Let's Work Better

There aren’t many ways to become better at work as a team. Below is a retrace from personal experience working at different companies and roles, and taking ownership of different projects. I’m writing these down to lay the backdrop as to what a high mark looks like.

1. Prioritization. Some tasks are more time-sensitive. Some become dependencies of bigger plans. This applies to balancing your own projects & tasks, as well as coordinating with your manager & other teams on the same project. A great outcome is that the most important projects move forward at full speed according to the team plan.

2. Work through and around blockage by external factors & other team members. Everyone is bound to be blocked by something or someone at times. Don’t just passively wait. Either proactively engage with someone who is blocking you, or vocalize to your manager who can help you get unstuck. Communicate immediately when you realize what you want to do cannot make progress unless something else happens. Your manager can only effectively coordinate something when the thing is communicated. If you have to wait on someone, communicate, and shift gears onto something else in the meantime, be it a backup project, or something exploratory, or technical learning that furthers your skills. Having something as a backup to work on deepens your technical expertise, broadens your scope, and creates more ownership and opportunities to grow. It marks you as exemplary, and the effort will not get overlooked.

3. Make progress on mastering domain-critical knowledge and skills, and use them at work. It creates a culture of learning, spanning a longer time window, and is the only effective way to work smarter and better. There are some subjects in everyone’s role that once mastered, make the implementations simpler, more scalable, and less maintenance-prone. Identify them and be good at them. Find tasks that allow you to flex those skills on them. This will not go unnoticed.