It happened on a Tuesday afternoon.
I was doing a task I had done the same way for years. Tedious, manual, mind-numbing. The kind of work your hands can do while your mind is somewhere else entirely.
And then, for no reason I can point to, a question surfaced.
WTF am I doing this this way?
10 seconds later, I literally felt the lightbulb light up over my head. I had a better way. Faster, cleaner, and honestly not that clever.
Why didn’t I think of this sooner?
I’ve since learned not to spend much time here. The answer to why you didn’t think of it sooner is almost always the same: you were too busy doing it to ask about it.
That’s what full days do to a mind.
I have spent much of my career in HR and People Operations, much of it leading teams whose mission was continuous improvement. Finding the better way was the job.
Which is part of why that Tuesday landed the way it did. I knew how to do this. I just hadn’t turned it on myself in a while.
The frameworks below are the ones I actually used, and still use on my own work, and with my teams when I’m helping someone grow.
But that Tuesday made me curious about something else. If the question showed up on its own, could I make it show up on purpose?
Training the lightbulb
It turns out you can. Not reliably, not on command, but far more often than waiting around for a random Tuesday.
What I do is simple enough to feel like it shouldn’t work. I set a recurring reminder for myself that asks one question:
What can I do differently this week that would make this work better, faster, or more impactful?
That’s it. A phone reminder with a question in it.
Some weeks nothing comes. Other weeks something small does, and occasionally the whole shape of a task changes, because I am finally looking at it from outside lines, that I usually like to color within.
The reminder isn’t groundbreaking. It just interrupts the autopilot we so easily fall into.
Take inventory of your work
Last time you looked at your calendar and where your time goes. This week you’re looking at something different: what the work is actually for.
A few things before you start.
This is for your eyes only. It is not a job description, not a self-review, and not something you’ll ever hand to anyone.
You don’t have to do this in one sitting. Give it a few days, even weeks if needed. Tasks surface as you do them, and you’ll remember things on Thursday that you’d never have listed on Monday.
For each task, capture:
The task. What is it, plainly?
Who it’s for. What person, team, or function needs it?
What it’s meant to accomplish. What is the purpose (not the activity)?
The output. What actually gets produced?
What it impacts. What changes because this exists?
The value. What is your honest rating of this task?
That last column is the one that matters, and you can’t fill it in without the two before it. You cannot rate work you don’t understand the purpose of.
Here’s the uncomfortable part. Some of you will get to a row and realize you don’t know. You don’t know who reads it, or what decision it feeds, or why it started.
Most of us inherited work from someone who inherited it from someone else, and the reason left the building years ago.
This means you have a question to ask.
I have done this myself more than once. I spent real hours on inherited work, never quite sure how it was contributing to the team or the business, and when I finally asked, the answer was that nobody needed it anymore. Nobody had needed it for a while. It had just never occurred to anyone to say so.
Once the inventory is in front of you, every row may fall in one of these three places.
Keep. The work is valuable, you understand why, and the way you’re doing it is fine (for now).
Change. The work matters, but how you’re doing it doesn’t have to stay the same.
Retire. The work no longer needs to exist.
Changing the work
For everything in the keep-but-change pile, three questions to ask.
Can it be automated?
Not everything that feels manual has to be. Workflows, rules, templates, scheduled reports, forms that route themselves. Most systems we already pay for can do considerably more than we ask of them.
Can AI help?
This is where I’d push you to be specific rather than philosophical. Could the policy FAQ answer itself? Could the first draft of that communication start somewhere other than a blank page? Could the summary write itself and you edit it? Start with one task.
Can it be delegated?
I’d push back on how most of us hear that word. Delegation sounds like getting something off your plate, and that’s the smallest part of it.
When you hand work to someone else, three things tend to happen.
That person learns something they didn’t know before and for someone building a career, the unglamorous work is often where the real understanding lives.
You gain a backup. The work no longer stops when you’re out, and that is worth more than it sounds the first time you take a real vacation.
And a fresh set of eyes sees what yours can’t. The person who built a process is the last person who will notice what’s wrong with it. More than once, someone I handed work to came back within a month having improved it in a way I never would have seen.
The lightbulb moments are for everyone. Not just the person who’s been doing it for years.
The point of clearing this work is not to have an emptier calendar.
Or maybe it is. No judgment here.
It’s to make room for the work that expands you. The strategic thinking you never get to. The thing you’ve wanted to learn. The project sitting unclaimed that you’d actually love.
You named those goals in part one. This is how you make room for them.
And set the reminder. Whatever day of the week suits you, with that one question in it.
What can I do differently this week that would make this work better, faster, or more impactful?
The lightbulb moments will come more often.
Stay tuned for part five, where we bring all of this together.
With gratitude,
Cristal
Founder, Clahrity | getclahrity.com