Consistence is key

Are you an all or nothing person? If you are like me, you must start putting some effort in improving your everyday routine. And trust me: it’s not easy as it looks, but the quantity and quality of tasks you can address simply changing your mind is unbelievable.

I must admit, it wasn’t my IT career to drive me into this mindset: as a fitness fanatic (did I ever told you about my other fitness related blog, Stay Healty, Stay foolish?) exercising and diet quickly brought me to understand that consistence was the key to achieve some sort of result. Not being able to have a full workout session was a shame at the beginning, and I found myself skipping more and more sessions because I didn’t have proper time. At that point, I understood that tuning my routine either by changing hours or putting a brief 20 minute workout would do the trick just as well, or at least put me in a positive state of mind, allowing myself to trying to cut out some extra time the day after to catch up.

This greatly applies to all sides of my life, and obviously also in my everyday work in information technology. To be honest, this is a key concept in my everyday work life, especially in these days where working behaviour incredibly changed due to Covid pandemic. Before Covid, it was pretty easy to handle standup meetings or walk-in questions simply getting up from the chair and going to the team / manager / whatever and asking a 5 minute question; now seems like nothing moves until a meeting is set up (and that’s why I tried to include voice channels in our everyday work life to improve this quick question and answer behaviour). If you are like me, your calendar is a battlefield of meetings, and you are forced to include placeholder meetings where you DO your work instead of listening to other colleagues’ issues and progresses.

Trying to change company mindset and train every other business unit to avoid not-so-usefull meetings is an option, but can became a work itself and can put you into the so called (by me) Julius Caesar Syndrome: when you fear to wake up some day with your colleague backstabbing you because you’re always questioning and pointing out “something” that (in their opinion) is slowing down their work. I don’t know about you, but even if I’m an hard-ass by nature I’d like to keep some sort of good neighbourliness with my co-worker.

That’s why you need to drive your way around these obstacles, and here’s where consistency became the key of getting your work properly done. A proper routine (yes, you’ve heard right: routine is the key to let everything done, unfortunately I must say because I personally hate routines) is the key to remain consistent with everything, especially at work. Here’s my personal focus points, just for you to know: everyone should develop his / her one according to their kind of work, the current period and (most important) personal work-life balance (but I’ll talk deeply about this in another post).

• Use something to organize your work. Everything would fit, it depends of the kind of person you are. I personally use Trello at present, switched back to it after using Google Keep for a brief time, but you can use whatever you want, even the good old paper diary. I’m a personal fan of paper, but I’m freaking slower compared to digital writing: I’m planning to buy a reMarkable device to test if it can fit better my needs.
• Plan everything, and I mean everything, in advance. I personally plan my workout routine (now it’s at 6 AM before waking up my son, but I plan to switch back to exercise during lunch break because I can hit the gym and being more focused), my personal engagements and also my personal work-related activities that are not directly related to my everyday work (see next point). Not to mention that this “everything” should flow directly in your shared calendar: placeholder meetings are your best friends when you need to cut your time to do that f*cking hard assessment or review that humongous 200+ pages partner agreement (TLDR anyone?) . If you don’t want to share your activities with everyone you can simply use some description that is meaningful for you, but meaningless for the others, or use one private and one public placeholder, or a wide variety of other options: choice is yours.
• Cut some time for your personal development. Always, better if everyday, cut out some time for you to read, learn, write, whatever action that can increase your personal skills, soft skills or hard skills must be included in your everyday routine. When I do business interview there’s nothing I hate more than candidates saying “I would love to learn this or that, BUT”. Well, there’s should be no “but”, you should be able to cut out an hour, or two, during the day to try to improve yourself, whether it’s a new technology, a new language or simply keeping yourself aligned with your business area. Again, consistence is key: if you plan to put one hour every day and you have any issue (it could happen, see next points), don’t simply skip it: if you only have half an hour, use that to do something anyway: a little effort is always better that no effort at all. If there’s really no time, try to reschedule an extra hour in the next days, or in the week end: one hour of business computer will not affect your week end that much. I personally have one hour every day before work for press release and updates, and one hour before / after dinner to write my articles or train / test some new technology I’m not planning to use in my company soon, but could be useful long-term.
• Be consistent, but don’t be stiff: shit happens, as we were reminded by Forrest Gump, and if something arise don’t simply say “no, because I’ve my personal development time”. You should be able to evaluate urgency and understand if something actually needs to be addressed as soon as possible, and trying to fit your daily routine around the urgent matters that could arise
• Tied to the previous point, learn how to cut your time around your meetings. If you are like me, you something have two hours slots that became one, or one hour slots that became 15 minutes. It’s something nice that most people translate as “oh well now I have time for a looooong coffee”. Well even if it’s tempting, try not to indulge in these kind of activities: chances are that you’ll always have some delay from the previous tasks or something you need to discover as a part of your next tasks, so try to put your effort in progressing with them. If they are too complex or the time slot is too small, try to put something in your personal development area: organize and check your tasks and deadlines, check if there’s some new source you should add yo tour reading lest, etc. Again, don’t be stiff: if you only have 10 minutes left, enjoy your looooong coffee: being consistent but flexible means you can also enjoy some brief spare time when you have the chance to.

Photo by Estée Janssens on Unsplash