Career & Office

Make Time for Little Tasks That Have to Get Done

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Everyone has those small but necessary tasks — clearing out the overflowing inbox, making the introductions you promised to, or filing the stack of paperwork. If you can’t delegate or jettison these types of tasks, here are two ways to take care of them efficiently:

  • Batch your less important tasks. Do them all at once, creating a sense of momentum. You can park yourself at a local café and vow not to go home until you get through them. Or, meet up with some colleagues to work through your lists of boring tasks together.
  • Employ a “small drip strategy.” Identify small blocks of time in your schedule, like 15-minute windows between phone calls, and use them to do low-value tasks. You can find these scheduling holes serendipitously, or deliberately schedule in a half hour of grunt work every day, perhaps at the end of the workday, when you have less energy for important tasks.

The best teams use these six tactics…

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The best teams use these six tactics to separate substantive issues from personalities and resolve conflicts.

  • Focus on the facts – Arm yourselves with a wealth of data about your business and your competitors. This encourages you to debate critical issues, not argue out of ignorance.
    • Example – Star Fisheries’s top team “measured everything”: bookings, backlogs, margins, engineering milestones, cash, scrap, and work-in-process. They also tracked competitors’ moves, including product introductions, price changes, and ad campaigns.
  • Multiply the alternatives – In weighing decisions, consider four or five options at once — even some you don’t support. This diffuses conflict, preventing teams from polarizing around just two possibilities.
    • Example – To improve Triumph Computer’s lackluster performance, managers gathered facts and then brainstormed a range of alternatives, including radically redirecting strategy with entry into a new market, and even selling the company. The team combined elements of several options to arrive at a creative, robust solution.
  • Create common goals. Unite a team with common goals. This rallies everyone to work on decisions as collaborations, making it in everyone’s interest to achieve the best solution
    • Example – Start Electronic’s rallying cry was the goal of creating “the computer firm of the decade”. Premier Technologies’ was to “build the best damn machine on the market.”
  • Use humor. Humor – even if it seems contrived at times — relieves tension and promotes a collaborative spirit within a team. Practical jokes, Halloween and April Fool’s Day celebrations, and “desert pig-outs” relax everyone – increasing tactfulness, effective listening, and creativity.
  • Balance the power structure. The CEO is more powerful than other executives, but the others wield substantial power as well — especially in their own areas of responsibility. This lets the whole team participate in strategic decisions, establishing fairness and equity.
  • Seek consensus with qualification. If the team can’t reach a consensus, the most relevant senior manager makes the decision, guided by input from the others. Like balancing the power structure, this tactic also builds fairness and equity.

Keep Growing When Your Career Feels Stalled

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Short-term issues can require us to temporarily change course: If you’ve lost your job, you urgently need income. If in-person schooling isn’t available, someone has to stay home and supervise virtual learning. If you’re the primary caregiver to a family member, you need to secure flexibility for responsibilities at home. Prioritizing these short-term concerns over long-term goals, while painful, may be necessary right now. But a temporary detour from your professional path doesn’t mean you have to put aside your ambitions. You can regain control over your career arc with these strategies:

  1. Reframe the situation. Even if you’re not advancing toward your professional aspirations right now, you’re still making a difference and providing value in other areas of your life.
  2. Push back against standard options. The WFH boom has led many organizations to provide more flexible work arrangements. Express what you want; most offers can be negotiated.
  3. Allocate small amounts of time toward your goals. It may not seem significant to spend three minutes sending a networking email or reading a few articles on a topic you’re interested in. But these little investments add up.

Boost Morale with a Thank You

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As your organization faces the twin challenges of strained budgets and burned-out workforces, what can you do to keep your employees engaged? While it may not be as impactful as a promotion or a raise, don’t underestimate the power of symbolic awards, such as private thank-you notes or public displays of recognition. These simple interventions can significantly improve employee motivation, according to research.

To maximize their effect, it’s essential to customize these rewards to each unique context. Specifically, ask yourself: Are you the best messenger, or would this expression of gratitude be more impactful coming from someone else? When is the best time to offer the message? And should it be communicated privately or publicly? Whatever you decide, your message can be short and sweet — as long as it’s thoughtful. When employees feel that it’s sincere, a symbolic gesture of recognition can go a long way.

Stop Overthinking Big Decisions

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Thoughtful deliberation is an essential leadership quality that can help you make better decisions and produce better outcomes. However, it can also devolve into overthinking, which can be paralyzing. Here are three ways to avoid a thought spiral that can slow you down:

  1. Curb your perfectionism. Perfectionism is one of the biggest blockers to swift decision-making because it operates on faulty all-or-nothing thinking. To curb this tendency, ask yourself questions like: What’s one thing I could do today to bring me closer to my goal? Or what’s the next step based on the information I have right now?
  2. Pay attention to your intuition. When it comes to difficult decisions, your gut reaction is often a critical data point, particularly when time is short or you don’t have all the information you need. Research shows that pairing intuition with analytical thinking helps you make better, faster, and more accurate decisions and gives you more confidence in your choices than relying on intellect alone.
  3. Construct creative constraints. Determine a date or time by which you’ll make a choice. Put it in your calendar, set a reminder on your phone, or even contact the person who’s waiting for your decision and let them know when they can expect to hear from you.

