Happy November! It’s so crazy that we are almost at the end of this year, but as always the months are flying by! I feel like October was even faster than most months, but I think I say that every month. But this time, I felt like the month was just getting started as the month ended. But even though the month felt like it went by too fast, I still made an effort to get as much as I could with my monthly challenge.
I challenged myself in October to get out of the rut that I’ve been in and to try to say yes to doing more stuff. I did try to say yes to things that fit into my schedule. I couldn’t say yes to everything because I had plans or other things I had to get done, but I tried. I hung out with friends when I could, but it wasn’t as often as I would like. I said yes to dates even if I wasn’t totally sure about the guy (I never agreed to a date if I felt like it would be unsafe, but if I felt like I would be safe I gave guys a chance). When I saw things come into my inbox, I tried to see if I could make plans to do something. It wasn’t as successful as I would have liked it to be, but I think that was because I was dependent on other people inviting me to things and I didn’t do enough outreach on my own.
I’m hoping to be a bit better about reaching out to friends to go do things moving forward. I do know how important it is to continue to try to be social because it’s so easy to not do that. And just considering going to my workouts isn’t enough to really have a social life. For a while, that was all I did and I know I need to do more than that. So I hope that I can continue to work on making plans and not just be lazy every day after work or spend the weekends recovering from my week.
For this month, my challenge might be more related to my work than anything else but I also might find ways to incorporate it into my regular life. I want to find more ways to be more efficient in my work and to be ok with asking for help more often. I have realized with some recent work tasks that there are things that I didn’t have to spend as much time doing if I had asked someone if there was a better way to do them. I haven’t had a lot of tasks I couldn’t do, but there’s no need for me to spend days working on something if someone else can help me do them in minutes or hours.
A good example is how we tag our clients in our database. I was working on updating and adding specific tags which were taking me a lot of time. It wasn’t something that was difficult, but it was time-consuming. Someone mentioned that there might be a way to do mass tagging in our system, so I set up a meeting to talk to a member of the executive team to ask about it and they were able to get all the work done for me in minutes. I also learned how to do what they were doing, but there were some tasks that they needed to do since I don’t have full editing permissions in our database. But it was so great to see something that I was expecting to work on all week be done in a single meeting.
A lot of the work I’ve been doing lately are things that take up time and are very repetitive. And I know that for some of this work, there isn’t a shortcut or easier way to do them. They just have to be done one at a time and there’s no way around that. But it never hurts to ask if there is a better way even if I feel sure that there isn’t because I might be surprised. So I want to focus this month on asking for this type of help so I can make sure I’m using my time the best way I can.
It’s hard for me to ask for help because I don’t want people to think I can’t do my work. But I also know that asking for help doesn’t mean I can’t do it, it just means I’m making sure I’m not missing something that might make my life easier. And this could be applied to other areas of my life such as hiring someone to clean my place every so often. I can clean my house on my own, but it’s nice to have someone else to do it too if I’m too busy. Of course, things like hiring cleaners also involve money, so it’s not as simple as asking for help at work.
But I hope that even if it’s just about my work stuff, I can make sure I’m asking to check that I’m doing things as efficiently as possible so I’m maximizing my time each day. And hopefully doing this during November will help me find better ways to organize my work day and really get the most out of my time so I’m not worried about what I didn’t finish when I step away from my computer at the end of the day.
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