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Make it a priority

“You had better make that a priority!”

A common phrase that we hear every day in our workplace. But what does it really mean? How do we ascertain if something is a priority? What behaviours does that then drive if we do make something a priority?

The word priority comes from the Latin word Prioritas which roughly means to come before in time, order or importance. This definition provides a useful framework when we need to prioritise on a day to day basis. The challenge we all face is that we have more to do than we have time available. It is a very limited resource. So to manage our time and priorities effectively, we need to make some decisions about what we do, and when we do it.

The first prioritisation technique we could use is what I call filtering. This is where we prioritise based on whether something is an important use of our time. When checking email, accepting meeting invites, dealing with interruptions or even answering the phone, we should always be filtering out the lower value demands on our time, and filtering in the things that are a genuinely a good use of our time. The most productive people are usually very good at filtering.

A second prioritisation technique that we can use is scheduling. Choosing when to work on your priorities based on their deadline, or your capacity is critical to getting the right work done at the right time. If you do this well, and use the power of the time that lies in front of you, you will feel less overwhelmed and will work a lot more proactively than if you were to just let everything pile up.

Lastly, we can prioritise by sequencing our priority lists. Whether this list is a task list for the day, or your monthly list of big priorities, or a task list for a project, it will benefit from some sort of sequence. The challenge is to resist sequencing your work solely in order of urgency. A well sequenced list will evaluate both urgency and importance, and create a rough order of execution that is based upon something more than just “This is urgent”.

To truly create an impact, we have to ensure that as much as the time as possible we are working on the right work, at the right time, in the right order.

Are you clear about your priorities?

Our dirty little secrets

My brother is visiting from Ireland and of course staying at our place. While we generally keep the house clean and tidy, we spent the last few days doing an extra special round of cleaning. Cupboards, the fridge, drawers, under couches and beds, shelves, blinds. Places that privately we put up with being the dirty corners of our busy lives.

But when someone comes to stay, and those corners may become public places, we get busy cleaning and polishing. I was actually astounded at how much dirt I have been living with privately over the last couple of years. That said our house is generally clean, and I suspect (read hope) that we are just normal.  I have vowed that I will clean those drawers and corners in future at least every couple of months. It did not take long, and they looked and felt much better for it.

Is there a parallel here with our work spaces? Do we let things get messy when it is private, but feel the need to clean up when it might be public? I certainly see my coaching clients clearing their inbox before I come in as they know I will be looking at it!

Some of our work is very public, like meetings. And we are usually pretty good with managing those as others are involved, and it is immediately obvious when we are messy with meeting workload by turning up late or unprepared. But when it comes to how we manage our priorities, or our email, that is a much more private thing. Nobody gets to see how you manage this work, so we can get a bit messy. We manage this work in fragmented piles, and often leave things until the last minute as nobody will notice until it is overdue. Just in time is good enough.

But managing this work in a messy way can cause stress, a drop in work quality, a clash of deadlines or even lead to one of the biggest causes of productivity loss – rework. Don’t just wait until this work becomes public to get it organised. Make an effort to keep your inbox under control and your task list up to date whether other people can see it or not. Manage your work with integrity. They say that integrity is when you do the right thing even though nobody else is looking.

Ok, back to my cupboards. I think I see some more dirt! I hope my brother appreciates this.

Time to think?

A recent KPMG Global CEO survey found that 86% of global leaders struggled to find time to think about two of the most critical drivers in their businesses – disruption and innovation. In Australia, that percentage crept up to 94%. When you think about the role a leader plays in steering the organisation in the right direction, and navigating the challenges in a complex and volatile environment, not having enough time to think has to be problematic.

I am not surprised by this though. This issue comes up every time I work with a leadership team on their productivity. They are so pressured during the day with meetings, emails and interruptions, they have no time to really think, make sense of things, connect the dots or make quality decisions.

I believe that those working at the leadership level need to protect time for four key disciplines. They need to communicate strategy and give instructions (Talk), gather intelligence (Listen), make decisions (Decide) and take time to ponder and sense-make (Think).

Most leaders spend a lot of their time talking and listening, which are both activities they do in collaboration with others, or what I label as ‘facing out’. These collaboration activities, often in the form of meetings, are critical for any leader, but can swamp the schedule and leave little time for other work.

