#602 High performance habits for your Squiggly career

Helen Tupper (0:00)

Hi, it's Helen from the Squiggly Careers Podcast, and you are listening to one of our Squiggly Shortcuts. These are episodes that come out every Thursday. They're deliberately designed to be a shorter listen with lots of really quick, easy actions so that you can put them into your work straight away. And in today's Squiggly Shortcut, I want to talk about four high performance habits for your Squiggly career. So this is less about four things you need to do to make your week better, it's less about that. It's more about things that you can do that have a really long-term positive impact on your career over time. So I would say with all of these, the benefit of them will compound, they don't take a lot of time to do, but they make a really significant difference to your Squiggly career. So let's go through each one in turn, and I'll talk about maybe how I do it to bring it to life. So the first one, probably no surprise everybody, it is learning. I say that as somebody who has written a book called Learn Like a Lobster. But learning is one of the things that means that our skills stay relevant and our squiggly career is resilient. And the thing that we know is that sometimes that can feel really hard because it feels like it can take a lot of time. So your high performance habit really with learning is to do little and often. I'll give you a specific example. So Sarah and I have started our PhD, which is a very daunting thing for our development. But all I'm trying to do at the moment is read one article a day. It takes me about 10, 15 minutes and I'm just doing that a day. Now that learning, that time really compounds. I create momentum. I start to be able to connect the dots, but it just starts with little and often. So for you, I would think about what is something you want to become more expert in? What is something that you want to feel more confident in for your career? And how could you apply little and often learning? Something you could read or watch or listen to each day, but just protect that small window of time so that that can increase compound and have a bigger impact on your career. So that's your first high performance habit, little and often learning. The second one is about tracking. Now, if Sarah was here, she probably wouldn't like this because she is not a fan of tracking, but it can have a really big positive impact on your career. And there is quite a lot of things that you can track. You can track your time, how much time you're spending in meetings, how much time you're spending on certain projects with certain people. There are lots of different filters you can apply for time tracking. And if you're interested in doing this, I'd really recommend Laura Vanderkam's work. She's a previous guest on the podcast and on her website, she has a time tracking template, which can really help. The point of this is you can spot patterns, patterns in where your energy is going. You could track your energy in an average week at work. And there are lots of sleep. You could track your sleep. And that's one of the things that I've been doing, trying to improve my sleep, because I know that that gives me energy in my day. But tracking, just think about it as data for your development. And when you have data, it creates a choice about what you might want to do differently. And honestly, without tracking, you're operating on autopilot and you could be getting in your own way at work. And so I really want you to have control, make decisions are going to have a positive impact on your data and tracking is part of that. So just decide on what you might want to track and how you're going to do it. And then when you're going to reflect, that's your pattern with that one.

The third thing is reflecting.

Might not be your favourite thing. I'm a doer. I like pace. So sometimes reflecting can feel like it's slowing me down. But reflecting is how you consolidate what you're doing on a day to day basis. It's how you spot where you can improve. It's also how you spot what you're doing well. It's such a healthy process for you to get into in your career.

I find intermittent journaling, I'm not a regular journal. I can't do it every day. But when I do that, that does take me a bit of time. I feel like it helps me to process what's going on at work for me.