What's In Your Toolkit?

As we get ready for our upcoming workshop on Managing Messy Projects, I can't help but think about all of the tools and tricks I use and now take for granted during my everyday work, but which I have discovered in various nooks and crannies of work, school and life otherwise. Think about it: whether you work at a highly structured setup or at a startup, you always bring your unique toolkit with you. I am talking about the unique combination of hard skills (certificates, degrees), soft skills (conflict resolution, communication), and systems and tools each one of us have and favor, whether we realize it or not. All of this combines into a personal workplace toolkit, which I see as one element of my work self. When I think about my personal toolkit, I realize that there are several elements I rely on regularly, whether it is for projects, operations or even a personal decision (like buying a vacuum ha). If I think about the toolkit for now, I can see four big things that I use almost daily:

1. Proportionate effort approach to time-management:

This one took me a while to learn, and that is not surprising, given that the message we receive is that the amount of work you put into something determines the quality of the output.

• This is true sometimes, not always. Sometimes the output stays the same, even if you increase your efforts.
• Not everything needs the same amount of work. Yes, you read that right. It doesn't sound right but it absolutely is.
• If you try to give everything your all, all the time, it is a sure shot way to burnout by way of misguided perfectionism.

2. Customized communication:

When you see this you may think, oh she is talking about emails. Yes, but I am also talking about all of the communication that happens outside of emails (in other written forms, spoken and unspoken). Your emails should be customized for your audience, to make sure that you not only get your point across, but it is easy for people to understand, and is clear.But you are also communicating daily via chat, via phone, via video and the casual conversations at work (happening in 2021). Consider using each of these to engage with the other person authentically, in a way that matches who you are and respects who they are. I find an occasional smiley helps me get a difficult point across in an email but I don't send emojis in all my emails. I enjoy learning about people's lives outside of work but not everyone wants to talk about their weekend, and you have to learn to read the room.If you are leading any sort of in-person interaction (meetings, training), you should be reading cues from people's body language. Emotional intelligence will go a long way in helping you find your own communication language. I am very direct (a culturally contrarian trait) but have to remind myself that not everyone likes that approach.

3. Be ruthless with the tools you use:

When I started, Microsoft Office was the system I learned on, and the scheduled send option for emails, way ahead of time along with all the other features such as folders for organizing emails etc were new to me, helpful and available only via work. Gmail existed but it was nothing like what it is today.Of course, now the problem is of plenty, not only for emails, but sharing content (Dropbox, Google Drive), coordinating calendars (Calendly, the infamous Doodle), meeting online (Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Skype), chatting online (Slack, Google Meet/Chat). There was a time when you had to have subscriptions to the likes of Microsoft Project - now you have Asana, Trello, Smartsheet, TeamGantt and the list is endless. At this point, you have to identify what works for you and ruthlessly cut out the noise of the other tools and systems. Just because something exists does not mean you have to give it attention or energy.At some workplaces you may not have the choice to select what you use, whether for security, consistency or branding reasons. At others you may have some or complete freedom - I recommend you choose using a combination of what works for you, and what will work for folks around you. So, maybe don't choose Skype if everyone in your workplace has a Google account. But do ask yourself if a basic project plan in a Google spreadsheet could serve you just as well as a more complex one in a different tool (and there are so many). You can also have your own templates for a plan, an agenda etc. that you can repurpose (if allowed) in your career.

4. Know where you are:

I don't mean know where you are physically, although that is always important ha. You have to understand the stated and unstated culture and norms of your workplace. It may be that everything is stated, it may be there are no clear ones, it may be that once you know what they are you don't like the place much. All of that is okay. But making the effort to understand what drives people to speak, stay silent, share or withhold, will help you customize your words and actions.By sharing this I hope I have given you a starting point to reflect on your own toolkit, and share with others