Building Bridges

EnVision at 27: Part 4 of 9

Posted on by Irene Stern Frielich

WHAT I WISH I KNEW #1: Don’t Confuse Activity with Progress

In honor of EnVision’s 27th birthday this past November 2025, I’m sharing my reflections on success, what I wish I knew, and what’s next.

In previous posts, I shared 3 examples each of 3 keys to EnVision’s success. In this next series, I will share what I wish I knew 27 years ago! My hope is that some of these examples help you refine your own plans as you build your business or career.

Early on, I saw the need to track everything and to get involved with as many groups as possible. But to what end? I confused activity with progress.

Here are three things I wish I knew about planning my activities from the start.

  1. AVOID THE FOMO PHENOMENON: I love meeting new people at professional association events and learning from the presenters. Attending these meetings could be a full-time job (with no income!). This FOMO (fear of missing out) was hard to resist when I was starting out. Quickly, I learned to join a select two or three associations every couple of years. Sometimes I even joined the board or worked on event programming. If the group met my professional needs, I continued. If the group did not meet my needs, I moved on to try a different organization.
  2. DON’T TRACK EVERYTHING: I spent too much time tracking things that didn’t matter. I’ll share one example. I created a spreadsheet listing my 300 or so work-related books by topic and where I stored them. Sure, that made it easier to locate them, but since I only use about 5% of my library, tracking and maintaining the book list was wasted time. Organizing the books by topic would have been adequate; I didn’t need to keep updating a lengthy list. Some amount of tracking is useful, yet I spent more time tracking things than was warranted.
  3. START WITH STRATEGY: Why was I doing something? What would I do with the results? Let’s use networking as an example. I enjoy the networking aspect of my work. However, I spent a lot of time in the early years connecting with people without having a plan. With hundreds of people in my network, I eventually realized I needed to establish criteria and prioritize my efforts. Was there potential work? Was there opportunity for expanding my network? Was it a “soul nourishing” connection? What could I offer the other person? With my new approach, I could focus my relationship-building time where it had real (mutual) impact.

What’s one thing you can change to save yourself valuable time?