Conclusion

Organising you for impact

I hope that after reading this book you understand (read: know without a shadow of a doubt) that intelligence isn’t enough. Being smart is great, but your impact at work will never reach its full potential if you don’t reflect deeply on yourself, others and your environment. As you reflect on the key takeaways from the book and how to implement them, I want to leave you with three parting steps: your mindset matters; be intentional and organised; and assess, adjust and celebrate.

Step 1: Mindset matters

As I have stressed in every chapter, your mind is your most powerful asset. Your behaviour begins with how you think; your beliefs about the concepts I’ve offered in this book are no different. If you don’t believe them, your behaviour will not reflect them. Real change begins with embracing these concepts or, at the very least, being curious about how you could apply them in your career. If you can’t find a way to connect personally with these ideas, don’t go any further. Spend some time unpacking the root of your resistance. Is it that you aren’t sure you can implement these ideas? Do you feel overwhelmed? Does stepping outside your comfort zone make you uncomfortable? Does my advice feel fake and contrived to you? If so, why? Is there a way for you to reframe your perspective that resonates with who you are?

When you’re doing something new, there will always be discomfort. When I first started addressing tension in my workplace relationships, it was extremely uncomfortable. But as I faced more and more of these situations head-on, I became more comfortable. I knew what the downsides were if I didn’t have them: more tension, broken relationships, less support and, ultimately, less impact. If I have to choose between the pain of having the conversations and the pain of not having them, I will choose to have them. Focus on the long-term benefit over the short-term discomfort.

Step 2: Be intentional and organised

If you’re ready to embrace the ideas in this book, now is the time to put them into action. You’re going to have to become very intentional about incorporating these behaviours into your daily, weekly and monthly routines. I don’t want you to read this book and then let it collect dust on your bookshelf. It should be a career-guidance manual that you refer to often.

With all the information that I’ve presented, you might be wondering where to start. Just like you would do with any other big project in your life, break the lessons into smaller, manageable parts. To help you implement these ideas, I’ve shared a six-week template below that you can use to work your way through each chapter. Schedule a repeating appointment in your calendar to reflect on your key takeaways from each chapter.

One of the biggest keys to delivering quality results on time is to be organised. Organisation can be the difference between delivering on time and not. When I was a first-year consultant at Arthur Andersen, I almost missed a very important client deliverable because I was not keeping track of key information that I needed to gather from the client. I knew what I needed to do, and I had the resources to do it, but my lack of organisation left me in a panic as I scrambled at the last minute for this information.

My organisational skills have improved over the years. In my teens, I was a complete and total disaster. If you are like me, there is hope. You can get better at it, and if you are organised, you should strive to get even better. Being organised will not only help you make time for yourself, but also help you meet your various personal and professional commitments. When I was writing this book, I had to discipline myself to meet the publisher’s deadline. I used many of the tips below to accomplish that. From this point forward, your life will only get busier: you might go back to university while working full-time, you might get married and have children, you might have to care for your elderly parent, and you’ll probably end up managing a team, or even managing managers who lead teams. Your projects at work will get more complicated, too. This is why you have to keep revisiting your priorities and reconsidering how you spend your time. No extra hours or minutes will be added to your day, so you need to think about how best to spend the time you’ve got.

Make a concerted effort to organise yourself to give yourself the best possible advantage. Keep in mind that this will not magically happen. Will things pop up that are totally unplanned for? Yes. Will deadlines shift and totally muck up your carefully orchestrated work plan? Absolutely. Because you can’t plan everything in advance, let’s focus on what you can control and influence.

Below are three key areas you should focus on if you want to get more organised: organising information, organising time and energy, and organising tasks.

Organising information

When you start working, you’ll probably find that you receive 50 to 100 emails every day. You’ve probably never had that amount of email before in your life. You will receive invites, information and multiple requests from different people, and each project will have many moving parts – different people you’ll have to speak to, and different pieces of information that you’ll have to gather, organise, analyse and provide insights on. You want to be seen as someone who is responsive and knows what is going on. So how do you keep up? (Although I present a few tips here, you should also check out books such as Tim Ferriss’s The 4-Hour Workweek or Getting Things Done by David Allen.)

