M-Theory: In 2020, resolve to make progress

Right, well, welcome to 2020. Presumably you’ve emerged from your holiday carb coma and have made your ephemeral vows of virtuous living.

I have trouble with New Year’s rah-rah. Perhaps because this is Canada and we’re nowhere near the beginning of the season of renewal. I’ll be walking my dog in the dark for months yet. It’s not even the beginning of the fiscal year for a lot of companies.

Nevertheless, allow me to muse a bit on what I think could be a useful approach to this calendar clean slate: progress.

Now, this may well go against the usual rules and resources of self-help and getting your sh*t together. But realistically, how much good have those books and things done you?

The best part about progress is that it doesn’t matter if you didn’t start on Jan. 1, doesn’t immediately require any major changes or deprivations, and doesn’t have to include unachievable goals.

Progress is not for slackers, though. You will need to work, often hard. But there are near infinite ways to achieve progress.

At work there’s undoubtedly a backlog of a million things that there just aren’t enough bodies or hours in the day to get done. But pick one. The one that’s been bugging you, or that will most improve your work life will depend on your role, skills, personality, etc.

Don’t make a big deal about it. Don’t announce to the team that you’re working on it. Don’t set milestones or a deadline for it. I said progress, not project. Completely different head space.

As you work on the thing when you’re able, making progress, structure will assemble itself around the work. Or if it takes long enough, you’ll just get really sick of it and will push harder to just Get It Done. (Plus you’re too far in to just quit.)

Progress: always positive, not always pretty.

My example: We migrated some internal systems a while back, including our documentation, and I noticed just how overdue it was for an extensive update. Guess who our main writer/editor is…?

Hundreds of topic sections, endless cross-referencing, updates ranging from correcting typos to writing entirely new procedures. Not something I had time to hunker down and work on exclusively. But I printed out an index to keep track of where I was and got started.

It took seven months. I finished just before Christmas. Some days I tore through massive chunks of documentation. Other times I’d go weeks without even looking at it. Some days I had the time but zero energy or motivation.

I made progress. I knew the result I wanted to get to eventually, even though no documentation is ever really done. I didn’t beat myself up that I didn’t get X amount done every week, because I couldn’t know what priorities each day would bring.

So pick a thing. Start somewhere. You’ll get it done eventually, and you’ll be an office hero, even if only to yourself.

OK, but what about more long term? You have a job, possibly a career path. Maybe just a dream. Where do you want to get to? What do you need to get there? Do you just want to keep learning, gaining and using new skills? Or do you need specific accreditation to move up in your chosen field?

Pick something to improve on or work toward. It could be something as simple as learning how to do a thing in Excel to save yourself or your team time-wasting workarounds. Could be something as big as getting a degree.

Too busy? No time? If your life is insane now, perhaps it’s not the right time for the degree. But it doesn’t mean there’s no time for SOME thing. And sometimes we can just get complacent about where we think our limits are.

I know a guy who has a full-time job, does freelance work in another field, and is a dad with toddlers. So he started grad school. Dunno if he remembers his own name anymore, but he’s making progress on important stuff, even though he knows it’ll take years.

Tackling something new and challenging will make your brain feel good. No matter how small you start. As the saying goes, when I rest, I rust.

And hey, your company might be able to help – financially, with training or mentorship. Won’t know until you ask. Or, if you’re at a company where the mere notion is laughable, maybe the progress you need to start with is moving elsewhere.

If you’re a manager or leader, you have lots of opportunities for progress. What could you do better? You probably have at least an inkling. If you have no idea and think you’re godlike, I suspect you have a lot to work on.

If you’re not sure what the most important place to start is, ask people who will tell you the truth. If you don’t have people who will tell you the truth, this is a big red flag for you as a leader, but also makes an excellent starting point for your progress.

Time to figure out why you don’t have mentors or confidants or why your staff can’t trust you. Once you figure that out, you have plenty of progress to make to fix it.

If your company is growing, look at your existing team. Who’s at the table? Does everyone look like you? There is a very good chance, especially if you’re at a tech company, that you can make significant progress with your team.

Once again, real diversity on teams is good for algorithms, for customers, for HR, for leadership and for revenue. Real diversity includes the obvious things we can see – gender diversity, people of colour. And it includes less obvious things – a range of ages, cultures and socioeconomic backgrounds.

Now, don’t start asking illegal questions in interviews or anything, but put some work in and make progress on your suite of interview questions to get the really interesting answers. Work on understanding how new and different brains can improve your company in ways that never occurred to you.

If you’re working on hiring and talking to someone you don’t quite get, or it feels like training them up and integrating them into the team would take more effort than usual, you’re probably on the right track.

There are endless opportunities to make progress, and they’re open to everyone, regardless of job, education, or fitness level. Making progress is as important as achieving a goal. And hey, the latter is impossible without the former.

If you have no idea what you want or where to begin, may I suggest being kind? You can do it anywhere, any time, toward anyone. It’s a guaranteed form of progress for you, me and for the world.