Providing for yourself and your loved ones is the principle motivation in your career. Paramount is that you do well in your day job, whether you are an employee or work for yourself. Be indespensible.
Your reputation should be for getting things done – be a doer. An employee is judged by the results that they are expected to produce. Among your coworkers / peers, you should be viewed as above-average at least. Your supervisors should trust you completely. Their biggest fear (which they will never tell you) is that they will look bad to their supervisors and/or customers.
Knowledge Worker
Knowledge workers do not produce a “thing.” They produce ideas, information, concepts.
The knowledge worker only deals with information. Specifically they:
- Collect information – required for the remaining steps
- Organize Information – the most difficult and potentially time consuming component of the entire knowledge worker process. The whole purpose of collecting and organizing information is to be able to recall it
- Recall Information – the most important task of a knowledge worker
- Use existing information to produce new derivative information – how a knowledge worker manufactures products.
The rest is making decisions about that information – which is a managerial function.
Reps
In building up business acumen, academically learning the task is inadequate. You learn the task, its principles, and it repercussions, by doing the task…a lot. Through regular repetition, facility is developed. Sense is gained where you can tell if something is “right” or “wrong” – expected or off. Your curiosity should be peaked as your intuition is developed. Becoming adroit at your work tasks will lead for you to critically think, a skill that your managers are hopefully honing within you. Get in your reps.
Apprentice Model
“At Koch, this model entails four phases: I do, you watch; I do, you help; you do, I help; you do, I watch.”
Good Profit
Important vs Not Important
Your work tasks can be divided into a quadrant. Below is similar to (but not identical to) the Eisenhower Decision Matrix.
On the x-axis are tasks that are important and those that are not. “Important” items will lead to performance in areas of work that are measured and critical to your success at your job. Hint – Most things are “Not Important.”
On the y-axis, are tasks that are urgent and those that are not. “Urgent” tasks are those that need to get tackled right away and are usually an extension of what is “Important” to the one delegating the task. The result is a quadrant:
- Important – Urgent
- Important – Not urgent
- Not Important – Urgent
- Not Important – Not Urgent
These tasks should be handled as follows:
Not Important – Urgent
Not Important items are not urgent, even if the person delegating the task thinks so. Those tasks are automatically in the “Not Important – Not Urgent” category.
Not Important – Not Urgent
Not Important items should be batched and addressed once per week. “Not Important – Urgent” is now redundant. Let the “Not Important” tasks pile up. Do not distract yourself by taking care of these annoying tasks frequently.
Important – Not urgent
These tasks should be where your time is spent during the workday. Expect that there will always be a handful of tasks that need attention and that completing those tasks will take some time.
Important – Urgent
Important tasks (to you) that are also urgent, should be tackled close to when they arise. This usually results in taking the first hour or two each morning / afternoon to address. Important – Urgent tasks have the potential to wreak havoc on your work day – but that is okay as you have identified it as “Important”. Avoiding these urgent tasks and sticking to some kind of schedule is a fool’s errand.
Labelling things “Important” and “Not Important” can be scary, particularly if others may view the task as important. Try it. In my experience, people realize that an unimportant task is so and are not inconvenienced by you taking a week to respond.
Folders for organization
My recommendation, building on the previous section, is to organize your “inbox” as follows:
- Urgent
- Important
- Not Important
- Waiting For
- Archive
Sort the messages in your inbox into the various folders. “Urgent”, “Important”, and “Not Important” tasks should be sorted accordingly per the discussion above.
- Clean “Urgent” out first.
- Tackle the “Important” folder throughout your workweek. Expect the folder to regularly have tasks.
- Address “Not Important” items once per week.
The “Waiting For” folder are for those items that you have delegated others to do. Follow up on those delegated items once per week and expect the folder to have tasks regularly.
Once completed, send any messages from your inbox, completed tasks from “Urgent”, “Important”, “Not Important,” and “Waiting For” to the “Archive” folder.
Do not have individual “Project” folders for various subjects. This leads you to have to search through many folders before finding a certain email. An email service’s search function is powerful enough to find the message you are looking for.
Electronic File Naming Convention
YYYY-MM-DD – Project – Document Name_Modifier
Spending time to adjust file names to an organized structure will assist you and anyone that is reviewing the file to know exactly what it is before opening it.
Date comes first as it will order the file in your file folder.
Project helps to place the file into the appropriate context. If the file is living in a certain project folder, this should match.
Document Name announces what it actually is. Simple but most file names look like someone had a spasm on their keyboard. A Modifier is in the event that someone marked up the original document.
On filing, I’m pretty sure that I am in the minority by suggesting that, if you name your files correctly, they could all be dumped into one folder on your computer (like Documents), regardless of project. Search function would be quicker than searching through a number of folders. Most workplaces – and people – insist on having sub-folders ad nauseam. In workplaces, I follow their convention and succumb to their sub-folder ways.
4 Year Rule
If you have not been promoted (up or laterally) after four years, you need to move on. Seriously.
Your company does not value your contribution (or maybe themselves) enough to foster your development. You also may not be in the right role and time has shown that either you or your company or both will not remedy that inside of the company. A change is necessary.
Same applies if you are a manager contemplating an employee. Keeping them around is doing a disservice to them. While they (and you) may not like parting ways, it will be best for both sides in the long-run.