Growing up, I spent countless hours recording Good Eats episodes for my mom to use in her high school cooking classes. Beyond the science and humor, one concept from the show profoundly influenced my approach to work: mise en place, which is the practice of getting everything in place before you begin.
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A major component of my job is asynchronously collaborating with other people, usually subject matter experts from whom I need to get additional information or content approval on something I have created.
All of my project templates have this approval process built in at the appropriate points. This creates a common challenge: the people I’m working with are often overworked or get appropriately distracted by dealing with some type of emergency at work, and reviewing a script for the trainer gets put on the back burner. So, tactful follow-up is a critical skill and often something I’m managing across multiple people and projects at the same time.
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I do some of my best thinking on walks while listening to some combination of silly pop music and songs from my son’s favorite movies and tv shows. Something about that scenario gives me the mental space to think clearly and deeply about creative projects.
Sometimes on these walks, I can write a whole script for a video in my head; other times, I generate a few unstructured fragments that need to be worked into something better. My favorite tool for building out those fragments is a mind map.
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Because of some structural changes at my work, my team was moved to a different department. This new department is full of subject matter experts who are very good at their technical work; however, they do not have much skill in transferring this knowledge to others.
Enter my team!
This week I had to work with one of these experts to prioritize a list of projects she wanted us to work on. As part of the preparation for this meeting, I decided to articulate my method for prioritizing training creation. She found the visual I made very helpful, so I figured I would share it here and explain my thought process.
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Spear phishing is when you get a researched, prepared, and targeted email specifically crafted to fool you, the addressee. This is not a Nigerian prince type email; this is a focused attack by an artist. Receiving one is a bad sign. It means a bad person has taken significant time out of multiple days to ruin yours. They will typically impersonate someone important and either scare or entice you into clicking on a malicious link or attachment.
On September 6th, 2022, I thought I was under just this type of digital attack.
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