Do you ever hear the saying “the days are long but the years are short”? I think that might be 2025 for me in a nutshell. There are multiple strategic efforts and issues I’ve been working on all year. It feels like they’re just dragging along and taking forever, and I look around and wonder if they’re ever going to get done. But then suddenly I look around and the full year’s gone by and some of the initiatives have actually launched and had outcomes. So that’s a positive thing.

If I had to summarize the key things I learned (or re-learned) this year, it’s as follows.

1. The good old adage: “90% of the project takes 90% of the planned time, and the last 10% takes another 90% of the scheduled time.”

You can try to look around as many corners as you can, and try to mitigate as many risks and be as prepared as you can. But in the end, all those unknown unknowns still appear and it turns out you’ve got a lot more things to do that you didn’t anticipate. One major product I’ve been working on, I had really thought it would be completed in 2025, but it looks like it’s going to be January or February until completion. This is why experience is so important, because the more times you’ve actually done it the more likely you’re going to remember all the extra things you had to do. Really the only other way to mitigate it is to build in that management reserve time.

2. You have to pay attention to the details.

There’s always so much going on around you, and if you are out of the loop or miss something, then that’s an opportunity you may have missed. And the only way to handle that is to be intentional about taking the time to read, pay attention, and stay in the loop. Maybe that means going to meetings or reading messages that you don’t want to, but you never know when some key opportunity is going to arise. I get a LOT of emails, but sometimes in those “monthly status reports” there are key points that become valuable later, such as a new publication, or a new successful project to reference.

3. Figure out how to embrace the chaos. Or at least ignore it.

Especially in a company or organization of size there will always be things broken, things going awry, things going off the rails. It’s tempting to be stressed about everything and want to swoop in and save everything, but you have to figure out what’s important and priority and what isn’t. There are some things that if a project goes off the rails and is delayed the consequences really aren’t that severe. Sure, there are people that will think that the consequences are severe because they don’t like seeing any red on their status reports. But from a strategic perspective, there are things that to be honest really don’t matter if they’re late.

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Simply put, the combination of the three of these is “pay attention, but only to the things that matter.” And if 2025 has taught me anything it’s that there is so much going on, and so many distractions, that if you ever want to get anything done of significance, then this right here is the key piece of advice.