24 things we learned to do better this year: work and life edition.

We wanted to celebrate how much we’ve learned and discovered this year, so we asked folks from Iron Horse to share tips and insights from both work and life. We left it pretty open: Share something that’s made your work/life better, a hack you wish you’d known before, tips for boosting productivity/energy/positivity, etc. 

From pickleball musings and making yogurt to several new and exciting ways to leverage AI, here are their answers:

Uzair Dada

Founder & CEO | World Traveler 

Work insight: The best personal assistant

Chat GPT has been a game changer for me across most of what I do.  It’s like an always-available personal assistant that can do all the busy work for you—while also giving you a great starting point for everything from brainstorm sessions to drafting a thought leadership blog.

Life tip: Stop skipping workouts

Adding your workout to your calendar helps make it more habitual. I’ve started adding my workouts to my calendar and now I feel guilty about missing them. And guess what? I’m working out more than ever now. 

Monica Behncke

Chief Growth Officer | Expert Hostess 

Work insight: Free thinkin

I realized that my best problem-solving time was first thing in the morning—even before I get to my desk, often when I’m out walking the dog.  I stopped putting headphones in and listening to music or podcasts in order to let my mind wander around problems.  30 minutes of outdoor “free thinking” beats 2 hours at my desk trying to figure it out any day. 

Life tip: Choosing the right cleaning products

I learned this year that when cleaning, you should mostly think about the makeup of the òdirt’ or the òstain’ you are getting rid of rather than the surface you are cleaning.  

For example dish soap is great at getting out grease—so when I have to clean something greasy I just use dish soap.  Pizza grease stain on my jeans = dish soap.  Oil splatter on my cabinets = dish soap.  You get the idea.  Now I only buy one product instead of a pile of specialty products that don’t quite as well anyways.

Samir Mehta

Chief Product & Innovation Officer | Gen AI Enthusiast

Work insight: Making the most of non-typical AI use cases

Tools like ChatGPT and Notebook LM have been a big productivity boost for me. While the obvious use cases of summarization, research, and writing assistance have been huge time savers, it’s been some of the non-typical use cases which I have experimented with that have been helpful. Here are a few examples: 

1. Calendar control. I will consult ChatGPT about my upcoming calendar of meetings and ask it for recommendations on how to better structure my time to create an efficient schedule that helps me balance work/life and increase productivity. 
2. Brainstorming partner. When I’m on a long drive or extended walk, I will use ChatGPT voice mode to discuss various topics, help me progress some of my ideas, and organize my thoughts. From there it can also help me convert things into actionable tasks. 

Life insight: The pickleball community

As somebody who plays a lot of tennis, you’d think pickleball would be easy to pick up and get good at it. But that hasn’t been the case. What I’ve learned is that the best pickleball players are not the ones who hit the hardest, but the ones who play with chess-like strategic thinking—mixing in a variety of shots. It’s counterintuitive, but the softer, more delicate shots are the ones that have the highest percentage of winning you the point. But this takes time, practice, and consistency to develop. 

What’s been a huge unintended positive consequence is the local community that has formed around the game. I’ve met so many people from all walks of life who enjoy playing the game and have become new friends. It’s been a really positive thing in my life this year. 

Samir’s not the only one with pickleball on the mind—Monica wrote about the B2B marketing lessons you can learn from the sport here!

Nisha Dada

Sr. Director, Finance & People Operations | DIY Adventurer

Work tip: Google spreadsheets

I’ve been really enjoying using AI to help me create useful Google Spreadsheet formulas and automations. It’s so much faster and easier than trying to figure them out manually—plus I’m able to do a lot more than before. 

Life tip: Homemade yogurt

Did you know you can make homemade yogurt using an Instant Pot? It’s so easy and the results are delightfully creamy and yummy!

Amber Keller

Content Director | Backyard Artist

Work tip: Reviewing changes in Google Docs

I discovered the “Review Suggested Edits” feature in Google Docs, which lets you preview a document with all changes accepted. I’ve found this great for reading through a whole document to make sure everything is coherent. Extra tip: Need to copy content with tracked changes without getting both the deletions and insertions? This feature lets you do it. 

Life insight: Enjoying two hobbies at once

I normally listen to audiobooks during short tasks like exercise or cleaning, but this year I discovered listening for hours while gardening. It’s like getting to spend the whole day reading AND the whole day gardening.

Ezra Hockman

Sr. Director, Engineering | Winner of the Iron Horse Step Challenge

Work insight: Spinning up proof of concepts

I’ve been using AI tools to create a bunch of mini-POC’s (like bots, agents, scrapers, landing page generators, competitive analysis tooling, personal research assistants, etc.), which has been a fun way to spark creativity. Previously it would be quite time-consuming to spool something up. This way, the barrier to entry has been significantly lowered, allowing me to experiment more freely.

Life tip: Starting the day with peace

Starting every morning with a walk before I look at my phone has made a huge impact on my energy and positivity, especially now that it’s getting darker and colder!

