As everyone knows 2024 is a leap year. With February 29th being a date that only appears in our calendars once every four years we got to thinking about other things that happen in a similar time period. What should you focus on over the next four years?
Many of the world’s major sporting events take place every four years such as international football tournaments, the cricket and rugby world cups and, of course, the Olympic games. Generally the summer Olympic games take place in leap years although since an end of century year is only a leap year if it is also divisible by 400 then the year 2100 won’t be a leap year even though it is an Olympic year. The last edition of the summer Olympic games was delayed by a year due to the Coronavirus pandemic which has clearly had a major impact on the business and technology worlds over the last four years.
So, how can we use February 29th as a trigger to think about goals for the next four years?
The pace of technological change means that over the last four years there have been huge leaps in the development of artificial intelligence. The ChatGPT service was only launched in November 2022 but has rapidly gained awareness with the general public rather than just within the technical sector as had been the case with AI previously. We’ve already written a few articles on this topic such as AI Tools we are using but if you’re using February 29th as a way of thinking about how your business approaches the next four years then take the time to think about how you could integrate some AI into your processes.
If you’re not quite ready for AI yet then perhaps you might take a step back to consider other systems within your business. Something that might have worked well for you four years ago may now be starting to get unwieldy as your business grows. Security and availability of data is crucial to the success of a business and if you started out storing data in a spreadsheet such as Microsoft Excel now might be the time to consider whether that is still the best home for your business critical data.
In general many companies look to redesign or refresh their websites every 2-3 years so if your website hasn’t changed since the last leap year then it might be worth thinking about a refresh, we’re always happy to have a conversation about how we can help with that refresh process.
This leap day we hope you get the chance to take that step back from the day to day to look at the bigger picture for your business.