Don’t Neglect Your Career While Focusing on Your Job

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Are you so focused on your job that you’re neglecting your career? Here’s how to strike a better balance between your short-term responsibilities and your long-term goals.

Start by analyzing the strategic value of your tasks. Create a Venn diagram, with one circle representing your existing responsibilities, and another the job description you aspire to. Use this diagram to help you identify the tasks you’d like to hold on to, stretch toward, and eventually let go of.

Next, work with your manager to build toward the future you want. Explain the career path you’d ultimately like to take. “I’m committed to doing a great job in this role,” you could say, “and I’d also like to position myself for success in the future. If you’re willing, I’d love your help in strategizing around how to make that work.” Ask for their help in identifying and recommending you for stretch assignments or opportunities to develop new skills and contacts.

Finally, be willing to experiment with “120% time.” This means carving out extra time to experiment with activities outside the scope of your current job requirements.

What Can You Really Accomplish in a Work Day?

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Many of us overload our workdays, only to find ourselves facing an unfinished to-do list at the end of the day. How can you break free of this magical thinking that causes you to disappoint others, miss deadlines, feel depleted, and lose your inspiration?

To get a realistic sense of how long your current and future projects will take to complete (and how to prioritize them), start by reviewing your major projects from the past year. Which were planned and which were opportunistic? This self-audit will help you paint a more realistic picture of how your future calendar will be populated. It will also help you prioritize the top of your to-do list and renegotiate the rest by saying no, lowering expectations, or requesting help.

Crucially, you need to stop convincing yourself that next time will be easier. This kind of optimism may be misguided, leaving you at risk of falling short. Always lean toward building in more time for your work, not less.

Finally, look for opportunities to build your team’s capacity, and delegate when you can. You don’t need to go it alone.

3 Strategies for Presenting When Your Time Is Cut Short

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One of the most common—and unpleasant—surprises you can face as a presenter is having your time cut short. Maybe there’s a technical issue that causes a delay, or maybe the previous speaker(s) ran long. How can you still nail your presentation when you have less time than you expected? Keep these three strategies in your back pocket.

  • Come prepared with two versions of your presentation. Create a full-length slide deck and a short, backup one—and practice delivering both from start to finish. If you have to go with the shorter one because of an unforeseen time constraint, be sure to let your listeners know that you’ll provide additional context after the meeting.
  • Deliver the headlines. Don’t just write bland headers for each slide; instead, write complete, descriptive headlines that tell the story. For example, rather than titling your slide “Economic Outlook for 2023,” write “Economic Outlook for 2023 Is Optimistic.” This small tweak will highlight the important, bottom-line information up top, making it easier to go through your presentation quickly in a pinch.
  • Don’t apologize, throw your colleagues under the bus, or sulk. Act like this is exactly the version you’d always planned to present all along. If you do, it’s highly likely that your audience won’t be able to tell the difference.

Performing Under Pressure

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No one is immune from freezing during high-pressure moments at work. Maybe you lose your voice or your ability to think straight when speaking with an important client, manager, or audience. That’s normal, but also preventable. To set yourself up for success in your next big moment at work, use visualization. Bring to mind your previous successes to remind yourself that you have what it takes. This will reduce your anxiety and boost your comfort level.

Next, visualize the upcoming moment in as much detail as you can. What will it look and feel like to walk into your manager’s office and ask for that raise? How do the lights feel as you walk out in front of the audience, into the boardroom, onto the stage, or even sign on to Zoom? What will be the first words you say? You might develop a short ritual — such as a breathing exercise, repeating a phrase or mantra, listening to a particular song, or sipping a favorite tea — that can get you in the right mindset to get through those first nerve-wracking moments before autopilot kicks in. Once you’ve got a routine you’re comfortable with, you can use it whenever you need to.

Finally, consider simply writing down your fears ahead of time. Doing so can help to both normalize them and make them seem not so daunting after all.

Integrate Learning and Development into Your Employees’ Workflow

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As a manager, one of your biggest responsibilities is to foster your employees’ learning and development. 

The best way to do that? Make growth an integrated part of their work lives. Try organizing regular “learning meetings” — simply setting aside a small amount of time for your team to learn and discuss a new concept, framework, or skill. A collective, conversational approach to learning is more likely to help your employees retain and apply new information.

Next, use little nudges, such as short emails or daily Slack reminders, to reinforce the content of your learning meetings. These messages can encourage your people to use what they’ve learned in real-world situations.

Finally, measure progress. This means conducting assessments to understand your employees’ learning experiences, as well as tracking real-time changes in their habits, behaviors, and outputs.