Anna Pasquale

Client Engagement Director | Organization Pro 

Work insight: 

Don’t be afraid to change things to work better for you, the team and your client. Create a new spreadsheet to help keep things organized, update a template to work better for your specific project, etc. Hack it until you like it 😉

Life tip: Bed linens

When organizing your bed sheet sets, put the fitted sheet, sheet, extra pillow cases, etc into one pillowcase, so it houses the whole sheet set all together. When it’s time to change sheets, voila! They are all there together.

Alex Jonathan Brown

Sr. Content Strategist | Diet Coke Aficionado

Work tip: Prioritizing tasks

Understand the differences between the tasks that require your full attention and your best effort and the things that just need to get done. When you don’t have the energy for the first one, you often have the energy for the second one.

Also, do your time tracking as you go! Don’t wait till the end of the week. 

Life insight: Taking breaks

If you don’t plan on taking a break, your body will eventually decide to take one for you. It’s much better to handle your own scheduling.

Jay Jaime

Designer | Home Remodeler 

Work insight: Keeping tasks visible

When it comes to tracking and plotting out my work week(s), it’s easy to let Asana blow up in your face. I’ve found the best way to organize my task list that has helped me keep track of projects and track timing.

Here’s how I group my tasks: 

• Recently assigned
• Meeting/admin time tracking 
• Waiting/dependency holds 
• Tasks due today
• Upcoming tasks 
• Tasks due later 
• Tasks related to my main clients

Life tip: The Pomodoro Technique

The Pomodoro Technique for getting things done means giving myself a set amount of time to focus on a task rather than just working down my to-do list, which often leads to me spending so much time on one task, I neglect other tasks. Instead, I set an amount of time to focus on one task, pivot to another for a set amount of time when the time is up, and so on.

Stephanie Siemens

Client Engagement Manager | Dog Mom 

Work tip: Scheduling messages and emails

With work from home culture, sometimes I find myself working late hours and need to send messages to co-workers or clients. Instead of sending a Slack or email at 9pm when it can get lost or missed (or disturb others while they’re enjoying time with their family), I schedule the messages to go out the next day when they’re back online at more “normal” work hours. 

For Slack especially, since we respond and converse in real-time throughout the day, a ping late at night can take on a sense of urgency, even if that wasn’t your intention. To avoid this, I’d highly recommend adopting a scheduling strategy.

Life insight: The robust morning dog walk

Prioritizing time in the morning with my dog, Brody has become a necessary part of my routine. Not only has this been great for my mental health and Brody’s overall health, this also helps me do my job better! When my dog is tired, he is calm and relaxed during the day instead of begging me to go outside to play every 20 minutes and distracting me from my day-to-day tasks. 

For this to work I have to sacrifice some of my sleep to get our full morning routine in, which includes: a 20 minute walk around the neighborhood followed by at least 30 minutes of fetch in the backyard (my dog is a husky mix and has never-ending energy).

Kat Andersson

Sr. Copywriter | Dungeon Master

Work tip: Text styles in Google Docs

If you’re like me and can’t even touch a document until it’s formatted correctly (or at least consistently), you might already know this tip. For the rest of you, here’s how to make text style uniform across the document. 

Find an example of “normal” text that’s the font and font size you want, then highlight it, hover over “normal text” in the Styles drop-down at the top of the screen, and select “Update normal text to match.” It will apply your changes on all text that’s been labeled “normal.” Do the same for Headline 1, Headline 2, etc. 

Life tip: Hacking the brain

This is kind of a pivot off of Todd’s hand-written to-do list tip. Once you have your list written down, add a number (1-6 unless you’re also into Dungeons and Dragons) to each item. Now you can roll a six-sided dice to determine what your next tasks will be. I’ve found this excites my brain into doing things because I literally don’t know what I’ll be doing next.

I can’t emphasize enough how productive I am on the days I employ this executive functioning hack.

What makes this really effective is if you sprinkle in a couple fun things in your list of tasks. That way, your brain gets extra excited because there’s always the possibility you’ll get 20 minutes of embroidery done next instead of more dishes. We can also integrate in Jay’s Pomodoro technique and give each task a time limit. This works really well when you’re struggling to find motivation. Washing dishes isn’t so bad if it’s just for 20 minutes. 

Todd Johnson

Marketing Operations Specialist | Breakfast King 

Work tip: To-do lists

Write your to-do lists on paper, instead of keeping them digital. It’s actually increased my efficiency noticeably. 

Life tip: Pancakes

Cook pancakes in coconut oil—you won’t regret it! Not only does the oil give the pancakes a very subtle coconut vibe, but it’s the best at getting crispier edges. I get the oil decently hot before dropping the batter, and it is just 👌

The Iron Horse (work and life) insight

It’s easy to look past all the things you learn over a whole year—especially when the largest insights and challenges tend to take over. It was fun to slow down and think about the little things. Here’s our own overarching insight: Slow down, appreciate the small improvements and little learnings, and always stay open to discovering more. 

Think the team sounds like fun? Get to know us a little better here. Meet the team

* At Iron Horse, we never use AI to generate final, un-edited copy. We do use AI to more efficiently create excellent writing. AI-assisted tasks may include brainstorming, pushing past writer’s block and getting to a first draft more quickly. All final copy is always written according to our expertise and best practices. Any input by AI is thoroughly analyzed and adjusted to produce the best result possible.