I’ve rediscovered my love of board games recently. But trying a new game is always a risk, in ways that feel quite unique to other media. It’s because the learning process of a new game can be daunting at first. You’re at the whim of the game creator and how intuitively they designed the mechanics and wrote the instructions. If you picked too complicated of a game for the group you’re with or the mood you’re all in, you may be in for a rough night.

There’s always this bit of tension when you start out, but after the initial hurdles learning and understanding the concepts, there’s a moment where everything just clicks, and you see what all the fuss was about.

Working a new project or in a new role can feel similar to this. At first you feel totally lost and out of your element. But if you stick with it long enough, something clicks and suddenly you’re no longer a stranger in your world.

This adjustment period is always present, and always a little painful, and I’m not sure it’s possible to avoid. It’s easy to think things will never get better. But I like to think of these new situations as if I’m simply learning a new game, and the next course of action is to tough out the “tutorial” period. Eventually everything will click.

I often talk to recent marketing graduates and interns who feel somewhat lost in figuring out what they want to do with their careers. There’s so many directions you can go in the field, and students often feel like they have to choose a path now, while turning their back on the other paths.

It’s true that at some point you may specialize into a specific function, but early on, it’s worth staying flexible.

A friend of mine met a recent grad who was torn on what path to take. In their last internship, they enjoyed the creative & brand sides of marketing, but thought they “just weren’t good enough” at the more analytical and demand generation sides of marketing. It just wasn’t an area they were passionate in.

When I first started my career, I was dead set on working in social media and SEO. And here, years later, I do neither. In fact, I discovered early on that I didn’t like those aspects of marketing much. Never would I have expected I’d be in marketing technology, automation and analytics. I certainly wouldn’t have predicted I’d become an email marketer.

It’s easy to buy into the “follow your passion” advice, and get hung up on finding our true calling. But you’ve got to spend some time toiling away at work and logging the hours before you start to build the expertise and mastery that fuels passion. There’s a great read on this topic I’ve started recommending, Cal Newport’s “So Good They Can’t Ignore You”.

Before you make the call on whether you’re good enough or passionate about a role or career path – give it a try anyway. You may indeed discover it’s not for you after all, but how unfortunate to never discover your true calling simply because it didn’t reveal itself at first glance.

Between my current role and my past time as a consultant, I’ve now been working 100% remote for well over a year. I had previously worked occasionally from home, but never in a fully remote setting, and the transition was more challenging than I imagined. Now I’m nicely settled into the remote life, but it wasn’t without a few rules and systems to get there first. Here’s a few lessons that come to mind:

Insist on video calls

I’ve been lucky to work in video call-focused environments where this is just the norm, but if your teams default to audio only, it’s worth insisting on video calling, especially for important meetings and 1:1s. The human personality evolved for face to face interaction with others – and while we can never fully replace that with technology, video calls go a LONG way.

And when your entire existence interacting with your team is spent behind a camera, it’s worth investing in a better camera than whatever came with your laptop. You can easily go crazy here with camera setups, which isn’t what I’m suggesting. Just something with better resolution and a wider camera angle that’ll give a better image than the typically potato-quality built-in cameras on even high-end laptops.

Lighting is important too – yet even more rarely addressed by remote workers. The fact is that solid, consistent lighting can work wonders for how you appear in video conferences. If you don’t already have consistent lighting in your workspace, invest in some simple external lighting sources to help remove shadows and light your face more evenly.

Go for a walk

This is an obvious one for workers in the office and remote. But it is incredibly easy to become a hermit as a remote worker and never leave your house. The issues with remote work are rarely what most managers fear—distractions and poor productivity. Instead remote work is much more likely to create unhealthy overwork situations. The boundaries aren’t there for a good work-life balance – you have to create them yourself.

Even taking a quick 15 minute walk outside—I have dogs so I have a ready made excuse to take a walk around the block—can work wonders for your focus.