They then tell themselves a story about how this is just the nature of their role, and they need to leave thinking and deciding until outside of hours. But the problem here is that this impacts on their family or personal time, which has real and severe consequences in some cases. And there has to be question marks over the quality of this thinking!

I believe to be truly effective, leaders need to actively make and protect time in their week to ‘face in’ – spend time alone thinking and making decisions. They should not see this as downtime, wasted time or less valuable time. In fact, it may be the most valuable time in their week.

I once worked with a law-firm partner who said the most valuable lesson he learnt as a junior lawyer from his first senior partner was to never be afraid to look out of the window. His boss said that if he ever caught him looking out the window, he would know he was doing what he was paid to do – think!

Have you stopped looking out of the window?

Make your outcomes visible

‘Are you outcomes-driven or are you inputs-driven?’ 

– This is a question I often pose during my productivity presentations and workshops. 

By outcomes-driven, I mean do you let the bigger picture drive how you spend your time? The significant work, the work that makes the most difference over the long term.  By inputs-driven, I mean do you let the immediate drive how you spend your time? The stuff that’s just turned up in your inbox, interruptions, “drive-by” meetings. 

Unfortunately, the reality is that way too often, much of our precious time is driven by our inputs – they’re noisier, and more in your face. 

Monthly planning is a sure-fire way to achieve greater balance between being inputs- and outcomes-driven.  At the start of every month, think about and record your ‘Top 10’ – the significant, meaningful pieces of work that require your time and attention, the biggest priorities for the month ahead. 

When I invite participants to do this during workshops, I often find people struggle to come up with something even close to 10. 

I am positive the outcomes would exist somewhere, since most businesses engage in setting goals and objectives each year.  But perhaps they are buried in a document or plan that’s gathering dust somewhere; perhaps they exist in your head only.  This lack of visibility of the most important work often results in people being driven by their inputs instead – living in the inbox; reacting way too quickly to urgency; being very, very busy, but not necessarily as effective as you could or need to be

Stopping at least once a month to connect with your outcomes helps you to stay focused on the right work, and to prioritise how you spend your time each week. Making your outcomes visible and tangible by thinking about them and getting them out of your head, or the pile they are buried in, will help you to connect with them more frequently.

How connected are you with your outcomes?           

Scheduling actions – hard or soft?

A common question that we hear when discussing task management in workshops is ‘When should a task be blocked out as an appointment in the calendar’? Blocking out time, or what I call ‘Hard scheduling’ is a great strategy for putting traction into your action, but if overused or misused, it can work against your productivity.

In Smart Work, I talk about the difference between meeting and task workload. Meetings are ‘fixed’ commitments that we have with other people, tasks are ‘flexible’ commitments that we have with ourselves. Meetings need a scheduling tool that allows specific scheduling for both date and time. But tasks, given their more discretionary nature, need a more flexible system to manage them effectively.

So, in a good scheduling system, where meetings and tasks are managed together in a holistic way, meetings are hard scheduled into your calendar, and tasks can be soft scheduled into a dated task list. The difference is that although both are scheduled by date, only meetings are scheduled with a specific start and finish time.

But, I believe there can be a case for hard scheduling tasks into your calendar, sometimes. If you choose the right circumstances to do this, and you honour the time that you block out, this is a great strategy to make sure the important work gets done in a timely way.

Here are some circumstances where I will hard schedule tasks into my calendar:

  • Any task that will take more than 1 hour of concentration time
  • If I have pressure on my schedule from others, and need to protect time for the task
  • If the work is something I am likely to procrastinate about
  • A task that need to be complete by a specific time in the day i.e. a report due by midday
  • If the task requires me to go somewhere outside of the office

I reckon that your calendar and task list are both designed to help you get things done at the right time. The calendar is by nature more time focused, so is worth using in these situations. But be careful not to overuse the calendar for task workload. There is a risk that you may end up ignoring the reminder that pops up for the activity, and end up leaving work behind in your inflexible calendar. If you schedule it, do it, or prioritise again and reschedule the activity.

How we waste each other’s time

While much of my time is spent helping workers to increase their personal productivity, I also see many issues with how we work together. The truth is that your behaviours affect my productivity, and my behaviours affect your productivity. Teams that do not put strategies in place to manage this will experience a sense of friction when they collaborate together. Teams that do work on this will experience a sense of flow.

Most people are trying their hardest, and certainly do not mean to drag other people’s productivity down. It is often unconscious behaviours that cause the friction. So it might be useful to bring to the surface all of the ways that you might be diluting your team’s productivity. See how many of the following unproductive behaviours you are guilty of from time to time.

