Emerging Professionals

Most people spend summer at the beach or mountains. I just got back from Chicago (Go Cubs!) and Destin, now it's time to catch up before deadlines hit.

This got me thinking: How do you use summer to recharge work-wise? Do you actually clean up stuff you said you'd do during busy season? Tinker with processes? Figure out where AI could help? I'm curious what people actually do to prepare.

Personally, I've listed every major bump in the road from recent jobs-the delays, inefficiencies, the works. I'm classifying them into three buckets: one-time events, ongoing issues, and things outside my control. My summer goal is fixing the ongoing issues before everyone's swamped, so I'm trying to preventing problems instead of just surviving them.

That sounds like a great system, Steven! 

I am definitely using the summer to catch up on some trainings and start to dabble a bit more into AI Tools. One goal I have for this summer is looking into building more AI agents to make my work day more efficient. I think the biggest hurdle is finding the time. I usually start at 9:00 AM each day - so I blocked out an hour each morning from 8:00 AM - 9:00 AM Tuesday through Thursday to explore AI tools and work on some training. 

I feel that it's the follow through of making time for exploration on my calendar that I struggle the most with because it's so easy to jump to another task or not get distracted by teams messages and emails. I feel like I am studying for the CPA exam all over again - just have to be in the right mindset to learn and really focus in on the subject matter. 🙂