June is Pride Month in many countries, including Ireland, and on Saturday, I attended the Pride parade in Dublin. As in previous years, I loved the good vibes and the joyful and inclusive atmosphere one can feel on these occasions, where everyone is welcome to show up exactly as they are.

Afterwards, at home, I was chatting with my daughters about the multitude of identities included in the LGBTQ+ compound (apologies, I´m probably missing more letters), and I came to think about this thing people love to stick onto themselves, and to others: labels.

(Sign seen on a disabled toilet door in Ikea Dublin. My guess is that it´s a neutral gender toilet, but I haven´t been able to confirm this. To me, it looks like a person carrying two Ikea boxes...)

The topic of labels is quite complex; I can see how one could argue for or against them. But before we get deeper into this topic, it´s good to remember that our brain is not designed to help us be happy, but to help us survive. And in order to ensure this crucial mission is accomplished, it has evolved to optimise its functions, developing patterns that allow it to make decisions very fast with while keeping energy consumption low.

This ability to quickly interpret and "classify" situations (and people) has been tremendously helpful to us humans across many generations; at the end of the day, we are alive today because all of our ancestors managed to survive at least enough to reproduce, that is, on multiple occasions, they were able to identify potential problems and move away from them. And that included evaluating each person they found as "friend" or "enemy", as "one of us", or "one of the others".

Another positive side of all these patterns and mehchanisms is that they help us to understand the world around us; we could say they arrange to put together a model, a set of stories, that give us a highly simplified but very understandable version of a reality that can be very, very complex. And that makes us feel good.

The problem is that the exact same mechanisms get us into trouble sometimes, for several reasons. First, because, in order to simplify, our brain needs to necessarily alter and reduce the information, through generalisations, distortions and omissions, which may not matter much in certain contexts, but in others, it does, paving the way for prejudice, stereotypes and misunderstandings to appear (in a future article, I´ll get into more details on cognitive biases, a very meaty topic!)

Second: following this logic of trying to increase the chances of survival, our brain benefits from not being too trusting: if I bump into someone I don´t know, and I mistakenly classify them as an "enemy" when they´re not, that´s OK, I will survive regardless, but if I mistakenly identify them as a "friend" and it turns out not to be... The consequences can be terrible.

And a third point that´s also related is that humans are tribal beings, it´s in our blood. In terms of evolution, belonging to the group, to the clan, provided you with protection, this way increasing the chances of survival. And we have inherited that tribalism, seeking to fit in with the group, judging how others fit in or not, highlighting our similarities with "our people" and accentuating our differences from "the others".

After explaining all this, let´s get back to the topic of labels. I hope the reasons why we use them so much are a bit easier to see now: simply put, we are wired to do so.

But the fact that we´re programmed to do it doesn´t mean we do it well; today´s world is a lot more complex and sophisticated than that of our ancestors, so we need more sophisticated thinking tools, as well as learning to know when to get out of autopilot mode because the occasion requires more attention and intention from our side.

That´s why investing in our own personal development and growth is really important, so that we can make more conscious decisions that bring us better results in any aspect of life (or rather, in all of them).

And as we make progress in our path of self-discovery, we will find words and concepts that will help us understand ourselves better, adding nuances and explanations to our identity. The concepts included in LGBTQ+ may be some of those labels, as are the personality profiles described by the Enneagram, and so many other things...

Giving things a name helps us understand and accept them, and from that point of view, labels can be really positive at certain points in time. But the important thing is not to cling to our labels too tightly, not to identify with them too much, because then they stop being a point of reference to become a limitation, and in many cases, an excuse.

What do you think of this? Are you in the process of putting any labels on or off?

Once again, we reach that moment when, in the Norther hemisphere, we enjoy the longest day and the shortest night of the year: it´s the summer solstice. And once again, we got lucky with the weather, like last year: it´s been a gorgeous day here in Ireland.

Now that I think about it, all season changes have something special,, don´t they? Very often they´re moments of change also within us, or at a minimum, a great opportunity to take a step back and assess how we´re doing.

(Photo taken at Malahide beach, exactly one year ago)

In previous years, I wrote about small rituals you can perform on days like this, like, for example, during Saint John´s Eve. This time, however, I´m afraid my proposal sounds considerably less glamorous and more bureaucratic, though I hope you will find it equally inspiring, and above all, useful: doing quarterly planning.

This is something that, in many companies, including where I work (at least in the technology-oriented areas), is a well-established process, and, coincidentally, our team is due to do it this coming week, although we´ve already been preparing for a couple of weeks. The basic steps we follow and the questions we ask ourselves can be used for all kinds of projects, big and small, personal and professional:

The first thing we have to do is clarify priorities:

• What would we like our main focus to be in this coming quarter?
• When the quarter is over, what would we like to have achieved?
• What else would we like to at least make some progress on?

Let´s remember some basic rules when it comes to prioritising anything: if everything is equally important, then nothing is, which makes the word "priority" lose its meaning, rendering the whole system completely useless. What definitely works is estabilshing an order of priorities,, ranking them so that no positions are shared. So, to ensure the first priority is actually the first one on the list, the rest of tasks, projects or goals have to necessarily be placed underneath.

A technique that can really help here is distinguishing between tasks, projects or goals that absolutely need to be in the plan for whatever reason (also called "must-have"), and the ones that it would be nice to get included, but that are not indispensable as such (also called "nice to have"). This distinction can clarify a lot for us, making the rest of the process a lot more straightforward.

By the way, I want to say that I´m generalising a lot here; when I refer to "tasks, projects or goals", it can be literally anything that´s important to us and that we want to give time, energy and attention to. For this summer quarter, for example, one of the top priorities may very well be to rest and go on vacation, which is absolutely necessary in order to maintain a sustainable pace later on.

Once priorities are clear, and knowing the reason why the top priorities are at the top, we move on to define the work:

• How much work is involved in each of these priorities?
• What is the work? What needs to be done (roughly)?
• What resources do we need to do that work? Do we already have them, or are we dependent on others to get them?

The idea here is to understand the scope of each task, project or goal, getting to a level of detail that allows us to roughly estimate the effort. We should also have a good understanding of whether we depend on others, or others depend on us, to successfully complete it.

Now that we have a relatively clear idea of the work, we can move to calculate capacity:

• How much work can we tackle this trimester? (taking into account other factors as well)
• Does everything we were hoping to fit in, fit in?
• How can we adjust the plan so that we maximise the results?

And here is where the rubber meets the road: evaluating capacity against workload. We all have a limited amount of hours in a day, and in the majority of cases, other tasks and obligations to attend to, so this step is fundamental: how realistic is to try and cover everything we´re including in the plan?

Finding the answer to this question can be a little tricky sometimes, and it may require negotiation with others or with ourselves if, after doing all the sums, it doesn´t all "fit in". But that´s exactly why doing this exercise is so fundamental; to be able to, on the one hand, adjust and optimize the plan as required, and on the other hand, manage expectations (those from others, and also our own). All this is what is going to allow us to increase our chances of success.

What do you think of this process? Do you see yourself doing this for your personal life, or maybe a creative or professional project? I have a few things I want to move forward this summer, so that I can start strong in September.

What about you? What´s your plan?