Calm Wind Solutions

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Mastering the Care Cycle – Your Framework for Understanding Your Work Responsibilities

In our last post, we talked about two aspects of your work-related responsibilities. The first is related to tasks or duties that clearly fall under your job description. The second is related to things that aren’t clearly defined in your job description, but are things that you nevertheless are responsible for taking care of.

These are things like a marketing idea for promoting a program, a solution to a software problem you’re dealing with, a proposal for a new product.

Managing responsibilities that fall under this second category can often be unclear and difficult to categorize. This is because they tend to be less routine and more creative and problem-solving focused.

At Calm Wind Solutions, we’ve developed a simple framework to help guide you through these unclear, yet important responsibilities. We call it the Care Cycle.

There are four typical stages of the Care Cycle. Each stage starts with the letter C.

  1. Contemplate. This stage is where you develop the idea for the project, plan, proposal, or solution. Something happens that sparks your curiosity or frustration, and you develop an idea for addressing this.
  2. Confer. This stage is where you meet with others to discuss the idea, gain consensus or agreement, and build expectations and accountability.
  3. Clarify. In this stage, you communicate with others to gather updates, address issues, or clear up any questions.
  4. Complete. In this last stage, you work to finish or bring to life the project, idea, or solution.

Not every idea or project is going to exactly go in this order; sometimes, for example, you’ll go back and forth between contemplate and confer before you get to clarify or complete. But for the most part, things like projects, collaborative solutions, new programs, and so on, tend to move through these four stages.

Interestingly enough, for each stage, there is a specific digital workspace tool that provides maximum effectiveness and efficiency for managing that stage.

A notes app, for example, is great in handling the contemplate stage. When you have an idea, you can quickly capture it and develop it by creating a note or series of notes.

For confer, this is best managed with a digital calendar. With a digital calendar, you can send an invite – with notes or agenda – to the people you need to confer with.

For clarify, email is the best tool for this stage. Whether sending or receiving, if you have specific questions that you need to answer, you can use email to quickly clarify a task or project.

Lastly, for complete, most likely you’ll be managing this stage using your file drive. Here you can create artifacts (documents, presentation slides, videos, etc.) related to the project, proposal, or solution you need to create.

In utilizing the Care Cycle in your own work, you can gain a clearer idea of your responsibilities and what tool works best for managing the work in a stress-free way.

For specific details on how to implement these four stages in your own work, download our free guide on developing your stress-free digital workspace.