If everything is a priority, nothing is!
You likely know this quote. Actually, everyone seems to know this one, and yet we constantly fall victim to it. (Did my self in the past)
Regularly I see teams trying to squeeze 10 weeks of really urgent work into a two-week cycle because it’s just really hard to say:
🙅♂️ “NO… this can actually wait”.
As a manager, you regularly need to make priority decisions. There’s many different approaches. Some more complex than others, but all of them require discipline, or you are destined to fail. Before we can solve that for everyone in the company, we need to be on top of our own tasks.
Let me introduce you to my favourite one, which helped me to get rolling and to get things done.
My Now-Next-Later Model to figure out your priorities quick and easy.
The Now-Next-Later Model still gives you place for 6 things to focus on in some way. There’s always 100 things in your backlog, but we can’t think about all them at the same time. Knowing they are there is good enough and lets focus at what is at hand. For the priorities to work though we really need to think about what is it that we need to do NOW, and what’s the stuff that is Next. The further along something is in the model, the more details you need to have.
This model is simple and self explanatory, and that’s why it just works.
When managing multiple teams, you constantly need to handle important work in parallel. In reality, you still need to tackle one thing after the other. There’s only one thing you can actively work on now. So move stuff around, and don’t feel bad about switching place of an item between NOW and NEXT.
While on the one side it works for one individual to move stuff around quickly, it’s a little more problematic with teams.
Let’s say you apply a similar model for planning the work of a team. As written in the beginning, you have 2 weeks time, but 10 weeks of important work. Changing priorities while the team is building momentum on the most important task can be demotivating, and even cost you time, that originally expected 10 weeks turn into 11 weeks, just because you decided to kill the momentum.