Peacetime productivity, wartime productivity

#todayilearned #career #beginners

TL;DR notes from articles I read today.

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:
1. Star emails that need urgent responses and get to them asap.
2. Use an incident command protocol or similar best practices.
3. If you can help in a specific way/area, pitch in. If you don’t know where to start, start anywhere.
4. Ignore your usual task manager app and start an essentials-only task list.
5. Skip weekly reviews or call for an abbreviated version that is fast and focused.
6. Leave complicated work till peacetime. Focus on controlling the chaos.

Full post here, 6 mins read

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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