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Reports : Priority Management Techniques
Priority management is an area well worth revisiting periodically for a number of reasons writes Pete Rogan of Future Positive Consulting. Firstly, it’s awful easy for us to get quietly pulled off of our genuine priorities and into a quagmire of stressful, unsatisfying, low-leverage busywork .
Secondly, even if we think we’ve got it all under control it’s always worth a second look to see what we can add to the mix, to do it even better and smarter.
There’s great wisdom in the adage “The Master Manager achieves more and more by doing less and less and the unwise manager achieves less and less by doing more and more” and for this reason honing and strengthening our priority management skills will always be worth the time it takes.
Priority management is a bit of art form, like playing guitar or playing golf, practice can always be improved, there’s always something to be learned, nobody has got it totally sussed.
A quick reminder then of the simple principles underlying priority management.
1. Nail your priorities: Do this for each year, month, week and day. Without this you risk spending your time working on somebody else’s priorities (and will probably not be recognised thanked or rewarded for this, just criticised for not meeting your priorities!) Identify your highest-leverage activities: The ones that improve the ratio of the impact you have for effort you put in.
2. Identify where time is leaking away: Where is the gap between how you should be spending your time and what you are doing in practice. What bad habits have you crept in, what good habits do you need to develop or strengthen? Compile a Not To Do List. This might include habits of mind (“I have to do this myself”) or behavioural habits(“I’ll leave this until later”) or particular tasks that are not top priorities.
3. Choose some techniques to use. There are a range of techniques which build into a complete suite of ideas that support and reinforce each other to give you greater mastery. A good way to augment your current skills without spending ages on it is to pick one a month and get slick at it, then pick another next month and so on. Such small victories don’t take a huge amount of time or effort, they bring immediate benefits and build up over time to help you develop mastery.
The causes and cures for overwhelm when we strip it all down, can be reduced to three fundamental causes:
1. We’ve undersold ourselves or overpromised the client: We’ve not built in enough time or resource to do the job as well as it needs to be done.
2. Lack of training, expertise or experience. We don’t have the ability to do it well enough, fast enough and we need to invest more in learning and development.
3. We’re disorganised and in loop of not planning ahead which is leading to avoidable errors which is creating failure-driven demand (a demand created on our time and resources by not getting things right first time and having to go back and fix them)
The cures relate directly to these causes.
1. Manage expectations and perceptions. Clarify what people expect to make sure that you are not agreeing to spend more time and resource than they have given you to do it. If they are asking for too much, manage their perceptions around this (i.e. if it’s unreasonable find a polite way to let them know, and to ask for more time and resource, or for them to be more reasonable in the requests). If it is reasonable and within scope, crack on and do it of course.
2. Invest in learning and development – make sure you and your people have the skills and confidence to do things right first time and efficiently. It’s cheaper in the long term. As Derek Bok noted “If you think education is expensive, try ignorance”.
3. Plan and communicate: Yearly, Monthly, Weekly, Daily. Planning sounds pretty dull and unexciting and a lack of it leads to all that exciting fire-fighting and staying late a work that we love so much. Planning is simply the art of mistakes on paper so we can avoid them in reality. Coupled with communication with the people involved in making the plan happen, it’s the only know antidote to self imposed and self-defeating failure-driven demand. Dull maybe, but very effective, and it’s effectiveness we’re being paid for and what gets us home at a decent time with some of our sanity left intact!
One simple and excellent tool is the Weekly Planner. It allows us to scope out priorities for the week ahead. It brings structure and focus. It helps us plan to use time more efficiently and it lets us see when we’re trying to cram in too much. If we don’t think we can do all the allocated work in the time available it allows more informed reflection and discussion around why not and what needs to be done (i.e. reduce the work, increase the resources, become more efficient or get better organised).
This is an excellent tool as it takes priority management out of the bubble of individual performance (as important though that is) and into the wider domain of how we manage workload and performance in the wider team and business. A vital perspective if we are to give ourselves and the people we manage the chance they deserve to make every day at work successful and rewarding.
©Copyright Future Positive Consulting Limited 2009. All rights reserved
Weekly Time Planner courtesy Peter Rogan, Future Positive Consulting