Returning to Work after Vacations

Posted on by Brendan

Vacations are necessary for me, and I think most people. I took Thursday and Friday off last week and traveled to the Dominican Republic to celebrate a friend who is getting married in a few months. It was a fun time. Warm weather, sun, golf, good food, beach, pool, and most importantly many conversations and laughs with old friends. It is quite surreal spending time away from kids for a few days. It is great to get away from constant parenting once in a while but I also missed them. And when I got back they seemed like they grew up in 48 hours. 

Back to the point I want to make about returning from vacations. I’ve learned the importance of mindset on the first day back at work after a vacation. It is important to take the vacation and truly enjoy yourself during it. I used to take less vacation because I didn’t like coming back and feeling out of the loop and catching up. 

Rather than taking less vacation, I simply switch my mindset when I return. My mindset is to ease into the first day back. I do this by giving myself the morning to be meeting free. At least 830AM to 11AM or so. In that time I catch up on data, weekly planning, team priorities, and email/slack. I like to do this off a fresh night’s sleep. I find after spending 2 to 3 hours in these areas, I reap the recovery benefits of the vacation and I dive back into work with a mindset of excitement and control rather than letting calendar or other people’s priorities dictate my first half of the day which leads me feeling more stressed and bored than excited and engaged. 

Take the vacation, come back and be deliberate about your time for the first half of the day.

Make it Happen

Posted on by Brendan

My neighbor published a children’s book, Birdie & Bodhi: Coastal Tails. Our dog, Tide, made it in the book and is friends with Bodhi, one of the main characters. 

I found the story my neighbor told about creating the book very inspiring. She got the idea for the book after her and her daughter got Birdie and Bodhi. She was watching them play often and thought a book would be fun to write. 

She then went out and made it happen by finding an illustrator and someone who can do the publishing and distributing of the book. 

Pretty cool and a lesson in if you have an idea and are passionate about it, find a way to make it happen. 

The book can be pre-ordered here.

Relationship Principles

Posted on by Brendan

Relationships shape our experiences and influence who we become. They take consistent effort. Yet they can be easily put on auto-pilot. After all, there’s work to be done. 

It is important to reflect and think about your relationships and act on building healthy habits around them. 

I saw this tweet yesterday from Ray Dalio. I found this list of 8 principles for better personal relationships quite helpful and profound.

AI, Blockchain, and Search

Posted on by Brendan

I recently finished Read Write Own by Chris Dixon. I found the brief section titled, Artificial Intelligence: The New Economic Covenant for Creators the most interesting because it most closely ties to search. He quickly summarizes historical context around content creators bringing supply and distributors like Google putting that content in front of relevant users. The creator base was fragmented back in the 90s and early 2000s and still today. Dixon argued the fragmentation of content creators prevented them from gaining any sort of power in the relationship between supply and distributor. Had creators been able to band together, the Google we know today might have been different. Instead the result was Google gathering more users to amass a 80%+market share in search today through moving to compliment products it gave away for free such as an internet browser (Chrome) and mobile OS (Android) then moved most of the commerce to search with ads and built a great product that kept users coming back. 

The connection both AI and blockchain have to this history of the internet is that it is a chance to reset the power dynamics. His big argument is that blockchain is the only way to do it because of the network design. The root of the design is to give more power to people who contribute value to the network, not the management teams of those networks. If a traditional corporate network tries to do this, over time it will just turn into what you see today as the network attracts users and then extracts as much value as it can for the benefit of the people who own the corporate network (founders, shareholders,etc.).  

It is a short part of the last chapter on pages 216 to 222 with some thought provoking questions at the end.

My thoughts are that I want the creative work I am a part of on the internet to have a chance to perform in search and get credit when value is generated. I also want to be able to find and point to the creative work of others as a user. I am really excited about that end-state. The design or technology that powers that discovery is less of my expertise but I find it interesting to stay on top of new technologies and ideas that might gain traction like blockchain.

Staying Current in Knowledge Work

Posted on by Brendan

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.