Perspectives & Strategy

Every professional, irrespective of job title or industry faces a problem of too many deadlines and too many projects competing for our time. We have all seen it before, just when we have it all smoothly running, then  new crisis erupts. We constantly have to change our priorities and scramble to get control of our priorities once again – your daily regime must go on.

We can often look at others, who seem to have their stack of work perfectly arranged and appear unflustered whenever things go wrong. We can be the same, and this will help us deliver our projects on-time, irrespective of that last minute curve-ball thrown our way.

For anyone wishing to turn around how they organise themselves I heartily recommend you read David Allen’s Getting Things Done, it is a great book and the basis for much of this article. Before reading David’s book I had struggled to find my own philosophy for getting things done most of the other approaches or software I have seen don’t really work.

Some of the problems we face:

• New demands
• Insufficient resources
• The changing nature of our work
• Too many deadlines

If you can capture and complete all tasks that need to be done then you can certainly be a star within your organisation.

With all ‘stuff’ that we must do irrespective of whether that is a complex task like writing a justification for a project, or the act of picking up out suit from the dry cleaners needs to get prioritised somewhere within our day. So to be successful in organising ourselves there is not really any separation between ‘things for work’ and other tasks it is simply a matter of where we will do the activity.

Any ‘stuff’ that is to be done is logically in our in-basket (even if we do not possess a physical basket).With every item we must know what it is and decide if it actionable. With every new idea you can make one of the following choices

• Do it,
• Defer it,
• Delegate it, or
• Drop it.

Non-actionable items may be filed as reference material, or thrown away.

Actionable items require some action to resolve them. An item can either be responded to immediately, put for future action, it can be delegated, or included as part of a project.

If we are going to respond immediately David Allen suggests it should take no longer than two minutes to complete these tasks – I will do it now it it takes less than 10 minutes. An invitation to attend a conference in 9 months time may be interesting but we do not need to take action on it today therefore we file it in a future action file. At some future date we can decide whether or not to attend. Likewise that nice-to-have requirement by the production manager. We can therefore file it for future review. A future action should either be either entered in the diary, or filed for future review.

We have to continue to review these items at the appropriate time, in a series of files that we look at daily. David Allen calls these a tickler file. We have day files 1 to 31 and monthly files January to December. We bring an item from where we filed it to the front by continuing to review our files and then performing the relevant action at the relevant time. That conference next September has an ‘early saver’ deadline in July so we place it for future action next July. That requirement for the production manager is placed in the active file for 10th of next month (day file 10). As time goes on each file cycles to the back, ready for re-use.

If we decide to delegate it, then we are taking the decision to place an item on another person’s work queue. The person we may delegate will be the most appropriate person in the corporation. It may even be the President of the company. Within your own team it is important to understand the the team workloads. Remember you are adding to the team activity list by this action. When delegating a task to someone outside our team the appropriate level of diplomacy is required. This is especially true if you are adding to the already bulging actions for the CEO.

Within the IT team actionable items are essentially the lifeblood of the department and the IT leader needs to have their finger on the pulse.

It is not possible to do every task placed in front of us. At the end of the day you need to trust in your system and ensure it works for you. If lists fall behind reality then you will always be playing catch-up. When you trust your system you can feel fine about both the things you are going to do, as well as those you will not. Additionally within IT there should only be a limited number of ways that a team will pull activities off the work queue. Team members need to ensure that nothing gets in through back-door personal request.

By Peter B. Giblett