30 Days of Team-Building: Week 2 Update
Of my own accord, I independently created these project pieces to test my professional skills and expand my knowledge and experience. I was not hired or paid to complete this work.
I’m in the midst of creating a month-long project that will demonstrate how to recruit, retain, and empower quality employees. Today I cross the halfway point!
WHAT I CHECKED OFF THIS WEEK:
I polished the details of the previous week’s deliverables. This included a blog post exploring “Why People Don’t Want to Work Anymore” and a working draft of the landing page that will house all my project details upon completion.
I designed a targeted ad series for the recruitment portion of my project.
I learned how to use Meta for Business and filmed a walk-through of how to set up an ad to recruit new applicants.
I began learning how to harness Google Analytics. However, halfway through the course, I decided learning Google Ads would be a more relevant tool for the goals of my project, so I switched gears.
I wrote two blog posts:
“A Hot Take: Job Boards” where I argue there’s a better way to recruit than posting a passive job listing
“3 Refreshing Approaches in an Interview” where I dive into 3 angles that will help hiring managers discover who an interviewee really is beneath the surface
Finally, I recorded the first of 3 latte art demonstration videos and taught myself how to use Adobe Spark Video to add some editing magic. See it below!
CHALLENGES I FACED
I began the week overloaded with commitments outside my project work. My day job, plans I’d made with friends, and a wedding I helped coordinate halted the start of tackling this week’s objectives for a few days. Looking at my project outline, I knew I’d stacked the workload for week 2 to the brim.
I needed to find the time necessary to give my greatest effort to the week’s tasks, so I got a few shifts covered at my day job. This gave me the hours of the day I needed to tackle deliverables.
In addition, I faced the difficulty of shifting gears when I jumped into a Google Analytics course for 45 minutes only to find it wasn’t as relevant to my goals as I’d anticipated. I had taken notes and watched videos for nearly an hour and had to make the painful decision to put that work to the side in favor of investing in a tool more aligned with where I wanted to bring the project.
WHAT WENT WELL
I knew upon the creation of my original outline that I was reaching for the stars. I definitely put a lot on my already-stuffed plate to accomplish in 30 days. However, one point of personal growth is that I’ve been learning how to adjust my expectations in realtime.
For example, I had set out to write three blog posts this week, but decided to drop one of the pre-planned topics for time’s sake. It was a painful cut as I had the expectation to present a beautiful set of posts this week, but I concluded it was more important for the time to be allotted to other pending tasks.
Two weeks into this month, I’m learning how to efficiently prioritize and budget my time to build the most substantial project pieces. In a perfect world, I would have all the time and energy to complete every single element I set out to create. But recognizing and accepting my limits is an accomplishment within itself.
Learning how to adjust expectations and clearly communicate the changes is a vital skill to hone.
One workflow addition I made this week is I began breaking down tasks in my task management system into all the subtasks necessary to completing the whole piece. The week’s objectives encompassed so many moving parts that it was difficult to look at a task card and remember where I’d left it in its progress.
Being diligent to add subtasks and check them off as I worked remedied this.
This week, I also added a “Waiting for Feedback” column to my board in Asana.
It was visually helpful to drag a task out of my “Getting Done” column and place it in a section where its pending progress was, in a sense, “out of my hands” at the moment. This helped ease the overwhelm when looking at my board as a whole.
In addition, I created a “Final Project Links” note in my second brain, Evernote to gather all the URLs I’ve repetitively needed as I document my project progress. This cut down my hyperlinking time significantly when I’ve been polishing documentation!
2 WEEKS DOWN, 2 TO GO
Heading into week 3, I’m proud of the work I’ve accomplished thus far and eager to dive in deeper. Week 3 will touch on the “retain and empower” components of my three-fold project, and I’m excited to stretch my abilities in creating engaging SOPs in this portion.
Moving forward, I want to keep in mind the time it will take to package my deliverables. I’m finding it’s much more involved than just copying and pasting, but requires careful attention to detail and I want to do a clean job.
Until next week’s update!