Some people recommend not checking your email before a certain time in the day, because emails are other people’s agendas for you and you need to start off your day by focusing on your priorities before you’re hijacked by someone else’s agenda. Test that approach in your environment. Will it work or will people be flipping out if you don’t reply by 8 am to an email that was sent at 7 am? Ask successful people at different levels of your organisation how they manage email. For example, one of my teams had the following rule for emails: respond to any email on the same day if it was received by 6 pm that day. If the email comes after 6 pm, you can answer it the next business day.

Many of my executive assistant friends follow the rule that you should only touch an email once: either file it, action it or put in a folder with other items that you need to action later. Create folders in your email inbox according to topic, client, customer or whether action is required. In my email inbox, for example, I have unique folders for each client. I have an internal company email folder where I keep important messages from company leadership. You can use colour-coded flags as well. In my company’s email system, I can highlight an important message with a yellow or red flag, depending on the level of urgency, and I can pin the red-flag emails to the top of my email list. I schedule a repeating appointment in my calendar to clear my emails at least a few times per week. I know that if I don’t do that, I won’t naturally make time. If my inbox gets out of control, it’s easy for me to miss important emails and risk missing deadlines.

For documents, I create a folder for each new year and then, within them, I create more folders according to client name. When I name documents, I usually lead the document with the date on which the document was created. If I collaborate with a client, customer or colleague on the document, I will use version numbers and update those version numbers until the document is finalised. For example, if I created a document on 11 March 2021, the name of the document will be ‘20210311 Client ABC Leadership Development Plan v1’. If I send it to my colleague and he makes changes, he will save the document as ‘20210311 Client ABC Leadership Development Plan v2’, and so forth. Once we have finalised the document, we rename it ‘20210311 Client ABC Leadership Development Plan vFINAL’. With this naming convention, we know when the document was edited, which makes it easy for me to track our progress. If you work in an environment where you are constantly moving around and handling hard-copy information, you might want to scan documents and then save the PDF documents in folders on your laptop. This way, you’ll always have an electronic copy as a backup.

Organising time and energy

Time is the one resource that you cannot buy. It’s one of those resources that are equally distributed to each of us every day. Nevertheless, some people are just better than others at making the most of their time. Determine which priorities will provide the most impact for you (the 80/20 rule). Then figure out the most efficient way to achieve them and organise your schedule to reflect your priorities. Determining what you will say ‘yes’ and ‘no’ to are both critically important.

But there is another important element to keep in mind: managing your energy. This is about figuring out your daily, weekly, monthly and yearly energy cycles and scheduling your work and your breaks (as much as within your power) to fit those cycles. If you are a morning person, for example, you might want to schedule your most challenging work for that time of day because that is when you are most alert. I started thinking about how to energise myself during the day as well – grabbing a cup of tea an hour after lunch or taking a quick walk outside. During the course of the year, you can monitor when you start feeling tired and need a holiday. Obviously, sometimes you might not have a choice, but if you do, be aware of your energy cycles, communicate them to your manager and teammates and try to manage your schedule according to those cycles. But let’s go back to the topic of managing time and energy. Here are a few techniques that have helped me over the years:

   Time yourself: A technique I learnt from my brother is to use the timer on your phone to focus yourself. This can also help with procrastination. If there is a task that I really don’t want to do, I will say to myself: ‘Let’s just work on it for 30 minutes or an hour.’ Sometimes the hardest part is getting started, but once you start, you’ll notice that you’ll get some momentum and find that you can go on for a little bit longer. The timing helps you see how fast the time flies and how much time we waste. You can also time your breaks. (Yes, breaks are important!) Every hour or 90 minutes, get up and take a five-minute walk outside, grab a glass of water, do some stretches at your desk or meditate. These breaks help to refresh you and increase your productivity.

