Hello and welcome to Working It.
It’s the FT Weekend Festival on Saturday* and I’m looking forward to meeting Working It readers and listeners. There’s a VIP tent (I think the correct term is “lounge”) for FT subscribers and I’ll be in there at 11am for some free ☕️. Please come and say hello — and save me from that awkward thing of scrolling the phone to look busy in a room, or field, full of strangers.
Read on to discover the benefits of keeping a work journal — also an excuse to start September with new stationery. On a long train journey yesterday, I noticed that a woman across the aisle from me had a pile of new notebooks and pens in front of her. Respect 🙇♀️.
Email me with your thoughts, ideas and rants: [email protected].
*Promo code Newsletters24 gets you £24 off tickets
How to start journaling about work (even if your handwriting is terrible) 🙆🏻♀️
I’ve kept a diary at various points in my life, but never thought about doing it in a work context. That’s going to change, after talking to journaling enthusiast Ollie Henderson. Ollie is author of an excellent guide to career transition (another good September topic), Work/Life Flywheel.
He posted about his journal on LinkedIn and I was intrigued — so I asked him to share more details with Working It readers. He got started, it turns out, for the same reason that those of us who love personal diaries keep at it: maintaining a record of our daily lives, before it is lost to unreliable human memory 📒.
Ollie told me that when he started a career pivot, in January 2020, he realised that “thousands of moments that had shaped a decade of my work and life were a blur”. Relatable.
He went on: “As I considered my next steps, I struggled to identify the skills and expertise I could offer to other businesses. That’s when I started my work journal. I started by listing things I was proud of, exploring how I wanted my work and life to evolve, and focusing on what I’d enjoyed in my career. Once I had some clarity, I shifted to ensuring I didn’t forget anything else, noting key moments down each day: achievements, challenges I was struggling with, breakthroughs, and interactions with colleagues, collaborators and clients.”
The practicalities of keeping a work journal will depend on your individual preference, but Ollie started with pen and paper. This fits into your life with very little extra effort (or “friction”, to use the techie term), which is key when you start any new work habit 🔑.
Writing down short entries in a notebook, whether that’s “as it happens” or during a few minutes of reflection at the end of the day, allows you to record small things that otherwise get lost. When you feel you’ve “done nothing” during a working week, the records (let’s hope) will tell you otherwise. Logging progress and achievement can be especially important for people who are self-employed with no manager to “mark the homework”.
I asked Ollie to send me a photo (names redacted 🤞🏼).
One of the great things about diaries (of all sorts) is that they can show us long-term patterns of behaviour, preferences and problems that we can miss in the tumult of our day-to-day lives. As Ollie told me: “I find it fascinating to see which moments I note down, positive or negative, because the same themes keep popping up. What does it say when you consistently highlight how good it felt to present your ideas to your team? You probably want to do more of that. What does it tell you when your manager consistently drains your energy? Maybe it’s time to look for another job.”
Ollie has since taken his journaling digital, because he wants to be able to search and find useful data insights. He could not find an app that did everything he wanted so he’s building his own, with the help of collaborators. (Follow him on LinkedIn to keep up with his progress.)
None of us are going to be able to turn back time (sorry, Cher). Not to get too deep, but work journaling might help us to make sense of the transience of our lives. Final word from Ollie: “One profound impact is my perception of time. It can often feel like time is slipping away. Stopping to reflect on what you’re doing each day gives the sense of time slowing down. Marking important moments helps you differentiate one day from the next. It stops the sensation of life blurring into one.”
This week on the Working It podcast
I wrote a couple of weeks ago on how lunch has disappeared for those who work from home 🥪, according to data from virtual office platform Roam. The data shows no dip in work activity over traditional lunch hours, and instead workers at home keep taking meetings, sending emails and generally powering on. We decided to follow up that story on this week’s podcast episode, and talk more widely about the state of the workplace lunch. Has the business meal also disappeared? To find out, I talk to Nick Bloom, Stanford University professor of economics, and to Harriet Fitch Little, FT magazine food and drink editor. It’s a fun — and revealing conversation.
Five top stories from the world of work
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The dangers of staking your career on the company’s rising star: Recent events at JPMorgan Chase saw a presumed successor to Jamie Dimon being sidelined. When that happens, it also stunts progress for the presumed heir’s lieutenants. Michael Skapinker unpicks the complexity of workplace dynamics at the very top.
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Fund bets happier workers produce healthier returns: A new US ETF fund is picking stocks based on data showing how happy and engaged workers are. Will Schmitt in New York follows the story — it will be interesting to see whether staff satisfaction can create concrete returns.
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Interview: Google’s James Manyika on AI and productivity: Cut through the deluge of content around generative AI with this excellent interview from Henry Mance. James Manyika is Google’s senior VP for research, technology and society, and he’s got an interesting, balanced view.
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EY draws up female-dominated shortlist for top UK job: Well, the list is female-dominated in the sense that two of three candidates to replace Hywel Ball are women. Simon Foy also outlines the firm’s byzantine voting rules which are 😨.
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Why is it so hard to ask for help?: I love Enuma Okoro’s writing in FT Weekend, in which she uses art to explore human relationships and emotion. This week’s column is on the importance of connection when we accept vulnerability and ask others to help us.
One more thing . . .
A strong recommendation for Same As It Ever Was, a new novel by the US writer Claire Lombardo (the title is from the Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime”). Julia Ames is a 50-something mother who always feels like an outsider. She lives in affluent suburban Chicago — with a loving husband, two great kids and a quirky dog — but her life is overshadowed by her own early childhood of poverty and parental neglect. The past threatens to upend the present, in what is a very satisfying read about a complex family dynamic.
A word from the Working It community
Last week’s newsletter, about the challenges facing chief human resources officers, drew this interesting response from Olivia Stone, MD and founder of Tucker Stone, a boutique HR search firm:
I have a personal desire that in the next 10 years, we see a significant move towards chief human resource officers becoming CEOs — it would certainly move the dial for women “at the actual top”. But do CHROs want to be CEO? Or are they willing prisoners within their own HR function? It takes a specific skillset to thrive in a CHRO role, they are exceptionally adept at managing executive dynamics, coaching, facilitating, challenging, negotiating, influencing — it’s unsung hero stuff, and invaluable to a CEO. But are these CEO-type qualities, or is what makes the CHRO successful their innate ability to be the wind beneath the CEO’s wings?
Reluctantly, I think it may be the latter, though I am very happy to be proven wrong in the coming years. The combined result of people living for longer and retiring later, the HR function professionalising and burgeoning in number over the last two decades, and there not being a natural outlet for CHRO to progress to CEO, means that it’s becoming a crowded place, especially at the senior end of the market.
Luckily, private equity, start-ups and SMEs more broadly are recognising the need for executive-level HR earlier in their maturity, and this provides opportunities for some frustrated HR leaders, impatient for their first executive appointment. It is also a dynamic, commercial, pacy place to be, but that’s a discussion for another time!”
Read the full article here