Get in public, even if it’s not a coworking space

The value of a great home office setup is undeniable, but it is absolutely critical you get in public at least a few times a week. For me that’s coffee or eating lunch out. I’ve explored coworking spaces but I’m not sure they’re essential to the equation. Plus the cost of using them can add up, and they’re not often conducive to the quiet needed for frequent video calls. Simply getting out in public somewhere is typically enough for me.

Make time for off topic irreverance with your team

It’s important to not be all business all the time with your remote team – you ought to make time for fun and irreverence. As a remote worker, those off topic slack channels you might ordinarily view as needless distraction are actually quite important to building a sense of connection to the rest of the team. Don’t ignore these. Instead, factor in time for engaging in some fun with your team.

Check in regularly at the home office

If your company does have an HQ, it’s worth the trouble and expense to visit people face to face occasionally. Note – this should be seen as different than a retreat or conference. If you can manage it, it’s worth spending working time with your coworkers, in-person on occasion. I shoot for once or twice a quarter.

Build boundaries

If you have the option of a dedicated room for your home office, use it. I don’t – I live in a 100 year old, 1 bedroom house, so my office is in my bedroom, which was initially a challenge to separate work life from home life. But even a small, seemingly innocuous change, like rotating my desk to form a separate partition worked wonders.

Equally important to creating a work environment is respecting your personal time when outside working hours. Stay away from your office when it’s time to unplug. If you need to get on the computer, maintain a separate computer for personal work to avoid the temptation to be always on.

Self-reliance and an ability to get things done with little outside support is a big part of how I grew incredibly quickly in my early career – because I could get things done, and do it all pretty independently.

I still like being able to bust out that kind of work from time to time, but it’s rarely a default for me anymore, both as a people manager, and the sheer scope of the projects I now work on.

Most of the work worth doing—the big, interesting projects—all require selling “change” to those outside your team. Rarely are we able to change meaningful processes and systems without convincing others on our views first. There’s an intricate network of stakeholders in the way of you just doing what you want.

You can view these as purely obstacles to overcome. But there’s incredible power in bringing another team on board with an exciting new plan. Everything moves more easily. There’s a shared sense of accomplishment and progress.

I’m increasingly convinced, even for junior roles, that you won’t make it far in marketing ops without a willingness for being diplomatic and collaborative. I look for it specifically for all levels of new hires, and value it as much as technical proficiency.

When I pick up new habits, I tend to focus relentlessly on keeping the streak going. To take a swing every day. And it’s mostly served me well. Even writing here for most of the past 12 months, I’ve published something new every day. This didn’t just happen – I consciously chose to pursue that schedule.

But as I’ve learned, streaks can become a chore. If you get more invested in the pursuit of the streak than the habit you’re trying to build or the work you’re trying to accomplish, you start focusing on checking boxes instead of doing meaningful work.

The only thing this accomplishes is a false sense of accomplishment. It’s like checking off your workouts in an app without actually doing much of the workout. It might feel good to see that big unbroken chain, but eventually even that small bit of reward won’t be enough to sustain the streak. You’ll end up dropping everything – either because you feel like you’re cheating yourself, or the whole enterprise just doesn’t feel worth it any longer.

So it’s better to recognize the real reason why you’re on the streak in the first place. For me, this blog is a means to becoming a stronger, more consistent writer. And the break I took this past month was precisely because I found myself focusing more on that streak number than actually having something meaningful to say.

The goal is still to write daily. I think there’s tremendous value in making a daily commitment – the speed of progress is not to be ignored. But I don’t want to post just for the sake of posting if I’m truly out of stream. Better to take a short breather, reflect, and start again.

This weekend we repainted our kitchen cabinets, and it would be easy to think we did all the work over that 48 hour period. But in reality, I’ve been preparing for this for weeks.

First it’s the research of what colors, what paint types to use, the order of operations.

Then it’s the preparation – cleaning and removing the doors. Taping off edges, protecting appliances. Sanding. Lot’s of sanding.

All that preparation and pre-work for the actual work – a coat of primer and two coats of paint.