   Schedule work time and set boundaries: Block time on your calendar to complete your work to ensure that it is your top priority. Early on in my career, I used to accept other people’s requests and demands of me, and then I would use the time I had left to complete my own tasks. I quickly realised that I needed to start prioritising my work, because only I would be held responsible if I did not complete my work on time and at the expected level of quality. From then on, if I had an urgent meeting with multiple people and the only available time was during my blocked work time, I would be willing to move it. However, I made sure that my work was just as important as what others were asking of me. Block off and protect time in your calendar to think, to check email and to work on different projects. If you have four very important meetings, for instance, try scheduling them back-to-back so that you reduce the ‘dead’ time between each meeting. A study by researchers Gloria Mark, Daniela Gudith and Ulrich Klocke revealed that when a person is distracted by an interruption that is not related to the task at hand, it takes up to 23 minutes and 15 seconds to be fully focused again on the task they were doing before the interruption.

For example: if you block 1 to 5 pm for your personal work time and schedule your meetings before and after that, you would have a solid block of time to focus, apply your mind, make real progress and take the necessary breaks. You may not always be able to schedule your time in this way, but it is worth asking others if they are flexible. Some days you may end up with two one-hour blocks in between your meetings, but try to influence that as much as you can. And if you can’t, be mindful of it and select another day to set aside a dedicated block of work time.

   Establish an end to the workday: When you think the whole day is for work, that is exactly how long it will take you to do your work. This is still a bad habit that I struggle with from my consulting days. If you set a deadline of 6 pm, you’ll work much more efficiently. You need time during the week to decompress, spend time with your family and friends, watch your favourite show on TV, read a book, exercise or do absolutely nothing.

   Create repeat invitations: I use repeat invitations as a sure-fire way to ensure that I focus on what matters. If I say that I want to check in with my mentor, sponsor or colleague on a regular basis, or even attend a regular exercise class, I create a repeating invite to remind myself. These check-ins are really important to me; I know I won’t naturally set them up without a reminder. You can use your work calendar to set daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly or custom-frequency invitations. Sometimes the date and time might not work for me or the other person, but the repeating invite serves as a reminder to move the meeting and it helps this priority stay on my radar screen.

   Calendar evaluation: At the beginning and end of each week, reflect on your priorities and how you will spend your time. If someone were to look at your calendar without any explanation, would they be able to tell what your priorities are? Does it line up with what you say is important to you?

   Determine your energy formula: In Chapter 6, I shared what a former Life Healthcare senior executive says are the four things he needs to do on a consistent basis to re-energise himself. If there was one theme that emerged from the interviews I conducted for this book, it is that all the interviewees would advise their younger selves to relax, enjoy the moment, don’t take yourself so seriously and have more fun. For me, going to the spa for a massage is my hobby, and having days with absolutely nothing scheduled helps me relax and recharge. Do things that don’t necessarily have a point but simply because they bring you joy. Everything is going to be okay. What are the work activities that energise you? Coaching and facilitating training classes make me come alive. What works for you? Begin giving some serious thought to what you need to re-energise yourself personally and professionally. It’s going to be more critical now than ever.

Organising tasks

When you organise your tasks, it’s important to start with the end in mind. What does success look like in the end? Spend time thinking about your plan to achieve success. Often, we want to jump straight to execution mode without thinking it through. Be strategic about how you do your work. You have to work smarter and not just harder. Share your plan with key stakeholders to make sure you’re not missing anything.

There are so many tools people can use to organise themselves: good old-fashioned pen and paper, Excel, Microsoft Project (MP) and a plethora of smartphone applications. Test them all out to see which one works best for you. Find a tool that lets you see a visual representation of your project timeline and the sequencing of tasks. This tool should also allow you to indicate whether certain tasks are dependent on other tasks being completed, and it should automatically amend the start and due dates, based on those dependencies.

One of the things I do 30 minutes before I stop working for the day is to think about what needs to happen the next day, by the end of the week, the end of the following week or the end of the month. Before I leave the office on Friday, I write my to-do list for Monday so I can hit the ground running. You can’t just plan for the next day: start looking ahead. Are there things that you need to kick off now, tomorrow morning or early next week? Are there things that you should ask people to start working on now while you do other work in the meantime? I usually start by making a list by client and the dates by which the activity needs to start and finish. I build in wiggle room, especially if I am dependent on others for information. Take into consideration unplanned changes and mishaps: it’s always better to plan for them in advance. For example, if today is Monday and I need something from a client by Friday, am I going to wait until Thursday to ask them or should I ask the person now, just in case he is swamped and doesn’t have time to complete my item right away? You also have to know yourself. I once worked with someone who struggled to meet deadlines, and I asked him why. He said he liked spending a lot of time thinking about the task and not enough time putting it down on paper. If this is true about you, schedule enough time for thinking and, likewise, enough time for doing.

