I’m a big believer that putting goals on paper is the first step to making them happen. The next step is breaking those big audacious goals down into the small daily steps that will get you there. It’s all very well saying you want to lose a stone or build a business, but if you don’t make a habit of taking small daily actions towards those goals, the odds are you’ll spend a few weeks laser focused before burning out and losing faith in the process. Enter stage left, habit tracking. I’m absolutely certain there are lovely techy apps for this, but my version is the Notes app. One note with a list of daily tasks and a tick for each one when I complete it. Not exactly groundbreaking, but here’s where it gets interesting. Instead of starting from scratch when I miss a day, I count up all of those ticks at the end of the week and give myself an overall score. The result is I’m not beating myself up for missing one day and I’m always motivated to get back on it and earn more ticks.
Rethinking error messages
This post from Adam Silver on LinkedIn is a great illustration of how wrong we can get service language. Even in these small moments copy matters!
Remote work is working
I’ve become a regular listener of the Radio 4 business podcast The Bottom Line. However, I could not suppress my frustration with a recent episode – Managing Millenials (and Gen Z). What started as a balanced discussion evolved into a backlash against working remotely, with all the usual arguments that staff aren’t working and it’s not productive. Put aside the fact that it isn’t only millennials that see the value of remote working. Those of us who do work remotely know how much more productive we can be when not exhausted by a commute, constant interruptions and the feeling of being desk-bound. I’d love to have seen a more balanced discussion on the issue, including how we can hire, motivate and manage remote and flexible working more effectively. Alas, this was not the day for that discussion. So instead, I quietly seethed and composed this little rant.
And finally…
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