone else's imposed deadline which is just that, 99% of the time. Their deadline - not yours - to get something accomplished. And 99% of the time, that deadline should be seen as best case scenario and fluid - as long as you each communicate with each other and determine if a later date is feasible. Communicating and agreeing collectively is critical in this instance. Vice versa for your deadlines and allowing for fluidity where you can.

You can - and should - give yourself permission to prioritize.

When you build a plan, you often build a lot into that plan and when you add a dose of reality and day-to-day work, sometimes that plan becomes too big and it's okay to step back and say, ya know what? Let's focus on these three things and deprioritize these three things.

It's better to do three things extremely well than six things mediocre.

Keeping your boundaries while remaining flexible can be done.

After realizing how little I kept and maintained my own boundaries in previous roles, it was super important for me to establish boundaries early on and to communicate to my team that it's okay to have boundaries (and you should!), too.

Coming from a remote working background before the pandemic made it mainstream (circa 2011 for me), its easy to get wired into the mentality that you have to be always-on. That is just not true. Get your work done and it doesn't matter if you take a break mid-day, late-day, early-day, everyone is allowed a break. (and should be taking them anyway)

...but on the flipside, be flexible when you have to work outside your 'normal' hours for a short period or to accommodate time zones. Being globally distributed, that's just comes with the territory, but doesn't mean you should be working 16 hour days to cover all time zones, all day, either.

Take a step back and try to understand others' perspectives.

Going back to being globally distributed, that also means a variety of cultures, communication styles, and personalities. It is easy to get frustrated when you don't understand why someone did something the way they did it or communicated in the way they did, but if you step back and try to understand where they are coming from, you'll begin to see their perspective, empathize, and build a better rapport.

Make meetings matter.

I actually wrote a whole guideline document on what requires a meeting - and what does NOT require a meeting - to make meetings more productive while reducing the number of meetings we are all in. So when you're in a meeting, you know why, you know what (agenda FTW), and you have clear outcomes after the meeting. You'll be surprised at how much more productive you are with a) less meetings and b) meetings themselves become more productive!

I know I will for sure be taking each of these 'with' me into 2023, and perhaps you will too!

What about you? What did you learn this year?