Meetings

  • Turning up late
  • Coming unprepared
  • Not following through on agreed actions
  • Inviting the wrong people
  • Calling meetings at short notice
  • Not clarifying meeting outcomes or the agenda

Emails

  • Sending too many
  • Writing unclear communications
  • Burying the actions three paragraphs in
  • Copying people unnecessarily
  • Writing fuzzy subject lines
  • Marking emails as urgent every time

Delegations

  • Choosing the wrong people for the job
  • Delegating at the last minute
  • Delegating in a rush
  • Giving responsibility but no power
  • Micro-managing the delegation
  • Not providing enough support when needed

Interruptions

  • Interrupting too often
  • Having a lack of awareness and empathy
  • Interrupting to manage your mind clutter
  • Making negotiation hard for the other person
  • Make every interruption an urgent issue

Deadlines

  • Leaving work until the last minute
  • Creating unnecessary urgency
  • Expecting instant responses
  • Forgetting deadlines
  • Being a squeaky wheel

If we expect other people to respect our time (and we should), we in turn should respect theirs. With the right mindset, we have the opportunity to amplify the productivity of those around us, rather than dilute it. Play well together.

Do you conduct or cushion urgency?

In case you haven’t noticed, your team is probably drowning in emails, buried in meetings and struggling to deliver the critical outcomes you and the organisation need from them. Much of the work that comes their way is urgent, and they probably spend much of their week reacting to the latest crises. And while you would like to think that your team is the gold standard in responsiveness, the constant bombardment of urgent work will eventually take its toll on their morale and on the quality of their work.

As a leader or a manager, you have a responsibility to your team to protect them from unnecessary urgency. A part of your role is to act as a shock-absorber or buffer that will dampen the urgency being driven by other parts of the organisation – from stakeholders, from senior management and from clients.

This is a contentious idea, as many would see your role as a conductor of that urgency. That you should be communicating the urgency to your team, and ensuring they get on with the job with a sense of urgency.  But I see this leading more often than not to senseless urgency, rather than a sense of urgency. And remember, in many cases the urgency is not real, or is unreasonable. Your job should be to evaluate the request and work out if the urgency is real or not, or if it is reasonable or not. If it is false or unreasonable, you may need to push back, negotiate or simply ask why?

A manager I worked with recently was an urgency conductor. Many requests and issues came his way from the leadership team in the organisation. He invariably passed these urgent crises straight to his team, pulling them off whatever they were working on. His team were in a constant state of anxiety, and felt that they could never plan as their week and day was always rearranged at the last moment. They did not feel that many of these issues were truly urgent. They felt that other more senior managers made things urgent either because that was how they got stuff done, or they left things until the last minute and then made the request. Their manager responded to their seniority and let them away with this, and expected the team to suck it up. Not surprisingly this was a high stress, high turnover team.

So, what can you do to cushion the urgency a bit?

  • Always ask when work is needed by before accepting it (not when they want it)
  • Push back on unreasonable deadlines
  • Make sure you know what your team has on their plate already
  • If something is truly urgent, ask why it is urgent. What could have been done differently?
  • Fight to protect your teams’ time – it is their most precious resource
  • Remember that you are not working in ER (unless you actually are)

What can you do differently this week to dial down the urgency for your team?

Busy: A story we tell ourselves

Two executives bump into each other in a lift. One asks the other how she is going. She replies “Busy”. It is almost an instinctive answer that we give when asked the question. But we are all busy. I reckon that busy is the story we tell ourselves when we have not prioritised our time effectively.

Henry David Thoreau once said “It is not enough to be busy; so are ants. The question is: What are we busy about?” 

If you are always so busy that it becomes the badge of honour that you display when asked how you are, maybe you have let too much low value work into your schedule, or failed to prioritise what you have on your plate effectively. Now I can hear some of you say “But we have no other option – this all needs to get done and I am expected to do it”. I hear you, but respectfully suggest that you always have options. You just need to get creative and go beyond your initial reaction of OK, I will do it.

