Communication! Communication! Communication!

When Tony Blair first became Prime Minister of Britain, in one of his first speeches he underlined his administration's goal to improve British education by his (in)famous motto "Education! Education! Education!". Apparently, according to his judgement, British education was something that dragged the country down.

If I consider my work/school/university environment as my area of administration and decide to improve things that would be one: "Communication! Communication! Communication!".

I consider myself to be clever. Not "cleverly" clever, but "stupidly" clever. A "cleverly" clever person is one who is able to judge "on-the-fly" ideas and propositions and assess whether or not he is capable of executing what has been proposed. He is able to schedule his workload in such way as not to have to overload at any point. A "stupidly" clever person is one who believes that sky's the limit for him and will accept anything offered to him without hesitating. "Hey, how hard can it be?". He ends up working 24/7 just because he wasn't smart enough to pre-schedule.

I believe this to be one of my greatest flaws and assets at the same time. I will take on anything only to find myself baffled in between projects trying to keep up with my schedule and not let anyone down. On the majority of the cases, I (and my projects) have survived this kind of situations without putting my reputation in jeopardy (and maybe even building it even more).

Today I realised that apart from a "stupidly" clever person, I am also a bad communicator. 50 days before submitting my dissertation, yesterday I e-mailed my supervisor regarding my progress so far. Apparently I did it in such a vague manner that the reply I received had me scratching my head puzzled. My supervisor was under the impression that I was far behind schedule and spent two whole paragraphs explaining to me terms in my dissertation that even someone remotely relevant to the subject is aware of (i.e. speaker IDENTIFICATION as in "the task of defining who the speaker is" VS speaker VERIFICATION as in "verifying that the claimed speaker is actually who he claims he is") and subtly urging me to be a bit faster.

When I read the whole correspondence between me and my supervisor I realised what the whole misunderstanding was about. So what I did was spend a whole hour to precisely define what I have done without using abbreviations and try to show him that I have not been slacking around but working my a$$ out lately. It was then when he replied saying that I am actually on a good way and pointed out some hints about what to do next.

You must be able to COMMUNICATE what exactly you have been doing in a project. Show off if you must. Market yourself and pay a little more attention to how you COMMUNICATE what you have been doing. As David Brent (played in a unique manner by Ricky Gervais) in "the Office" once said: "A company runs on efficiency of communication". At the end of the day if you are not able to COMMUNICATE in today's world, you are bound to build bad reputation or worse. So there you have it: COMMUNICATION! COMMUNICATION! COMMUNICATION!