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Following Up
Izzy Grandic’s Lessons
Emails, teams and relationships. Followups have been key to my year’s progress.
I’ve built a network of 20+ doctors, five lawyers, an on-ground (Nigeria) partnership with an NGO and the local government. My secret: following up with clear asks.
Now that I’ve been a project manager for over 9 months, I’ve realized following up and checking in is one of the most important actions I can take to make progress as a team.
Planning is not progress. Having a solid plan can set you up for great achievements, but ultimately doing the plan is progress. It’s easy to engage in whiteboard-perfect plans that sound exciting but go nowhere. Following up is the process of ensuring plans move forward.
Using roam to take notes, keeping my calendar up-to-date and having a simple productivity system have allowed me to stay on-the-ball. Because while it’s one thing to set great goals, it’s another to followup to achieve them.
Lesson: followup relentlessly. Particularly, keeping productivity systems simple has allowed me to stay-on-top of my priorities more.
Bonus Fun Fact:
After sending 5 follow-up messages, Olivia Fox Cabane responded to me and she’s since been an amazing mentor. I visited her farm in Pacifica earlier this year where I met her pet chicken named Izzy:
