Happy Monday 🌞

I’ve always been motivated to keep learning and taking on more in my career and my work. Partially just because I find it fulfilling but also because it keeps work challenging and interesting.

This week, I feel lucky to have a few new subscribers thanks to a feature by ConvertKit — so hello if that’s you!

With that in mind, I am doing a bit of a roundup of my career growth advice and sharing three systems that have served me throughout my career and that I continue to rely on today.

Let’s get into it:

System 1: The accomplishments list

This list is so simple and yet so powerful. This is just a list of the accomplishments I’ve achieved at work that I keep in my notes. I organize them by whatever time frame will be most helpful (monthly right now) and add them to the list every week to make sure I’m keeping it up to date.

This small routine has helped me write my performance reviews more efficiently and ensure they cover all the most important information. It has also helped me keep my LinkedIn profile up to date with what I’ve achieved and worked on. (More on that next.)

Put simply, having a list of accomplishments is a very low lift — you’re just opening up a note and writing down what you achieved — and is very much worth the payoff. This is one of the systems I put in the category of a small action that can lead to better results.

System 2: A regularly updated LinkedIn profile

Keeping your LinkedIn updated might seem like odd advice from someone who has worked at the same place for eight years with no plans of moving on (read about that here). But, LinkedIn is no longer just a place to keep updated when you’re job hunting. LinkedIn is one of the best social networks right now in terms of engagement and networking. It is one of the primary places on social media where being active can actually impact your career in a very positive way.

By keeping my LinkedIn up to date, I’ve been able to:

• Connecting with peers in my field. (I wrote about this in my horizontal or lateral networking piece.) Overall, it has helped me level up at work and gain better context for how others approach the same problems. By connecting with more people in similar roles and industries, I am learning new frameworks, and I have helpful benchmarks through which to compare my own work and projects.
• Receive opportunities to build more authority in my space. My profile is up-to-date with my relevant skills and experience, so I get more outreach related to those areas. For example, I’ve had a lot of people reach out about writing opportunities or requests to judge awards after they found me on LinkedIn.
• Get recognized for top skills. Recently, I’ve kept up with contributing to articles on LinkedIn on a specific topic: strategic communications. By writing about my advice and experience in this area, LinkedIn adds a “top community voice badge” to my profile, which is just one more way to add authority to my own writing and content. (Read about how to do this yourself in this comprehensive piece.)

Here’s more about why I keep my LinkedIn updated even when I’m job hunting and how to do it yourself.

System 3: A dashboard for work priorities and projects

I spoke about this a little on MWW 47 — but during the busiest season for me in recent memory, one new system that was grounding was to set up one place where I could see all of my work projects at once. At work, those same projects live across a few tools since I work across several teams. To wrangle this, I set up a Notion dashboard that simply has the title of the project and links to whatever doc I’m using to collaborate internally.

The other piece of this dashboard is that I added my priorities at work. For example, at the time, I was hiring a Content Writer, so that was my number one priority, followed by my increasing page views to the blog. I made sure that all of my projects aligned with one of my priorities. Otherwise, I would put the project on hold until I had time to do it.

The final element is that all of my priorities rolled into team goals, leading to company goals. This means that there was a very strong reason that these were my priorities, not just because I wanted them to be.

This clear picture of how my projects ultimately connected to what we need to do as a company helped me get better at saying no to new projects that were outside of these borders and actually driving forward the projects that would have a company-level impact.

There’s more to come on system #3, so if this sparks questions please hit reply so I can include it in a future piece.

I hope you can take some of these systems and apply them to your own work or career. As always, reply anytime. :)

See you next Monday,

Hailley

• I have a backlog of podcast episodes I’m constantly working through. This episode on Lenny’s Podcast (a recent fav) is one I had a chance to listen to over the weekend, and I loved Carilu Dietrich’s advice for growing in your career and becoming an executive. I took a ton of notes.
• We won’t be replaced by AI; we’ll be replaced by professionals who use AI to work more efficiently than us. This is a reality I’ve been coming to terms with, as I’ve personally been slower to add AI into my work habits. This article by Greg Shove and Taylor Malmsheimer helped convince me I need to create better processes for using AI.
• ​Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals by Oliver Burkeman, is next on my reading list. Let me know if you’ve given it a read yet and what you thought!

That's all for this newsletter! Thank you so much for subscribing. Reply anytime you want to chat. ✨

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