It may seem like a bad time to ask, especially when plans have been thwarted and much taken away from us as a whole in the last year. However, some verbs are pandemic-proof, and this is what I would like to explore.
Whenever I had the good fortune to catch up with old friends (pre-pandemic), I would find myself mentally (and sometimes vocally) backtracking to the last time I talked to them, so I could update them on what’s been happenin’ in my life since then.
A few years ago, I also endured a long personality assessment designed to categorize my knowledge-based skills (for my own curiosity’s sake — not as a requirement). It turned out to be pretty accurate, although I would not have been able to predict that from the way some questions stumped me.
For example, one asked how many of the following I had done in the last 3 weeks, and had me select from pictures of:
- A happy gathering with friends
- A theater
- Shopping
- A game
- A sport
- Solitary music-playing
- Creating art
- Writing
It did not have a “none of these” option like some other questions did.
The thing is, I might do some of those things a lot in bursts, and not at all for an extended period of time. Or I might have done one of those things as a one-off in the last 3-week window. Does that skew the results? Is the intention to gauge how much you love doing something by assuming that if you love it, you probably do it frequently enough that 3 weeks would not pass by without?
I took the question literally and answered according to the actual last 3 weeks, rather than trying to average out the bursts over a longer time.
Later, the idea occurred to me — what if we look at not just the types of activities, but the essence behind them? (It seems like a reverse reverse-engineering of the problem.) Then we might assess our daily practices and mentalities, and measure our continued progress.
Lately, have you…
Collaborated? If you work with other people, the start of a collaboration may be your initiative or your inheritance, but when you put the common goal first, things get done better.
Improvised? It’s comforting to have a script to follow for situations that are unfamiliar and uncomfortable. However, the stage, the props, and the other actors are not as written most of the time. Good judgment is far more valuable.
Updated your tools? Maybe it’s a process, or maybe it’s a faster computer. Identify and eliminate bottlenecks — even the tiny ones.
Learned? Can 3 weeks really go by without learning anything?
Created? Besides the obvious… maybe you’ve sparked a good conversation? A lot of things you do would not be exactly the same if they were done by someone else.
Reflected? In the midst of all the doing, it’s important to pause and reflect — not just on how to do better, but also on why you are doing it in the first place.
[All views expressed in this post are mine alone and do not necessarily reflect those of my employer or any other entity with which I may be associated.]
