The Scaling of YOU: how do you manage your time and workload as your role increases?

New YEAR. New Habits. New Goals. That’s usually how January starts as we reflect on the past year and aim to set new goals for our growth and development. A month ago I felt like I hit a plateau and recognized I needed to learn some new skills in order to continue to keep pace with my career aspirations. While I was stuck in terms of how to do things differently, I knew that I had access to colleagues who have navigated that transition and reached out to them with a request to understand a day in their life in hopes that I’d learn a few new skills that I could immediately implement.  

My first "leveling up" conversation was with Camille Gatenby , Head of Global Talent Acquisition at GE Digital. Camille has had her role nearly double in the last year and as I thought about who I could talk to regarding my need for new skills, she was the very first person that I reached out to.

Here’s my top 3 takeaways from my info chat with Camille as to how she has shifted her approach to scaling her workload:

1)  Think of your work like a supply chain (NOT air traffic control): what work do you need to do to set others up for success? Being thoughtful about work and recognizing what you’re doing and how it affects the greater system. There’s a deliberate and automatic filtering that’s done around what to respond to vs. initiate based on whether it will hold things up or distract people from what is needed for them to focus on. on.  Another way to think of this is to imagine that you’re hosting a dinner. You’ve got different foods cooking at various times. And while you’re finishing up the cooking you want your guests to be enjoying their time (perhaps they’re snacking or mingling and enjoying cocktails). Most important, as you’re busy cooking this dinner, DO YOUR GUESTS EVEN KNOW YOU’RE HOSTING A DINNER??? A lot of the time we internalize plans and intentions. You have to step outside your head and think about all the communication dots that have to connect so people know there’s a dinner coming.

2)  Be intentional with your dead time: we all have these times in the day such as during a commute, or when we’re getting ready in the morning and is useful to refocus how to use the time to be purposeful whether it’s listening to a podcast during the drive that will help prime the attitude for the day or to take 5 minutes while enjoying a morning coffee to write down something that you’re grateful for. Your eye looks for things once you start looking for it and so you’d be surprised how much hidden dead time you actually have. The discipline and practice is to actually do something meaningful with it (vs. scrolling social media)

3)  Work for 50 minutes and then take a break: often we tell ourselves we’ll just plow through our work, or emails but in reality we need to take a break. The tools and patterns we use to get to where we are today may no longer serve us as our roles and scope increases. Its imperative to unlearn old habits and challenge oneself to create new ones.  The struggle is pushing through the uncomfortable “this seems counter-intuitive to take a 30 minute walk in the middle of the day when I have 30 emails waiting for me” but your brain will thank you and you may find you’re more productive following the break.  Book suggestion: “Activate Your Brain” by Scott Halford. This book provides data backed research and highlights the importance of mental wandering and reflection because they provide a form of rest that’s critical to build in to get creative results.

Habits and behavior change take time; it’s not a “I had this awesome info chat and now I can implement everything they taught me in a day” outcome, but I’m excited to take more focus in how I spend my time and I’ve already found it immensely valuable to challenge myself to walk away from my laptop and take a walk vs chugging through emails.

We're one month into the year, and have 11 months to go: if you can make one minor change a month it’ll add up to big shifts by the end of the year!

What are ways that you adjusted how you think about your work balance as you’ve taken on more complexity in your roles?