Blog post

Win A Little, Every Day

Success is not about how fast you go, or how fast you get there. It’s about consistency – finding new ways to improve your game and earn one win at a time. Communication & Marketing professionals need to play the long game.

After lasts night’s Fast4 Tennis match at Sydney Olympic Park, this sentiment rang true with a few words from coach, Thomas Johansson who spoke about the perception of tennis players at the top of their game. Johansson explained that it’s not necessarily that they’re “playing the best tennis of their lives”, it’s more that they face each match as a single battle and that contributes towards achieving greatness. Understanding that not every day is going to be your best day, but that you are striving to achieve something bigger picture, is somehow comforting. Particularly in the Communications & Marketing professions where 9-5pm no longer exists, and many days feel like a roller coaster.

In the spirit of performance, and to finding little ways to improve our game, we’ve compiled some simple hacks to making every day an incremental step towards your success.

“Eat that frog” 

No tech here, just a simple idea from author Brian Tracy. While there are lots of lessons within the book, a simple take-away is the concept of taking the biggest thing that you’re dreading (and putting off) from your ‘to do’ list, and doing it first. Start your day by tackling that difficult/frustrating/boring/complex task and once complete, the rest of your day will feel much easier. Having overcome the day’s biggest hurdle, other tasks will seem less of a challenge, and you’ll feel like you can achieve more.

Tackling lists

Speaking of lists, we love them. Depending on your need, Google Keep, Evernote, and Wunderlist  are a couple of our favourites – the simple click and go list function that gives you a lovely burst of dopamine every time something is ‘ticked’ off.

Phone a friend 

With everything moving so quickly, an overflowing inbox and a plethora of things to read or ‘get across’, sometimes we need a friend to pull us out of the depths and remind us when deadlines are creeping up. If you’re an Apple fan, Siri’s voice activated deadline reminders can be a life saver. Set them to alert you 2 hours before a deadline to give yourself time to re-focus, update anything needed, and mentally block out everything else.

Know before you go

If you’re just starting out in your career, one of the best habits to get into is informing yourself of who is in a meeting you’re about to go to. Understand who they are, why they are there and what they might want to get out of the meeting. By doing this, you can more easily navigate the conversation, weigh up points of view and better understand how you can contribute or drive to an outcome that you’re looking for. This isn’t just about external meetings – sure, lots of people will do a quick LinkedIn profile view – but you should remember that internal meetings can be made more efficient with this technique too. After all, everyone in that meeting is (usually) paid to be there – calculate how much time that equates to and understand the value of time in that room, and you’ll be less likely to take it for granted.

Teamwork makes the dream work 

There are so many solutions out there to help foster great teamwork. Slack, Salesforce Chatter and Resource Guru (just to name a few) can help with different needs. We recommend spending a bit of time understanding what will really help you or your team work together more effectively. If you’re a Mediaportal user, the Isentia App is really useful here too! You can comment on news to alert someone in your team directly from the App, or when you are logged in on your desktop. 

Clear your mind and your inbox

It may sound simple but sometimes all it takes is a simple re-organise to make you feel like you are ‘in control’ again. Your email is a great place to start! Unsubscribe from unnecessary mailing lists and utilise folders to stay on top of information, and to seperate tasks. Creating an automatic signature can also save a lot of time, as can saving contacts details of those you will email often so that you avoid having to hunt them down when you’re in a rush. 

‘Peaked your interest? Here’s one (of many) reputable articles that has more on productivity.’ Go on, win a little.