Length:
30 minutes for an individual, 1 hour for a team
If you don’t yet have a formal set of objectives for your / your team’s work, see the briefing page “Clarifying Objectives’ and associated exercises. There is clear evidence that clarifying your objectives, with measurable targets, and refining them into a set of tasks that enables you to hit the targets will help you to produce better results and feel more fulfilled in your work.
- Consider your first objective. What do you need to get right for this objective and its targets to be hit? What are the critical areas that will determine success or failure? Try to focus only on the really critical factors that will influence your success.
- Repeat this for your other objectives.
- Look for overlap between the work you need to do to for the different objectives.
- When you have a list of these ‘Key Result Areas’, list the tasks and activities you and the team need to undertake (the jargon for this is ‘task decomposition’). Every job is different and you will know how to draw a boundary around discrete tasks in a way that makes sense for you.
- If you are working as a team you can then assign the tasks to different members of the team. (See Assigning tasks effectively).