Organization - The one skill for any role

I spent a majority of my career observing a lot of highly efficient people. I learnt very quickly that I needed to figure out my system. The foundation to being successful was organization. Even if have someone that tells you that they have no system, they have a system in a way that they work that helps them accomplish things. Even in chaos, there's organization. The sooner we realize this, the easier it becomes.

How do you become organized? It's such a daunting task for many people. The people I mentored in it start to get overwhelmed but let's break it down. Let's take the example of transitioning into another career, in my case, Service Design. First spend some time researching the amount of information that you will be provided - this can be a rough draft. I love using Notion because it provides you the flexibility.

I spent at least 2-3 days setting up. I knew I was going to be overloaded with a lot of information - setting the expectations and the baseline. Gathering insights and creating a higher level architecture on the information that will be incoming. These can be modified later so I created placeholder text ahead of time. I create templates for easier duplication. Once these were set up, I started to research on the various communities to start to network. Now having a weakenss, identify it and use it to your advantage. I usually write down every person I meet and if they ever tell me any sort of interesting facts or their interest, I keep it as a note and review it prior to meeting them. Preparing for things is another thing that helps you connect to people. Having a career transition is overwhleming with the amount of information that's presented to you and you will be going through an emotional roller coaster with the imposter syndrome kicking in at the worst of times. But at least you don't have to fluster yourself looking for information. For example, you know you have to get to a portfolio later in your journey but even if it's important to you right now as you're sifting through information, you might find information. It's great to have that structure already in place and it's a matter of seconds to place it in the right place. If you have to think about creating it at that time, most likely, you probably will not.

Failures

Setting expectations that your systems might not work - so set expectations to keep tweaking. I know how I work now so usually I don't have to tweak as much. This comes with practice and experience

This might look overwhelming for a person that's never looked at it before but having organization helps and especially when you have to pay it forward to the community, if anyone, asks for anything, I have the information handy to be able to provide it. It also helps in preparing for interviews because all of your information is one place and you look so well put together!