How to avoid most common career pitfalls?

In a professional life, the more senior you become, the more important it is to be careful while leading projects, considering there are pitfalls at every corner that might jeopardize your reputation or the success of your projects. If you start practising earlier, by the time you’re senior, you may already develop a muscle on managing those dangerous areas well.

What are work related pitfalls and how to avoid them?

1.Ineffective communication

One of the most dangerous pitfalls to look after throughout your career is poor communication. It may result in delaying or failing complete projects, increased stress, missed performance goals.

To help myself avoid this, I have developed a reminder checklist that helps me to refer before every single project ensuring I communicate well:

• Communicate early and an entire story ahead

• Communicate often: Don't worry about over communicating, worry about the quality of it

• Communicate clearly: Practise explaining things as simple as possible. Simplify more and then simplify again!

2. Aiming for the perfection at first go

That’s an easy pitfall to fall in love with, especially if you’re a perfectionist. But that’s a dangerous route my friend! Because aiming for perfection, costs time.

There are two important learnings I'd like to share with you:

• Try to focus on shipping small parts first. It will allow you testing early, learning fast, implementing changes quickly

• Another benefit of having an experimental approach is that, incremental changes lead to smaller, manageable mistakes before it is too late.

3. Not being able to prioritise well

Your phone is constantly buzzing, your computer screen keeps showing new email notifications and that coworker stopped by yet again to ask for a project update. Distractions live everywhere , but it is possible to eliminate them.

When there are too many things to do, but less time, you need to be able to pick exactly right solutions to work on first. You may read my post about Prioritization.

Here are a few things for you think about:

• Smaller things should fight their way to your calendar, not important BIG ROCKS

• Focus on one project/problem at a time

• Turn off everything else or postpone until you accomplish high priority tasks for this week