You get through a great deal each week but nothing important moves
The work gets done and the week fills, but the things that would actually make a difference are no further on than they were a month ago.
You are not idle. A great deal leaves your desk each week, and very little of it is the work that would change anything. The commitments are your own, which is what makes this difficult: everything on the list was taken on for a reason, and nothing on it is obviously the thing to drop.
Presenting symptoms
- You could describe last week as productive and could not name what it advanced.
- The same two or three important items have been carried forward for a month or more.
- The list is long enough that choosing what to do next takes longer than some of the tasks on it.
Possible causes
- Nothing on the list is ranked, so the easiest item wins by default.
- Routine and administrative work may be taking a share of the week that nobody has ever counted.
- Work that could sit with somebody else is being kept, because handing it on takes longer than doing it once.
- You may have agreed to more than the year can hold, in which case the problem is what you committed to rather than how you work.
Nothing is ranked, so whatever is easiest wins.
Your most useful next step: Choose the three things that must be further forward by the end of this half term, write them where you will see them daily, and start the first piece of one of them before you open your email tomorrow.
Lead behaviours
Routine and administrative work is taking more of the week than anyone has counted.
Your most useful next step: Track where the next five working days actually go, in half-hour blocks. Take the largest routine category, write it down as a checklist somebody could follow, and then decide whether it still needs to be you following it.
Lead behaviours
Work that could sit with somebody else is staying with you.
Your most useful next step: Take three items that do not require your post to do them, and hand one to a named colleague this week with the decision attached rather than just the task.
Lead behaviours
You have agreed to more than the year can hold.
Your most useful next step: Identify the commitment you are least likely to deliver, go back this week to the person you made it to, and renegotiate the date or the scope rather than letting it quietly slip.
Lead behaviours
Core behaviours
An unranked list is not a plan, it is an inventory. Where nothing is ranked the easiest item wins every time, and the easiest item is almost never the one that would make a difference.
Most of the week that cannot be accounted for has gone into routine work nobody has ever measured. Systems are what stop the same small decisions being made again every Tuesday.
The commonest reason a leader keeps a task is that handing it on takes longer once. That arithmetic is correct for a single instance and wrong for anything that recurs.
Some of this list should never have been agreed to. Going back to a commitment and renegotiating it feels like failure and is ordinary professional practice, and it is the only honest alternative to letting it slide.
What actually happens to over-commitment is that things lapse quietly and nobody is told. Renegotiating openly protects your reliability, which is precisely what this situation is most likely to cost you.
Secondary behaviours
Use this before handing anything on. The judgement is about who is ready to hold a particular piece of work, not about whether delegation is a good idea in general.
Use this to connect the three things that matter to what happens tomorrow morning. A half-term priority with no action attached to this week will be no further on next month either.
Use this on the routine work rather than on the important work. A recurring task written down as a checklist stops consuming attention as a decision, and becomes something that can be given to somebody else.
A useful first action
Name the three things that must be further forward by the end of this half term. If you cannot name three without checking a document, the ranking is the first job and everything else can wait.
Suggested approach
- Name the three things that must be further forward by the end of this half term, and write them where you will see them daily.
- Start the first piece of one of them before you open your email tomorrow.
- Track where five working days actually go, and establish what share the routine work is taking.
- Hand one item to a named colleague with the decision attached, and turn one recurring task into a checklist.
- Take the commitment you are least likely to deliver back to the person you made it to, and renegotiate it rather than letting it slip.