Procrastination

One of the biggest enemies of time management is procrastination. Because I still struggle with perfectionism, I sometimes get overwhelmed when I think about a big task (and the fear of not doing it perfectly) and I ‘faff around’ (as South Africans would say). Basically, I procrastinate. That feeling of being overwhelmed keeps me from starting the task. To get myself out of the slump, I tell myself: ‘Carice, everything doesn’t have to be done today. What is the first step you can take? What can you do right now? Who do you need to talk to? What information do you need to gather?’ Once I’ve broken the big task down into smaller, manageable tasks, I make a list and start.

Like most people, I get easily distracted by the internet and social media. (Once, I think I almost reached the end of the internet when I was avoiding doing a project!) Let’s be honest, sometimes the work is just boring and we don’t want to do it. Or there might be things you enjoy but you’ve tired of doing them in the homestretch and you just can’t find the motivation to wrap up those last bits. You have to figure out what distracts you and then set up a working situation that eliminates or minimises distractions. For example, when I have an assignment that requires deep concentration, I might work from home. Or, if I go into the office, I will isolate myself in a private room because I get easily distracted with office conversations if I sit in the open plan with my colleagues. I leave my cellphone in another room, far away from me, which makes it less of a distraction.

Over the years I’ve also learnt that I hate working in silence, so I like to turn on music. However, I realised that playing my favourite songs on my playlist defeats the point, because I will start singing and chair-dancing along! Instead, I play calming classical or jazz music on YouTube. I bring along my lip balm and hand lotion so that I don’t have to get up to fetch them, thus getting distracted. Instead of solely focusing on the task that I don’t want to do, I think about how much more time I need to finish as compared to how much time I’ve already spent. I visualise the sense of accomplishment I will feel when it is finally off my plate, or how energised I’ll feel when it is done and I can move on to something I really enjoy. I also remind myself that if I want a different life, I will have to maximise my time.

What distracts you? What environment is most conducive to you getting your work done? Do you need silence or a bit of background noise? What emotions are you avoiding when you procrastinate? (Remember, mine is the feeling of insufficiency and of being overwhelmed, due to my perfectionism. Sometimes it’s just plain ole boredom!) Once you know what your formula is, write it down somewhere on your phone and on a piece of paper to remind yourself of that winning combination next time you start procrastinating.

Step 3: Assess, adjust, celebrate – rinse and repeat

As you’re implementing these ideas, make sure you’re setting a monthly or quarterly check-in with yourself to take a step back to assess and adjust your plan. Life happens. Priorities change. Goals shift. Relationships evolve. This is the time to look at what is working and what is not working for you. Last year’s strategies and goals may not be relevant anymore. Maybe you were promoted, and what you need to demonstrate or achieve now is different. Are you giving minor details major time and energy? Also remember to celebrate those big – and small – wins. Maybe you mustered up the courage to have a conversation that you had been avoiding. Perhaps you’ve drummed up the nerve to introduce yourself to a senior leader you’ve quietly admired from afar. Celebrate that! Acknowledging your progress helps to build your confidence to carry on and apply your new knowledge.

Perhaps you’re not exactly where you want to be in your career at the moment. But don’t panic: at least you’re not where you used to be. See your career through the lens of progress, not perfection. Remember that building your career is a lifelong journey. You’re going to work with all kinds of people with different personalities and values. You might live in different countries and work in different functions, industries or company cultures. You will unearth different qualities in yourself – good and bad – from different situations. Get used to discomfort. Embrace it. Make peace with it, because it’s the way of the world. But remember: the better you know yourself, the more equipped you will be to deal with an ever-changing world. Make the time to invest in you. It will be the best investment you will ever make.