Identify Your Top 3 Communication Bottlenecks

When I got made redundant from Amazon, I had, for the first time in years, an empty calendar and no meetings to run to. So I did something I’d never made time for while I was in the job: I sat down and mapped out exactly where communication had broken down over the previous year.
Not to relitigate anything — just to actually look at it properly. It took twenty minutes. I could name the three spots immediately. I’d always known they were there. I just never stopped long enough to write them down.

You don’t need a redundancy to run that exercise, and I’d genuinely recommend not waiting for one. Give yourself twenty minutes this week. Write down the three places in your business where communication costs you the most — time, trust, repeated explaining, whatever it is. Don’t aim for a perfect list. The obvious ones are usually the right ones.

Then pick the worst of the three and fix just that one thing. Not a complete overhaul — one targeted change. A shared document instead of information trapped in your head. A five-minute weekly check-in instead of finding out something went wrong after the fact. One honest conversation you’ve been putting off having.

If your worst one shows up right at the start of client work — mismatched expectations, the same clarifying questions on every project, assumptions that don’t match reality — that’s exactly the gap my Client Onboarding Hub on Etsy is built to close. It sets the structure before the first miscommunication has a chance to happen.

Small and specific beats big and vague, every time. That’s really the whole tip.

Your turn: what’s your worst communication bottleneck, and what’s stopped you from fixing it until now?