If you work in an evolving field, staying up to date with what is going on and bringing new insights to your strategy must be a consistent process so that you stay effective and impactful when delivering value each day. I believe at the root of that consistent process is a series of habits. 

I am going to share habits I’ve developed to stay current in the discipline of SEO. I believe they can apply to any area of knowledge work. 

• Read in and outside your industry 
• Meet and listen to others within and outside your company
• Analyze data at macro and micro levels 
• Tinker with ideas 
• Think, communicate, and tweak

These points might be a bit abstract, so below I explain them in more detail with specific habits. 

Read in and outside your industry: develop daily/weekly reading habits and record learnings in some way that works for you. I am not only talking about news related to your field. Thought pieces and tactical ideas are needed too. Pursue reading interests in adjacent fields. For me, the writing of what I am learning is key because it will trinkle down to other habits around sharing back with others or tinkering yourself. 

Meet and listen to others within and outside your company: it can become too easy for leaders to avoid this. I get it. It is nice being the boss. You have a little more control and authority but leaning on that control and authority too much can result in not getting enough reps learning from others both inside or outside your company. Make habits to talk to others outside your industry. Whether you set up recurring touchpoints with old co-workers, join a community, or reach out ad-hoc. I have personal development goals of talking to five new people a quarter to create habits of reaching out and making time here. I also take that extra time to ask questions of the people I am working with to better understand what they are learning and thinking so I can learn with them. 

Analyze data at macro and micro levels: this is one of the funner parts for me. I love looking at data points to make connections between the data and the strategy. I have a few dashboards that break out performance in ways that let me understand underlying drivers quickly or find emerging trends. I recently reviewed data about a specific category that unlocked an insight which ties to my point about also looking at data at micro levels. 

Tinker with ideas: once you have an idea, can you tinker with it to better communicate the idea to people in your organization? Whether you build out some sort of MVP or just write up a 1 pager that breaks down the idea, tinkering can be simple and high leverage. 

Think, communicate, and tweak: thinking time is valuable. I used to not protect against this and work was much less fun for me. When I started to protect thinking time by calendar blocking, work was more fun. Block time to think. When thinking, question the ideas and conclusions you’ve come to in the above habits. Play with how to communicate them to others for feedback. And tweak that delivery. 

I am far from an A player in all of these areas. Some areas I might be an A while others I am lagging and working at it. I wrote this post because, “how do you stay current in SEO?” is a question I have been asked a lot over the years by bosses, stakeholders, on job interviews, etc. 

Developing habits with a consistent process that support staying up to date on news, trends, and insights will allow knowledge work leaders to bring those learnings back into their business strategy in order to deliver value. Like any skill, it takes creating habits and getting reps building those habits.

I really despise slide decks. I recently dug into this thought more and learned something about myself that makes PowerPoint much less painful.

By asking myself why, I learned I don’t like decks because I don’t like creating slides (shout out to the pretty slide building crew…I had a boss once who made it look like magic). I also don’t like decks because I don’t like presenter mode in meetings. If a presenter is giving a talk to an audience, it’s fine but for a 3 to 8 person meeting presenter mode creates a boring one way conversation whether I’m leading or participating. This is partly why the Amazon memo has an appeal: to create two way conversations on a business topic.

I am a writer at heart and enjoy writing over decks but the reality is I need to use decks at times.

Becoming aware of these two reasons has given me some freedom when I need to make decks. I avoid striving for perfection and just try to get my points across in slide format. I do some tweaking to titles but avoid perfecting the aesthetic of them. I haven’t played around with any AI tools for decks building yet.

I also never user presenter mode. I believe this creates the two way conversation a memo does since we can jump around to slides from the deck that fit discussion points.

If you have tips for creating and using decks effectively for pizza team size meetings, I’d love to hear them.

I am not the first person to say this: culture is both hard to describe and influence. But I believe I have an interesting way to go about trying. I was recently asked about cultural differences between the companies I have worked for which is making me rethink how to answer that question by answering this question. 

How do ideas move through the company? 

If you objectively think and write down an answer, you can begin to describe the culture of a company. 

The most recent idea started from the executive team. The CEO asked for this so we went and executed the idea. The idea did not produce the results we expected. This would be a culture that is authoritarian and submissive. 

Another way an idea moves through the organization. Let’s keep it with the idea coming from the CEO. But now someone takes the idea and converses with three peers, stakeholders, or team members about it. Then throws it outside the company walls to a few users or industry experts. Using these discussions and data research, the person comes back with a recommendation and proposal on if and how to execute this idea. Some themes that emerge are teamwork, curiosity, conviction, thoughtfulness, and focus. 

Rooted in these quick examples are decisions and behaviors by people within the company that ultimately make up the culture.

The biggest mistake I see people make in the first 3-6 yrs of their career is not getting good at weekly/daily prioritization that supports their team/business. I needed to improve at this myself at various times of my career. It became hard to make time to truly prioritize work. The truth is you have more autonomy over what you decide to do than you think. It starts with organizing your weeks in a way that works. As you organize, share bits and pieces of that organization with your manager and team. Make your personal weekly planning trickle into updates so you are putting it into action. There’s research that telling someone you are going to do something increases the odds you will do it – you become more accountable to doing it. Here’s a few other habits to build for good weekly/daily planning: 

• Make time every Monday morning to plan your week.
• Make big rocks and put tasks under the big rocks. Big rocks should be things that tie to the team’s strategy. 
• Do not share laundry lists with your manager. You aren’t doing anything to make things easy on them. They probably want to know about all these things but you need to present in a more organized fashion. 
• Always remember it is okay to roll tasks over into the next day. 

Thankfully, I have learned the lesson of owning my priorities and calendar and hoping to help others get there too. When you find what works for you, you will feel the right amount of control and autonomy you want with spontaneity mixed in.