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We hope that when we communicate with people, they get the message. The communication is clear, it’s effective, it’s concise, everyone’s on the same page. Sometimes, though, that’s not the case. When the other person doesn’t receive the message, they don’t understand it, communication is rocky, and you don’t have a clear outcome.

Whether we think about it or not, we have a lot of first-time encounters, both in person and online. This can happen in person when you’re meeting with someone for the first time. It could be a first date. It could be being in a meeting with people. It could be being in a lecture or something like that. Online, we have new communication coming in all the time, whether that’s email, social media, or all sorts of communication. And that happens both in the way that we receive it and in what we send out to people as well. 

So you’ve made it to Friday. It’s the end of the week. You’ve been working really hard to try and get everything done. You’re ready for the weekend to come and you’re ready for your paycheck to hit your bank account so you can go home and not think about work. And work is definitely not the most important thing, but it’s still important to understand the value of the work you’re doing and the meaning that that work has, to understand the contribution that you’re making and to recognise the significance of that. 

It’s very easy in our work to just keep doing things the same way that we’ve always done them. The problem with this is it’s hard then to improve on what we do. If we just keep doing things the same way, we’re going to get the same result each time. It’s good to step back and look at how we can make our work simple.

It’s Monday morning and you’ve got a list of tasks that are a mile long. There’s a lot to do and you just hit the ground running. You sprint really, really hard to try and get everything done. But a lot of the time, not everything does get done and we get tired in the process of running really hard. We need to think of work not as a sprint, but as a marathon. It’s a long race and a long game, and the work is probably never going to be going to end. We want to make our work sustainable.

We’re busy. We have a lot of busyness in our lives and in our work. But do we take the time to step back and look at the big picture? Not just at what we do and review what we do, but looking at how we do it. It’s really important to understand the value of the work that we do and to look at how we can intentionally improve what we do over time. And this isn’t just about what we do, but thinking about how we get our work done, not just in our systems, but in our communications, in the workflow, and in the way that we collaborate with each other.