As the holiday season kicks off, it’s time to take stock (no, not the turkey soup stock simmering on the stove after Thanksgiving) and reflect on this past year. Where did your time and energy go relative to the priorities you set for yourself? Did you accomplish your goals for 2024?
As Chief of Staff for the Google Search Ads team, I led the annual planning process for six years, where we set our strategic priorities and deployed headcount and budget against them. What I learned was that you can never get to everything you want to do – even at Google! We had to make tradeoffs between fixing current issues, investing in opportunities and trends, and innovating to create future possibilities; as a result, most stakeholders ended up disappointed because they didn’t get the investment they desired.
Great executives clearly identify what’s most important and are willing to focus on their priorities, even at the cost of other opportunities. Steve Jobs once put it this way: “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on. But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are.”
That thinking can also be applied to your job and your career. If you invest your time and energy only on the challenges of your current job, you are not developing your future opportunities. You might think of your time and energy as a portfolio to invest, where most of it goes to your current challenges and opportunities, but a fraction is reserved for emerging possibilities, and a small fraction is devoted to exploring future directions (Google used 60/30/10 as a guideline in planning).
If you’d like to apply this executive thinking to your career and goals for 2025, I’m hosting a free 30-minute “Lightning Lesson” webinar with Maven on December 10th at 9am Pacific.
Sign up at https://lnkd.in/ggDNKZS9 and I’ll guide you through an exercise to clarify what’s most important to you, and create a plan to reach your goals. I also plan to answer questions for an additional 30 minutes after the webinar, so you might get personalized coaching if you show up live.
Can’t wait to see you there!