The Associates Handbook

Sign in Subscribe

Topic

Hack

Posts designed to make you better at work immediately.

Take a break before you review

Before reviewing, take a break, and then sit down to review with some distance. After four hours inside a file you have stopped reading it and started remembering it. Your brain fills in what should be there rather than reporting what is there, which is why re-reading the same

Learn two shortcuts a day

The lowest-effort compounding habit available to you. Forty a month, permanently. Every mouse movement you make is a small tax on your attention, because moving a hand to a mouse and back interrupts whatever your brain was doing. Individually trivial. Across a fourteen-hour day, considerable. So learn two

Two windows, and a colour-coded calendar

Always specify time zones

Lock your screen

Windows key plus L. Every time you stand up. No exceptions. Two reasons, one serious and one funny. The serious one: you work with confidential client data, often in client offices, often in open spaces. An unlocked laptop is a compliance incident waiting for someone to walk past it. In

Version everything, and never write “final”

A naming convention takes one minute to adopt and saves you the afternoon three weeks from now. Agree a convention with your team and use it on every file without exception. Something like: YYYYMMDD_ModelName_vXX_initials.xlsx Then mark what actually left the building. A file that was sent

Build in a one-minute send delay

The five-folder Outlook structure

Never delete an email