End of year work-related reflections

Bonus issue: Some cruisey "work" to look busy

📬In this issue

Reflection, advice, or planning exercises for all of your work and existential crisis needs:

• Career audits across personal strengths/weaknesses, team cohesion and feedback, and career progression

• My short/long term planning guide for small marketing teams

• Personal life audits and reflections (including a relationship quiz)

• A checklist of things we’ve all probably been meaning to do (myself included)

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Hi Mehketeer!

I’ve missed you, truly. This between-season break has fallen too close to Christmas to be worth starting up a season, but I have been squirrelling away topic ideas to come back with and I will be back with a Season 9 in the new year.

Until then, though, it is the silly season, which means we’re all running on fumes and need to “do work” but preferrably work that’s a little more… low brain effort. Personally, I love a quiz and a reflection exercise. It feels productive (and it is!) without being too draining.

I have recommended a lot of these before, with some new ones thrown in. Would love to keep this list growing so if you have one you love, let me know!

Career resources

1. The Red Bull wing finder quiz

It tells you your natural strengths and advocates for building on these rather than focusing on improving your weaknesses as it’s easier and more beneficial to go from good to great than to go from poor to average. It also gives you a summary to pass on to your manager about how to best manage you - if you’re a manager I recommend making your team do this.

1.1 Speaking of making your team do a quiz — this personal operating guide

This is a template from someone who works (worked?) at Buffer. It’s a good little questionnaire about how people like to receive feedback, praise, and other personal facts that go towards team cohesion. You’re supposed to all fill it out and read your team members’ answers to better understand each other.

2. Teal tools

Teal is an American jobs board with a bunch of resources. They’re all geared towards job seekers so if you’re looking for your next thing this might be more up your alley. My favourites include the work styles assessment (similar to the Red Bull quiz), the stay vs quit quiz (IYKYK.)

Actual work related stuff

This is my guide for building in the long and short term, specifically for small teams, but you can apply it to each of your specialties if you’re part of a bigger team:

Building in the long/short term as a small team

Wes Kao’s guide to giving senior leaders hard feedback was some advice I was seeking out recently, and it may be relevant to you too!

How to give a senior leader feedback (without getting fired)

Personal reflection

1. Design my life template by May Samli

I did this type of exercise for the first time last year and it helped my figure out some non-work related goals for this year. I didn’t do exactly this one, the one I did had slightly different categories: love, play, work, health, learning, giving, spirituality. Use whatever categories you care about!

One thing that surprised me was learning I had an unscratched itch for giving, so I made a goal this year to donate blood which I’ve now done twice.

The second step in this is very similar to another life planning exercise which is to imagine a day in your life, from waking up to falling asleep, ten years in the future. What’s your morning like? Where do you live? Where do you work? What do you do for fun? What do you eat? How much does this day cost? The more detailed the better. Then you break this down into steps that gradually get you towards that future.

2. Relationships and emotional needs

The past couple of years I’ve been on a ✨therapy journey✨ and one of my biggest learnings has been around emotional needs. Previously, I was someone who would always be like “oh I don’t mind, anything’s fine” and I’d pride myself on being not fussy or easy to please (think trying to pick where to eat with a group of 10 people, I’d just say yes to whatever the majority wanted rather than making my own suggestion.) (If this is you, this is actually not a healthy thing to do — I was shocked to find that out too 🙃)

Part of this has been learning what my needs actually are and that has meant learning new vocabularly! It’s been a lot of “you don’t know what you don’t know” so I’ve found quizzes to be a good way to figure out those unknown unknowns and then evaluate if they do or don’t apply to me.

Here’s one that’s specifically for what you need from a romantic partner — think an advanced and more in depth version of love languages.

Things we all procrastinate doing

• Update your LinkedIn profile to reflect some projects and achievements from this year

• Update your resume as well with the same info (I keep a “primary” resume with everything in it, then tailor it into smaller resumes that are more specific to an application)

• Take a moment to stop and smell the roses from this year (I did a Spotify wrapped inspired post on LinkedIn to this tune, I pretty much flicked through my calendar from the whole year to put this together)

• Book your dentist/health checkup appointments

• Reach out to a friend you haven’t spoken to in a while

• Take a sick day because the weather is nice (truly, no one cares… or notices)

• Do something for yourself, for no particular reason

• For the parents, show your kid something you used to enjoy when you were their age

All of this should give you a nice list of options of “things to do when you don’t feel like working because it’s the end of the year but you still need to do something reasonably productive.”

Enjoy!

Kayla