Three things I do all the time in my own life that are invaluable at work
Just because the context is different doesn’t mean the same skills can’t be put to good use
As I enter month seven of my adult gap year, I sometimes wonder if my “work brain” has atrophied from a lack of use. However, the more I’ve thought about this, the more I’ve discovered that actually the work brain isn’t that different from my “life brain.” Here’s my take on why so many of the skills I leverage at work are actually just skills I use in my daily life.
Prioritization and making tradeoffs, aka “what should I do today?”
You have an open calendar for the weekend. What do you decide to do? You’re probably weighing several options, figuring out what absolutely needs to happen and what might be a nice-to-have. You’re also likely weighing the options on a number of factors such as enjoyability, necessity, and external conditions (timing, weather, availability, etc.).
A lot of these small decisions in life can be made fairly intuitively as we’ve all refined our own rubrics over time. In a work setting, it can be hard to figure out that rubric when you’re new and don’t have the full picture of what’s most important. But once you start to get a handle of that, you can build out a corresponding rubric for weighing your options. In both scenarios, there’s limited time and resourcing available (be it budget dollars at work or disposable income in life) and you have to prioritize and make tradeoffs.
Making decisions quickly with a lack of clear information, aka making any adult decision
People talk a lot about making decisions in the face of uncertainty. That’s pretty much all the time, if you really think about it. Whether at work or in one’s own life, there’s always going to be imperfect information. We never know how something will work out. While one should definitely start by compiling known facts in the face of a big decision, there always comes a point where one has to simply say, “Let’s go ahead with X over Y.”
Often, this involves comparing the worst case scenario with the best case scenario – spanning the full range of possible outcomes – and figuring out how much risk there’s appetite for. I have to make decisions like this all the time, such as figuring out how to invest my savings, whether to buy a flight today or wait to see if the price will go down, or choosing one moving company out of five.
I used to be intimidated that my performance at work relied on my ability to make decisions with incomplete information. Only recently did I realize that this is always the case, no matter what or where. What it really comes down to is:
Have I gathered all the known facts that are available to me?
Have I weighed the best and worst case scenarios?
Do I have a good grasp of the risk tolerance in this situation?
Convincing others of my perspective, aka “stakeholder alignment,” aka “making plans with friends”
I recently had a realization that planning a trip with friends or even making plans with a group of people feels uncannily like convincing your team at work to get aligned behind a project. Maybe there aren’t any slides or spreadsheets involved (or maybe there are…) but the nature of the discussion tends to be quite similar. There’s a strong undertone of “this is why I think we should do X and here’s why it will work best.” Behind that, you have to understand each person’s motivation, their goals, their capabilities or abilities or willingness, and how these can all be aligned with your suggested path forward.
In a non-work context, you have to figure out each person’s interests/hobbies, their budget, and their preferences. In a work context, you have to figure out each person (or team’s) and their abilities, capacity, and career goals in order to present your plan in a compelling way that gets them on board.
To really abstract this further, most activities that require convincing others of a specific perspective can boil down to asking people for either their time or money. Making plans with friends is asking them to spend their time (and potentially also their money) with you. Pitching a new initiative at work may ask for both from your coworkers. Raising money for a charity is convincing someone to spend their money on your cause. If you can rally someone to have dinner with you, then take those same convincing skills to rally a team behind your next big idea at work!
Tl;dr
There are a lot of skills that are transferable from your daily life to work, whether it’s figuring out what to do with your time and resources, making decisions amidst uncertainty, or convincing others of an idea or plan that you have. Take the time to figure out what works for you in your own life and try applying some of those skills to the workplace. Just because the context is different doesn’t mean the same skills can’t be put to good use.