Single habit that defined the trajectory of my career

I feel privileged to be one of the influencers on Linkedin.

Once the news sunk in, I started thinking about what should be my first post on this platform? I knew that the post had to be simple, focused, well structured and powerful.

Why? Well, this is how I like my work to be.

Given the criteria, I zeroed in on following topic - What is the single most important habit that shaped up my career? This is the habit which propelled me from from being just an ordinary analyst to some one who can influence, manage and mentor people in Analytics industry.

Here is the habit:

Spend a defined fraction of your day working on the the most important project / problem you have.

Please note the importance of two words here: defined and most important. You need to fix what fraction of your time you would spend and what is the most important task for you.

Defining what is the right fraction:

There is no right or wrong number here. The important thing is to define a number. In my experience, people early in their career can spend a higher fraction of their day on the problem - I have spent up to 70% of time on single problem early in my career.

With increasing responsibility this might become tough. Currently, I spend up to 2 hours in my day in this fashion.

An alternate practice for implementing this has been blocking off your days entirely to work on specific problems. So, if you want to spend 20% of your time on the project, you block 1 out of your 5 day work week.

Most important work:

You need to identify the most important (and not urgent) problem for your business / role. Let me take a few examples to explain: For a blogger, the most important thing is to create awesome content for his audience. For an analyst, it is the highest impact project he is working upon. For the CEO, it is the most important bet for the company.

So, if you don't spend quality time working on these projects / problem, you are doomed for mediocrity. On the other hand, if you spend more time on these projects, you are likely to create more impact in life.

What do you do during this time?

This is the time when you disconnect yourself from everything else on your mind and focus only on this single problem. Here are some of the things, I have used this time for (remember I have been a business analyst for most of my career):

• Structuring amorphous business problems
• Brainstorming possible hypothesis for predictive models
• Building some of the best financial & predictive models I have ever built
• Data wrangling
• Coding
• Blogging

A word of caution:

While the habit might sound simple, implementing it with discipline can be very difficult. I have to admit that even after years of practice, there are days when this does not happen for me. The idea is to minimize the number of days when you are not able to spend this time and increase the fraction of time you can spend on important problems.

What do you think of this habit? What do you think about adapting this? Do you think this would be helpful? Do share your thoughts with me through comments below.

If you like this, you may also like:

1. Maintaining fearless monk-like attitude while leading Analytics teams

2. How to create a High performance Analytics team?

3. Tools for improving structured thinking

Reading my post for first time?

I have just started publishing on Linkedin. Apart from my day job, I have also founded Analytics Vidhya. Through Analytics Vidhya, I share my knowledge about Analytics with wider audience and aim to create a community of passionate analysts.

If you are interested in Analytics, please visit Analytics Vidhya.