An Unconventional Way of Standing Out at Work

During this time of year, my inbox becomes inundated with emails (usually with an offer attached to them) telling me what skills I should learn in the new year.

Just about all of them concentrate on how you can improve yourself to excel in your career and life. What can you do to make your life better?

What if one of the most underrated skills came in the form of making someone else’s life easier?

I was listening to The Knowledge Project Podcast (highly recommend) the other day and Shane was speaking with Sahil Lavingia, the found and CEO of Gumroad.

Sahil said, “The skill that’s been really top of mind for me right now is the ability to save other people time.”

“As a CEO, as a founder, those employees that do that will win. They will get whatever they want because those are the folks I really want to surround myself with because I care about my quality of life and my time.”

Master marketer Brian Kurtz lists “Enhance” as one of the 5 Ways We Get Paid

“How do you enhance other people in your world?” Or in this case, how can you make someone else’s life easier in your day-to-day interactions?

The good news is there are tons of tools that can automate a lot of this heavy lifting for you and make you look like a superstar.

A few of my favorites:

• Calendly — Avoid a million emails going back and forth trying to figure out each other’s schedule
• Zapier — A bit more advanced but lets you connect apps and automate just about everything
• Dropboxx — You probably know about DB but there is a fun little hack that pushes a download to a user when you share a link. When you get a download link, change the last # from a 0 to a 1 and it will automatically start the download for them

• Typeform — A free survey tool that looks much more professional than a Survey Monkey or Google Survey
• Loom — Free screen recording tool that you can instantly share and record your desktop to explain things much easier

Over to you — what are some of your favorite tools for automation? What can you do to make someone else’s life easier in both your personal and professional life?