Length:
45 minutes for an individual, 1 hour plus for a team
- Make a list of everything you or your team are spending time on.
- Go through the list and put it a big star against all items that you and your team feel you ‘Have to Do’ AND ‘Have Resources to Do’. You’ll find that many tasks will fall naturally into groups. Some groups of activities will be more important and central to your work than others.
- Repeat the process as many times as you need to, continually comparing the different items on the list. Ask yourself if you can drop some activities because they are not as important right now for you to achieve what you want to achieve. You may need to be quite brutal in this process. The idea is to trim your list to the absolutely essential. You want to aim to finish up with just 3 – 5 groups.
- If you still have some capacity left when you have finished Step 3, you can add in some activities that you ‘Want to Do’ AND ‘Have Resources to Do’.
- Alternatively, after Step 3 you might find there are activities you ‘Have to Do’ but DON’T ‘Have Resources to Do’. This is much more tricky. How will you discuss this with your boss, customers or other stakeholders? What CAN you offer them? It is essential for you to focus to get the best results, but this may mean dropping really important work. See the Exercise ‘Dropping inessential work’ for some tips on handling this.
- Now you can re-set your primary objectives. Look at each of the final groups you are left with. Take a ‘helicopter view’ of each group and write an overview objective for the group if you possibly can. Use the ‘SMART and compelling’ idea explained above to make the objective really motivational.
- Put the least important groups and tasks away to one side. We’ll look at them again in the ‘Dropping inessential work’ exercise.