You never know when an investment is going to pay off. 

A couple of months ago, while I was still living at home and working with my family’s business, I was in charge of the massive undertaking that was streamlining our internal communication and event management system.

That is, how do we keep our calendar straight when we’re all in 17 different group chats, google docs and sheets, Facebook messenger, texting, calling, and maybe talking face to face. 

I turned to Slack for a central location for communication and information housing. 

The scheduling/calendar component was less clear-cut to me (at the time), but after some research, I ended up just going with Google Calendars because of its extensive shareability features.

Because I was fairly unfamiliar with it up to that point, I spent an extensive amount of time researching the finer details and familiarizing myself with the intricacies, idiosyncrasies, and power of Google Calendar.

During this research, I discovered the various Slack integrations that are available for Google Calendar, and I spent a decent amount of time seeing whether or not they could help streamline life for us.

Turns out it really can! I got the family set up with Slack and Google Calendars, and we’ve all been miraculously on the same page about every single thing ever since! (Just kidding, but it does help to know what’s going on at any point in time.)

I knew that time spent digging in would be valuable in the short-term for my family, but it turns out that the same time investment would pay out dividends long-term as well. 

This week at work I’ve helped three separate people integrate their individual calendars into slack, answered questions regarding the various features, and framed out a possible process for managing our clients’ calendars along with our own. 

This may not seem like the greatest contribution since sliced bread, but the underlying idea is what really carries through. 

Even though it might have felt like the amount of research I conducted for setting up a family business joint calendar was a little bit excessive at the time, I’m now able to provide value to my coworkers’ lives using that same information. 

Being able to become a mini-expert (I use this loosely) in something, even if it’s just one small thing, can still pay off in the long run. 

I, obviously, am expected to contribute more at work than just making Slack notify my coworkers of when they received an event invite before their email tells them. 

However, it’s powerful to know that even the most random pieces of knowledge can be valuable in the right context. 

Like my father always used to say, I’m a veritable wealth of useless information. I’m glad that some of it actually can be put to good use.