Further to our post on “How to Truly Prioritize: a Vital Skill for Success“, I would like to mention how I observe that most organizations seem to be creating a Brownian movement that leads us in the opposite direction from correct prioritization (i.e., stop doing what is not a priority).
- Meetings too often suck out time from real productive work on priority issues and are often unproductive
- Other people constantly come with new issues and topics that add up on our list of to-do actions with no true priority ranking (or, worse, too many use a priority based on the rank of the originator multiplied by the implied urgency)
- Emails and other interruptions caused by our modern communication tools pollute the time we could spend concentrating of priority (thus, hard) work
- etc.
Ask yourselves how much time you really spend on what you have identified as your top priorities for the year. Got it? Really? Research has shown that the time you think you spent on these actions in reality was probably one half or one third of what you think, if an independent observer was really looking at what you are spending your time on!
Fight the natural trend of organizations to create movement for the sake of justifying their existence. Priorities once defined should occupy a significant chunk of your time. That’s the only way to be really effective. A good way is to define spans of time out of the usual operational emergencies to make sure to make good progress on what is really important. Are you ready for it?
