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How I recover my focus after tripping over a distraction

by | Jun 4, 2022 | Lessons Learned | 0 comments

There was a reality check moment for me this week when I had to realize, again, that I need to focus on the priorities.

I have a whole setup of tools to manage my time and projects, but I still get excited, then distracted, by new ideas. On May 31st, I was listening to this episode, How to Make 30 Videos in 30 Days as a Busy Person, in preparation for June, when I had planned to try exactly that for my team’s YouTube channel. I thought I had a good justification for it—to learn Camtasia in more depth by testing a new feature in each video and to build a playlist of two-minute tutorials for colleagues that may help improve their work, and because I thought it would be fun.

There was no visible block of time on my calendar to pull this off, so I would have had to spend my own evenings and weekends. But if I did, then I might as well upload it to my own channel. But if I did, then I would not be able to clock in at least three hours of immersion + active study for Mandarin Chinese per day, which was supposed to be my singular personal focus this year and has already gone quite off track. On June 1st, past my intended bed time, I managed to throw together one script, record the narration and screencast, then scrap the whole project.

I suppose on the plus side, I am able to abandon my efforts just as quickly. It sucks, but one thing that has helped me so much since 2017 is that for every task list or project board, I create a shadow list called “Sunk Tasks” or a board called “Graveyard.” It has allowed me to hold onto things I once wanted to do but that I can’t or shouldn’t do. It’s like a digital museum of dead ideas, so I have 5 sections: sunk art projects, sunk admin tasks, sunk errands, sunk keeping in touch, sunk random, sunk writing list. What a relief to clear them from the main list! What a relief to not have to look at the red overdue dates!

Starting now

  • Add a daily recurrence for three hours of Chinese to my Google Calendar
  • Use a template from this page How to Say No: Templates to Help You Say No In Any Situation (shoutout to my friend Beets for linking me this) whenever I get an invite that conflicts with something that is already on my calendar
  • Reduce the amount of time I spend on “Starting the Day” (67 hrs so far this year) and “Whatnot” (95 hrs) to a maximum of 60 mins per day. These are time tracking entries I use for random-but-necessary tasks, like reading and responding to emails and messages on Slack, organizing my tasks on Asana, looking at Outlook Calendar, pondering whether I should change its color code scheme, and other extreme misc. things that don’t have their own category.

How I will rephrase questions to avoid making assumptions

by | May 21, 2022 | Lessons Learned | 0 comments

This week, we kicked off a team retreat with about twenty people by going around the room, playing a game called Barbecue. You introduce yourself by sharing your first name and an item you’ll bring to the barbecue that begins with the same letter as your first name. The tricky part is that you also have to repeat the name and item shared by each person who came before you, which means it would suck if you were near the end. Shout out to my manager, Marshmallows, who suggested this icebreaker!

I was luckily near the beginning, but I had a hard time recalling food that started with the letter V, mainly because I don’t eat enough Vegetables. Nancy said she was bringing Noodles, and since I was unable to come up with anything else, I said I would bring Vermicelli Noodles. The second-to-last teammate who is bringing the Raccoon accidentally called me Nancy when reaching me, which was notable because Nancy and I were the only two Asian women, lol. It wasn’t a big deal to me because I relate to how our minds + mouths can trip up like that, but Raccoon later came by my desk to apologize and express how embarrassed she felt. I appreciated the follow-up as an example of what it looks like to take responsibility and realized I should have done the same thing when I made a similar mistake last fall.

I was still new to my role and the organization, and it was my second or third day coming into the office. My assigned desk is in a section that I was told was where everyone else on my larger team was seated, but everyone was still working full-time from home. When I noticed that there was only one other person in the corner of this area, I wanted to say hi. I checked the seating chart I printed out and confirmed this should be Pretzels, whose name I recognized but whose face I hadn’t met on Zoom yet. But when I went over and asked if they were Pretzels, they said no, their name was Udon Noodles, and then I spent the rest of the day reflecting on the mix-up I made between two Black colleagues 😓.

Next time

  • Instead of asking, “Are you. . .Pretzels?”, rephrase the question and ask, “I don’t believe we have met yet. What’s your name?”
  • Instead of asking, “Are you like a Project Manager?” during a tech-y happy hour to someone who looked like a young woman [who replied that they worked with data and studied computer engineering], rephrase the question and ask, “What’s your role on this project?”