Here are some thought starters:

  1. Say no more often. It is a small but powerful word
  2. Push back on urgent deadlines. They are rarely as urgent as people make out
  3. Plan your meetings and priorities for the week ahead, and make them both visible in your schedule
  4. Be clear about your most important priorities for the month ahead, and fight for the time to work on those things
  5. See workload negotiation as a positive and necessary skill. I bet your line manager is good at it!
  6. Delegate more. And remember, you don’t have to be the boss to delegate to others
  7. Negotiate how much time you will spend on activities. For instance, agree to attend 15 minutes of a meeting to deliver your action, rather than attend the whole meeting
  8. Don’t look at gaps in your schedule as ‘free time’. See these gaps as time to get your priorities done, and protect them well
  9. Be ruthless in controlling your schedule. If you don’t, they will

Change your mindset and automatic response. Next time you are asked how you are, don’t just say ‘busy’ – say ‘productive’

Which actions can you take today to reduce your “busyness”?

How is your productivity fitness?

Professional athletes in sports like rugby, soccer or AFL need a mix of anaerobic fitness and aerobic fitness to excel on the field. Anaerobic fitness is critical to short burst activity, like sprinting or lifting weights. The energy is created by a chemical reaction in the muscle. This is great for a burst of speed, but cannot be sustained for long.

Aerobic fitness is key to longer form activities, like distance running or constant movement on the field. The energy is created through oxygen in the lungs and bloodstream. By the way, I am no expert in the field of fitness, as my soccer teammates will attest, so forgive me for any scientific error in my descriptions above. I am trying to make a point about productivity.

You see, I believe there are two things that provide energy to our activities at work. Urgency and Importance. They are very similar to anaerobic and aerobic fitness, and need to be used in the right way at the right time for peak productivity performance.  I could even extend the analogy and say that we need to practice and train just like an athlete, if we want to be at the top of our game!

I see many executives over-using urgency as the energy to get things done. They often react to things like emails, making them urgent even though they are not, or they leave things until the last minute, where they are forced to react yet again. While a deadline can deliver that chemical burst of energy needed (anaerobic), if we use this energy to get everything done, the quality of our work suffers and we burn out.

Your work is a marathon, not a sprint, therefore I believe that importance (aerobic) should be the energy of choice for most of your work, punctuated by quick bursts of urgency when required. This will ensure a healthier approach to your work, and better overall results with less personal cost.

How do we ensure this balance? Dial down the urgency. Take a more proactive approach to your work, and ensure you have a solid action system in place to manage both your meetings and priorities in a proactive way. Negotiate deadlines and filter everything that tries to get into your schedule. Make importance the first filter you run potential activities though, then urgency. Take control. How you spend your time will dictate what you will achieve. Make sure your productivity fitness levels are at optimal if you want to survive, or even win the rat race.

The Holy Trinity of the Inbox

In a recent coaching session with a senior client, I had to give the executive some brutal and honest feedback. He had come to me with a specific problem. My Inbox is overwhelming me, he said. So, we worked on some strategies to get his 8,000 odd emails down to zero.

In our second session, he presented a very positive spin on his progress, and said he was feeling a lot better about his email. He had reduced his Inbox from 8,000 emails to just over 3,000. He was thrilled. I was disappointed. My belief is that he had made himself feel good about his progress by clearing some of the low hanging fruit in his Inbox. Deleting rubbish and filing the obvious. This made him feel like a good student, and that he was taking action as a result of our coaching sessions.

The truth was he was still a slave to his Inbox, was still trying to manage his priorities in a reactive way. He was not achieving the Holy Trinity of the Inbox – Clarity, Focus and Control. 

The reason I bang on about Inbox Zero so much is that I know that people who achieve it on a regular basis experience the following:

  • Greater clarity about what deserves their attention and what does not, because having reduced the noise, they can see the forest for the trees;
  • Increased focus on the important work, because they are consolidating their email-driven priorities into one task system alongside their other priorities;
  • A high level of control over how they spend their time, as they are proactively scheduling their work in a time-based action system, and therefore managing their time.

With my coaching client, when he measured his progress against the Holy Trinity, he came up short. Although he had cleared many emails from his Inbox, that was just the backlog. The real issues still remained. He had no clarity because his Inbox was still way too cluttered and overwhelming. He had no focus because his strategy for managing email actions was still mainly to leave them as unread in his Inbox. And he had no control as things kept slipping through the cracks or became urgent before he got to them.

Although Inbox Zero may feel like a chore and a constraint, it is actually easy and liberating once you put the right system in place, and adopt the right mindset.

How is your Inbox going? Are you achieving the Holy Trinity?

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