A highly underrated soft skill in the workplace is being on top of things. That means you don’t let deadlines slip, are always reaching out before someone has to nudge you, and even bumping up threads with others to remind them to help.

Being on top of things, for most roles, isn’t a requirement – but if you’re good at it, it can be magical. Stakeholders love working with you because you’re so reliable. Your teammates are confident that you’ll keep them informed about anything they need to know. And your manager will be impressed with this more senior display of communication skills.

But if you’re not the sort of person who just remembers, how do you become someone who’s always on it?

🗓️ Use your calendar!

I’ve already written about how much I love my calendar. The trick here is to make sure you don’t just use it for meetings, but to also include reminders and due dates.

In your calendar, try scheduling things like:

• When the project is due (or expected to go live)

• A reminder a week (or more) before the project is due

• Blocks of time to work on specific aspects of the project

• Reminders to chase people for their parts

• Placeholder times for meetings you know will have to happen

I tend to work backwards from the due date. If there are things that need to happen for you to be done on time, schedule in reminders to follow them up – multiple times if you need to!

🤖 Schedule your reminders.

If you’re using a tool like Slack or email to communicate, chances are that you can set up scheduled messages. If you know when you need to be chasing people up, schedule those messages in advance so that it doesn’t rely on memory.

The other benefit of scheduling messages is that you can do it when you have downtime. Instead of getting all your admin done when you’re busy, if you have a light hour you can run through your reminders and write all the messages at once!

😊 Be extremely clear, but still friendly.

Reminders and follow-ups only work if you’re clear about what you’re asking for. Don’t hint around for what you want – be direct!

Here are two examples: one gentle, and one direct:

In this case, the gentle ask is so soft you can almost ignore it – and if you don’t, you might even get an answer that doesn’t help you, like “it’s going well, thanks!”

Our more direct ask is not mean, but it does make the stakes incredibly clear and guides the ask-ee to give a relevant response.

(If you want more guidance on being assertive, try checking out this post from April.)

That’s it for this week! Next week will be our last post until early January for a bit of a Christmas break.