What Are You Working On?

I was helping a team that had 'prioritization' problems, so we did this exercise.

I asked the team to write down (on Post-it Notes) the tasks that they do in a typical week.

We made four columns - Mission Related, Strategic Objective Related, Personal Objective Related, and Other - and two rows - Proactive and Reactive.

I then asked them to place the tasks in the appropriate box. What did we discover?

1. The team agreed that they didn't really know what the mission was. Hard to prioritize if you don't know that...
2. A lot of 'other' activities are being done. Are they mission related? Who knows?
3. More than 40% of the work was reactive (non-scheduled). The team agreed that this was too high.

Action items the team agreed on:

• Write the mission.
• Regroup the tasks, if necessary, against the mission.
• Review the 'other' tasks. Distribute them to other groups? Stop doing them?
• Look at reorganizing the team, the roles, or the schedules to address the number of reactive/non-scheduled tasks.

Having time-management challenges on your team? This might be a good exercise...