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Forget percent-complete estimates and status colors. Track priorities by counting discrete actions like sales meetings or shipments, or by measuring completed tasks against defined milestones. Use dashboards and a peer to keep yourself honest.
Forget percent-complete estimates and status colors. Track priorities by counting discrete actions like sales meetings or shipments, or by measuring completed tasks against defined milestones. Use dashboards and a peer to keep yourself honest.
Well, I got one more thing that I think I really want to tell you about setting using great priorities. Once you've set great priorities, we want to work on tracking them over time. You're going to do that with your dashboards and your meeting agendas, but you want to set them up in a way that they're easy to track. By far the weakest sauce out there for tracking priorities is doing a percentage complete that you subjectively apply. I think I'm 80% complete. I think I'm whatever people very often go along or, or just color code it. I'm green on that. I'm green on that. Like, I'm yellow on that. How do we know? Very often it's very rare that somebody would say, I'm just super behind, I'm red on that. You know, we'll be hopeful and we'll say things. So don't use a subjective percent complete and don't use just an arbitrary red, green, yellow on your progress on it. Use something a little more discreet. So there's a couple things that really work well. One really obvious one is counting actions, incremental actions. Like I'm going to deliver, I'm going to make so many sales calls, I'm going to ship so many items, I'm going to do so many safety briefings. Whatever it is that you're going to do, count the actions on the regular and track that over time. So we have something for, you know, I'm going to do 13 sales meetings this quarter and I'm going to track one every week. So that would be one kind of way to do it. The other way to do it would be actually create a, a punch list. So maybe I'm going to hire a key executive and I want to design that project from the end result of the person's hired and onboarded. They've accepted the offer, they've started in the job, and then, you know, the final offers, then the finalists and then the final interviews and the background checks and the, the big cuts and the job description. And we get all the way back to the beginning where we're creating the job description itself. Those are like milestones on a project plan. And we could also do like a punch list of things. I've got 13 tasks and I mark them off week by week on the key things that I'm accomplishing week by week. So that would be another way to do it. So counting something or creating a project list and checking off milestones, both of those are really good ways to do something to track the progress over time that everybody can see it's really objective. And look, it takes a little work to get that good. At first, it might not be apparent, but if it's not clear to you, get a buddy, get a helper, get a peer to help you kind of sort through very often what's hard for us to do, somebody else can see very quickly, which is why working with a coach makes such a difference. Speed things up. So if you want to track your priorities really well with your dashboards and your meetings, you want to pick one of the two best ways to do it, which is either some kind of punch list or some kind of account of something. And those are by far the best ways to do it. And just avoid the arbitrary red, green, yellow. Now tracking the other is very easy to see if you're ahead or behind. So you can get to red, green, yellow. But make it objective, make it. Bring some rigor to it. Hope that's helpful for you. We'll talk to you again soon. Bye bye.
