As the end of the year approaches and everyone is writing year in review, or prediction posts, I thought I would share some of my resolutions for 2012 (that are slanted towards my work/professional life).
Learn to code
This is something that I’ve already started on and intend to continue through 2012 and beyond. Scott Brinker recently wrote a post called “Why marketers should learn how to program” and he advocates learning to code for two main reasons; programing allows you to communicate with technologists, and also develop process design skills, which is very much the way marketers need to think nowadays.
While being able to better communicate with developers and establishing a new way of thinking is important to me, there’s something even more basic about why I want to code; I want to learn how to build things and understand the products I’m working on (which include a lot of website and applications). While I consider myself fairly fluent in technology, I can’t get my hands dirty and actually implement an idea. I don’t want to be developer, but I want to be able to understand the products that I’m spending weeks and months on end with, whether it’s marketing, project managing, or developing strategy for them. If need be I also want to be able to tweak something or step in at the last minute to help the technical team. The more I understand the products I work on, the better I can do my job.
Stop multitasking and timebox everything
My job requires me to juggle a lot of different projects and responsibilities, yet it doesn’t mean I have to tackle them all at once. Multitasking is a myth, and attempting to do so is unproductive and burns you out. A lot of people claim they can multitask, but studies show that our brains aren’t wired to. In fact, multitasking can lower your IQ. In the end it’s better to tackle one task at a time to produce a quality outcome.
Not only is dealing with one task at a time important, but also setting limits on how long you’ll work on that task. One thing I’ve learned from agile whizzes like Jeff Patton and Rob Purdie, is that you should set a fixed time span (or timebox as they call it) for which you will work on something, whether it’s a two week sprint to produce shippable code, or 60 minutes to write a large chunk of a presentation. By eliminating all distractions and having a single focal point for your work, you’re able to produce a lot more, with greater quality and less pain.
Send less email
As someone who evangelizes collaborative and social technologies such as wikis, forums and blogging/microblogging, it’s ironic that I spend so much time on email, a very anti-social technolgy. While I’ll have to continue to send and respond to email, I intend to force myself to change how and when I send email, as it can become such a time waster and distraction.
One of my favorite pieces written recently on email etiquette is by Scott Belsky. He lays out the following guidelines to follow when writing/sending email.
- Experiment with three-sentence emails for a better response rate.
- Start with action-oriented steps, don’t leave them at the bottom of the email.
- Market your subject lines–make them an advertisement to open and read the email.
- Take disagreements offline.
- Don’t “reply all” unless everyone needs to be involved.
- Use numbers for reference in back-and-forth correspondence to reduce redundancy and length.
One thing I need to stop doing is sharing new ideas and items of interest through email, after all, email if where knowledge goes to die. It’s best to be shared in an open and collaborative environment, even if it’s only open to just my colleagues or a small group of friends, whether it’s on Twitter, a company social network or this blog. Which brings me to my last resolution…
Keep this blog going!
I started this blog to work on my writing and force myself to think through my ideas and thoughts, after all, good writing is just good thinking. While I realize most blogs have a very short lifespan or are infrequently updated, I fully intend to write weekly posts, though I realize at times it will be a little less than that 
Happy New Year!
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Thanks for sharing! Your e-mail and multitasking resolutions would certainly serve me well too. Mid-year review?
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