TL;DR notes from articles I read today.
Peacetime productivity, wartime productivity
- In business terms, in ‘peacetime’, your company has a large advantage over the competition in its core market and its market share is growing. You focus on expanding your market and reinforcing strengths.
- In ‘wartime’, your company is fending off an existential threat: competition, dramatic macroeconomic change, market changes, supply chain issues, etc.
- This distinction impacts your productivity (at an individual level) and strategy (at a team level).
- In wartime, you may have a website down, a product malfunctioning, a furious customer or a new piece of information that requires overhauling your strategy. You either know what to do but lack time/resources, or you don’t know what to do, and are making important decisions under time pressure (hours or minutes) while being constantly ‘available’.
- Some strategies for wartime:
- Star emails that need urgent responses and get to them asap.
- Use an incident command protocol or similar best practices.
- If you can help in a specific way/area, pitch in. If you don’t know where to start, start anywhere.
- Ignore your usual task manager app and start an essentials-only task list.
- Skip weekly reviews or call for an abbreviated version that is fast and focused.
- Leave complicated work till peacetime. Focus on controlling the chaos.
Full post here, 6 mins read
How to discover your unknown knowns
- Unknown knowns are the things you don’t know you know - matters of instinct, intuition or other factors you consider too trivial to notice.
- Ignoring unknown knowns can lead to dissonance: imposter syndrome, comprehension gaps when you use jargon or fail to provide context, and underestimating your growth curve because you ignore soft skills or trickier, smaller ‘hard skills’.
- To explore your unknown knowns, expand the implicit into explicit awareness.
- Write more about the decisions you make till you can see your seemingly simple ideas contain something more profound.
- Pursue public speaking and share what you have learned. Don’t assume what you say is too brief or basic, it needn’t even be a big event - it could be just your team and a few minutes on a ‘trivial’ topic.
- Mentor others, show them how you analyze situations or think around an obstacle, and you will find proof that you don’t give yourself enough credit.
- Track what you learn every week or month in writing, even if it initially appears trivial. In fact, pay attention to smaller accomplishments (a new shortcut, or a strategy to write better emails).
Full post here, 12 mins read
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Top comments (1)
Great insights ! Thanks for sharing.
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Thanks