Some useful things about work I’ve learned this year that makes things easier

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Here are some things that I’ve learned/been reminded this year on making work easier.

 

  1. Good sleep is key. If you don’t sleep well, your next day is a wipe out. It is like turning up to work drunk. Don’t do it.
  2. You need to keep constantly learning in your core areas. Yes, it means reading ECJ judgements in the weekend. Spend an hour a day perfecting your  craft on your time.
  3. Prepare Standard Operating Procedures, Checklists and case studies for every area you work in. It reveals your ignorance better than anything. Ask a colleague to see if they can produce what you would produce by following the SOPs. If they can’t, go back and improve.
  4. If you ask a colleague to do something they have not done before, and you don’t provide them with the above, you can’t expect them to produce the product you want.
  5. When you hire people, you  have a simple job. Help them to do your job as quickly as possible, and provide incentives for them to want to do it.
  6. You need to work with people with whom you can delegate 80% + of your work to, and go to sleep knowing it is going to be done to the same or a better standard that you would have done.
  7. Visualse your work. If you can’t describe what you are doing as a process, you don’t know what you’re doing. ~ W. Edwards Deming.
  8. Personal and team Kanban are powerful tools. They show that you can’t do more than one thing at a time.
  9. Limit your work in progress to around 3 things. Anything more, your brain will get foggy and anything more than 10 close down.
  10. Humans are awful at estimating how long they think a task will take. If you think it will take an hour, it will take 2.
  11. If you are doing deep work, you need to avoid interruptions. Interruptions from office babble, phone alerts, and constant asks will make an hour long task go up to 5 hours and the final product bad.
  12. Asynchronous communication through tools like Loom are great tools for providing clear and immediate feedback.
  13. Time chunking your week ahead on a Friday morning will make you work life a lot easier.
  14. Use your calendar to plan your work.
  15. Tools like Otter.ai and  Calendy make your work life a lot easier.
  16.  If a meeting has no pre-reads and agenda 48 hours before the meeting, excuse yourself.*
  17. You can only work on a certain number of things. Your head space is limited.
  18. You only have a limited circle of competence. Delegate anything outside that small competence to others. Don’t stray into areas outside your competence.
  19. In any meeting, ask people to send you a record of the action items and follow ups. It really helps cut work down.  People often won’t.
  20. If people want political miracles, don’t pretend to be a Prophet.
  21. Always ask for the evidence to support a policy/political asks. It will reduce the policy asks by 90-95%%.
  22. Set aside time to prepare and follow up after meetings – 15 minutes before  and 30 minutes after.
  23. Separate deep from shallow work. I do deep work in the morning and shallow work in the afternoon. No meetings etc in the morning.
  24. If someone asks you for help, see if you can. If you can’t, tell them that. If someone else can, introduce them. But sometimes, something has gone too far that things can be changed.
  25. Most key political decisions are taken before most people even realize. The window of opportunity is closed a lot earlier than most people know. Your job is to know when that the window is open and who is making the decision.
  26. Turn up at the right time, with the right evidence, real solutions, to the right people with the right people.*
  27. If you don’t know the process on how a decision is really made you don’t have a hope.*
  28. If you can’t explain your issue clearly and concisely in writing and speaking, you don’t have a hope.*
  29. The best ideas I come across come from reading around the area and going for a walk. The best ideas/solutions come out of the air and you need a note book with you at all time.
  30. If a tool can do something you do reliably better than you can, that saves you both time and head space, use it.
  31. Be comfortable with change. It is the only constant.

 

  • Long standing/eternal rules/lessons learned that deserve repeating.

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