OG Tuesday Issue #206

🤝 Work Relationships: Can digital work connections create the same camaraderie as face-to-face interactions?

🏅 Personal Brand: What we can all learn from observing Olympians’ personal branding strategies.

🔮 Futurism: Aspiring to be a more visionary thinker? Try these steps for using science fiction to brainstorm your company’s future.

💻 Tech: UK businesses sluggish to adopt trending workplace tech.

Okay, so who is it? It’s “no one,” right?

Not at all. Most of us assume the answer is “no one.” Who has discretionary time anyways, to take a vacation let alone engage with a passion?

Well, one breath-of-fresh air idealist (Eleanor C. Whitney)—writing for the nonprofit job board Idealist coincidentally enough—shared tips that helped her find space for passion in a jam-packed schedule she once assumed had absolutely no wiggle room for “frivolities” like passion.

Create a precise map of your time expenditure.

Of course you generally know how you spend your time each day, but how precise is your awareness?

The things that tend to leach the most time are also the things we’re maybe not fully engaged with, you know, the usual suspects like social scrolling and binge streaming. And when we’re not fully engaged with an activity, we’re probably also unaware of how long we’re spending on it.

Being more intentionally aware can help reveal those time drainers that have been flying under your awareness for far too long. (Example: I’ve been spending an hour a day just looking for something to watch across all the streamers? I would have guessed 5 minutes!)

Identify time zones throughout your typical days when your time expenditure earns the highest return on investment.

“Know when you work best,” Whitney writes. “Are you an early bird or a night owl? I’ve found I am the most effective and focused in the early morning, so I’ve trained myself to get up at 6:30 most weekdays so that I can get an hour of writing in before I go to work.”

Keep optimizing your ROI top of mind when planning your time, and you might just find opportunities to do more of what you love.

Avoid putting too much pressure on your passions. (That will only turn your “passion projects” into “more work.”)

Whitney recommends working on passion projects in small, feasible, gradual steps.

“Setting incremental goals will move you toward your vision of success without getting overwhelmed by how much ground you need to cover,” she says.

”It’s been a life-long goal of mine to be a published author, but I had to break that huge, idealistic goal into realistic goals, such as developing a book topic and proposal, writing an outline, and then writing the book chapter by chapter. Accomplishing those concrete tasks helped me assess whether I was making progress toward my passion project.”

Speaking of not putting too much pressure on your passions: Don’t forget it’s as important to take breaks from your hobbies and passions as it is to take breaks from work.

“Take breaks. While you do have to put in the time and effort to create a successful project, working during all of your free time will most likely cause you to burn out fast,” Whitney advises.

All this idealistic advice points to one overarching thing to keep in mind when it comes to passion projects. They’re about joy and fulfillment, not speed and progress.

At the end of the day, you’re doing this for fun and for no one but yourself.

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One TA reader needs help handling nested, dependent to-do and follow-up items:

The biggest challenge I face is keeping track of my follow up actions and having them organized to address them in a timely manner.

You’re absolutely right. Wrangling all those loose strings really is such a headache.

There’s something uniquely frustrating about those tasks and projects that seem determined never to be finished. You think you’re getting close when all these little appendages—you know, like unplanned follow ups or co-workers bringing up must-dos you hadn’t considered—spring up to bar your path to the finish line.

Your mission: From now on, use Matryoshka dolls, aka nesting or stacking dolls, as your muse for complex task mapping and organization.

In other words, rank and nest tasks into as many sequential buckets, or “dolls” if you prefer, as possible.

Picture how nesting dolls look when they’re not stacked—when they’re lined up in perfect order from smallest to largest.

You can see the meticulous planning and pre-measurement that went into making each individual doll the exact right size. The payoff? The dolls nest into each other so perfectly that 10+ can nest and take up no more space than the largest among them.

Imagine how it would feel if you could design your to-do lists with a similar precision that helps you get closer to achieving the organized elegance of nesting dolls in your work.

Here’s how:

Step 1: Isolate your largest “doll,” the one that contains all the others. It’s the broadest possible label you have for what you’re hoping to accomplish or finish.

Step 2: Divide that overarching goal into as many sequential sub steps as you can think of.

While nesting dolls gradually diminish in size and degree, your tasks don’t have to and probably won’t. Just focus on the nesting hierarchy—the order of operations.

Take your time with this step. Remember how nesting dolls symbolize the benefits of patience and precision.

Step 3: Pad your list with space for things that don’t have to be “done” (in the strictest sense of the word) and/or things that don’t have to be done by you.

A thing that doesn’t have to be “done” or done by you might be something like…getting feedback on your project before moving to the final steps.

You’re not responsible for giving yourself the feedback, but you are responsible for stewarding that step of the process from start to finish. (And things you don’t necessarily have to do can still take up a lot of your project time.)

To keep projects moving through these gray-areas that are hard to pre-map, the phases when your list becomes dependent on other people doing things, carve out plenty of space for them in your lists.

Many people make the mistake of simply leaving these steps out. After all, they can’t foresee what will be involved with enough precision to map out the steps. But you don’t need to know what the line items will be, specifically, to carve out space to allow for them in your to-do lists.

This will help keep these gray areas more contained so they’re less likely to spill over and derail the other beautiful steps you planned.

Step 4: Pad your list to make space for unplanned tasks.

Really! Actually put “unplanned – TBD” line items into your list. Taking a few minutes to reflect on what kinds of surprise hurdles have popped up during past projects can be very helpful for this brainstorm.

Why spend time accounting for unplanned tasks and hypotheticals?

Because this makes your plans more agile.

Planned tasks you can skip carry little risk of derailing your entire project. Unplanned tasks you can’t skip, on the other hand, can completely derail the perfect Shinkansen train of a workflow you’d planned out.

Plans, including to-do lists, rarely proceed precisely as mapped. While it’s true that you can’t possibly foresee the specific unplanned tasks you’ll encounter, you can plan for their inevitability—and make your workflows more agile, flexible, and resilient in the process.

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The most sought after skill is someone who can “figure it out”.

Whatever “IT” is, you need to be someone who can figure it out and solve problems.

When someone asks if I can do something, whether I have done that thing before or not, I always say, “Yes, I know I can figure that out,” or, “I can figure out a solution to that problem.”

Jill Fecher, Director of Sales

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