How are you feeling about 2023? Feeling accomplished?
Reflection: We’ve had quite a crazy year ourselves, of growing, building and learning what works and what doesn’t. We’ve taken some time to reflect these past weeks. Conclusion: We should focus a bit more. Do less, do things a bit faster - and don’t try to do everything at the same time. Sounds familiar?
🎄 Holiday season means a few days off at least, hopefully, a few weeks even! And you’ll probably cook up a few plans for 2024. Starting the year with clear resolutions helps. Hate or love resolutions, you can’t help making plans this time of year.
We found a decent list to try: 10 Great Tips to Keep Your New Year's Resolutions
💰Here’s our million-dollar question for you: When it comes to work, what is the 1 thing you want to make happen next year?
Think about it. If you could pick only 1 thing. What would you change? What would you finish? What would you create? What would make you, or your company, wildly successful next year?
Take a bit of time to reflect on this. It could be that you come up with a list of things. From that list, pick the 1 thing that matters most. Start doing that now (well, after your break). Let’s agree that this 1 thing will be your core focus until it’s finished.
Radical Focus:
It sounds a bit simple perhaps, but our power tip to end the year with is to Radically Focus.
Working in People & Culture basically means that a million things, often unexpected, will come up during your day. This will continue to happen, you can’t stop it. It’s part of the job, and also a part we kinda love. It makes us feel valued. It also means we constantly have to shift our focus and, service-minded as we are, help others with their most pressing issues - pausing our own projects.
The thing is, we’re better when we get ‘our own shit’ done as well. Having focus will make you a more strategic colleague, a more reliable business partner, and better at your job. Don’t get too distracted. Build in time to help others, but just like they say in plane… put on your own mask first. Sounds selfish? Think again.
We never have enough time. The biggest enemy of time = distraction 🤯
Imagine how amazing it would be to accomplish multiple BIG things next year. How would you do that? ‘By doing 1 at the time.’ When you focus on 5 things at the same time, none get the attention they need. Or maybe they do happen, but they’ll take a loooooooong time to finish. Not shipping, not moving, not releasing = missed opportunities.
TOP TIP: Finish your ‘1 thing’, then move to the next.
This way, you might actually accomplish multiple big things next year. Where focus goes, energy flows. When you have all your focus on it… it will give you a lot of energy working on it.
Think this is easy? We challenge you to do it and become crazy efficient!
💡 EXAMPLE: The image above is how a personal board (in Notion) can look like. We’re fan of using the ‘Now / Next / Later / No Prio’ stages.
👉🏻 In the Now you only list what you need to do right now. As soon as it’s done, an item from Next moves to Now. This way you don’t lose track of what needs to be done, and you might spend some time thinking about the ‘Next’ items once in a while. The focus remains on finishing the Now.
For teams, this will look slightly different. You might have multiple projects in Now and a lot more in Next and Later. You can allocate a Now item to each team member, and put multiple lists on top of each other. Make sure you know what your own NOW is, but as a leader, you can delegate enough to ensure multiple Nows are being worked on by those it matters most to.
It does also work for a team, to keep focus on what needs to be done most urgently.
When a new ‘project’ or topic comes up, ask yourself or the team - ‘How does it stack up against what’s already on the board? When it needs to be done ‘Now’, it means it will get all the attention to get it done, and the focus moves away from your current key priorities. Sometimes, when you put it like that, you’ll find out those new priorities can wait 😇.
💡 TIP: You can share this board/project plan with your team, but also with your manager or broader company. This way they always know what you are working on and it’s like a Roadmap of what they can expect. It prevents questions, as people can see what’s coming.
👋🏼 Good luck with your Radical Focus - We can’t wait to share new tips and tricks, amazing jobs, hr-hacks and events with you in 2024.
Let’s keep building those Irresistible Organizations! 💖
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