The step of painting was really only a few hours, but to create the conditions to make that possible to do correctly, it required more effort and forethought. Like most things, most of the work is in the preparation.

There’s no shortcut, and seeking one out will only create disappointment with the quality of the final product. Recognize that if your work requires precision, you’re better off with a bit more prep time – chances are you’re not quite there yet.

I’ve been writing here daily since October and things have felt a little…stale lately. I still love the exercise of publishing something new each day – it’s a fantastic morning habit that does get the ideas flowing, even if what I share isn’t always some groundbreaking insight, or is writing I’m particularly proud of. But I know I need a little break to focus on some other priorities for the next couple weeks, and recharge my creative batteries.

I’ve been thinking about taking a break for the past few weeks, and then I read Brad Feld’s post that sealed the deal for me. I started this exercise with this insistence that it must be a “Don’t Break the Chain” scenario, that I always post every day, no matter what. But I’ve recognized that keeping a habit like this steady over the long term – months and years from now, demands some flexibility for the occasional break.

I’m planning to be back in a month or so. See you then!

Meetings get a bad rap. In too large a dose, they feel like a waste of time, especially because most meetings are run poorly, and often are objectively a waste of time.

And because we’re all in so many meetings, we never have the time to prepare and ensure those meetings are actually effective. Which then requires more meetings.

But a well run meeting is hard to beat in terms of value. The problem, I think, has to do with the fact that most people treat a meeting, especially one involving a presentation, as a chance to talk at the group, to deliver facts, to show they’re prepared.

But often the insight people want out of a meeting is not the facts, but what should be done with the facts. Instead of giving a presentation about why the sales are growing, offer insight into why. And how that can be replicated in the future.

This seems like common sense, but it’s hard to pull off. Hard because it requires a true understanding of the content. And hard because it requires some risk in taking a stance.

Yet that is ultimately the point of having the meeting at all. Not to deliver your message and escape unscathed. But to come together to solve a problem.

An easy area to underestimate while in a remote role is the value of face time with your coworkers. Remote work is mostly an asynchronous world. A space that requires the willpower to stay focused, even without a team around you.

And it’s true one of the greatest gifts of remote work is the ability to control your environment and focus, while escaping the often crippling distraction of a traditional office.

But if you go too deep down the path of isolation as a remote worker, you can end up alienating yourself from your team and purpose.

The value of team meetings, and even informal 1:1s becomes urgently important as a remote worker. And wherever possible these ought to be video conferences. There’s probably some science to this, but face to face communication, even digital, feels so crucial to building camaraderie, empathy, and trust in your team.

Moreover, you still occasionally ought to meet up in person, at least once in awhile. It’s helpful to ground yourself and your team in reality, and that is best accomplished face to face.

There’s more great thoughts on the subject of remote work in Jason Fried and David Heinemeier Hansson’s Remote: Office Not Required.

It’s not hyperbole to say that many video games today increasingly resemble a job, at least in terms of time commitment required and a task completion-based progression system. In World of Warcraft, you have endless quests to complete, all with clear objectives guiding you where you need to go on the map, telling you what needs to happen next, and what reward is in store for you if you complete the quest.

You could easily spend an entire work day completing virtual quests for artificial rewards, while neglecting your real work with real reward.

Why is it that a game can hold such sway over our motivations, while the motivation to tackle a tough project can elude us?

I think it boils down to clarity. Clarity in objectives – the steps that must be done to complete the task. And clarity in reward – what’s in it for us?

In a game, these are simply design considerations to display to the user. But in our own projects – we must do the work to both lay out the steps to the plan, and articulate the reward we expect.

Of course we’re more likely to complete a task if we’ve clearly identified all the steps and order of operations. Of course we’ll be motivated to do the work if we know what’s in it for us.

But even knowing this, chances are we all have tasks and projects on our plates that could do with some of this planning. We ought to think about how we can infuse some gameplay design into our productivity systems. Take the ambiguity away and replace it with clear next steps.