Getting stuff done by focusing on what matters

When you think about a busy work day, you normally think about people running around from meeting to meeting, back-to-back, with no breaks, no lunch. Calendars crammed full with no space to breathe!

But, when you look back at a busy day like this, have you really achieved what you planned to? Did you even plan to achieve anything? The point here is that just because a day is busy doesn’t mean that it’s been productive. In most cases it’s counter productive as you waste time just moving from one place to another, switching context every half hour without a true purpose. The reason might be because with all sorts of calendar invites and distractions from applications on phones and laptops, it’s way too easy to “look” busy. The good thing is, it doesn’t take much more to actually be productive and achieving the goals you set out to achieve.

This is where the “focus list” comes in. To do this, write down a focus list of things that you need to get done for work, home or personal development. Prioritise this list with the most urgent stuff at the top. It doesn’t need to be super accurate!

Now, book out some time in your calendar each day (1hr should do) to FOCUS on the things in your “focus list”. The key here is repetition and being able to dedicate time in the day to achieving something of importance. When the time comes around, truly dedicate that time to getting that task done. You may even get through more than 1 task in that dedicated time slot, which is fine! The key is to focus on one thing at a time.

This tactic is very similar to the WiP limit (“Work in progress” limits) introduced by the Kanban methodology for development and manufacturing. WiP Limits are limits imposed on a team or individual to say that you cannot work on more than a particular amount of tasks at any one time. In the case of most humans, we’re only able to really focus on one thing at a time so our true WiP Limit is “1”. Sure, you may be able to multi-task but, by focusing your energy on a single task you can get through it quicker, easier and produce something that is of better quality.

But why stop at just yourself? I like combining this for agile team members too!

In the daily stand-ups, rather than going around and talking about what you did yesterday, what you’re doing today and if there are any impediments (your stock standard “stand-up” style), try talking about what the single task is on your focus list that you’ll be dedicating your time to today. Yes, you will have plenty of other events that happen through the entire day, but by calling out your main focus at the start of the day gives you a sense of purpose and makes you accountable to your team to achieving this before the day closes. Try getting the whole team involved and you’ll soon find that morning stand-ups become less repetitive and more focused and positive (it’s great to see things moving to the “done” column!)

But why should we stop at agile team members? Let’s use this for agile teams too!

You can use this method on the team’s sprint goals. Normally it works very well with new teams that are just finding their feet and learning about agile, but it also works for well established teams looking to transform their approach to work. Set out, in the same way as for an yourself, a “focus list” for a team. Put urgent team projects, issues and tasks on the “focus list” and put this on a wall for the team to see. Choose a cadence like a week or a fortnight and the team then starts from the top and FOCUSES on this main core goal for the week or fortnight. Like individuals, teams can have many other things come through (eg. urgent production bugs to fix) during the sprint. But the main focus should still be there! The team members can break this up into smaller tasks for themselves to focus on and if they do they have to add these to their own focus lists. Now you have team alignment on a single goal AND individuals more focused on getting stuff done.

A great tip is to make sure to give the individuals space and allow for them to make room in their calendars for their own time to focus on their tasks. In a very noisy environment, including interruptions from Slack, email, mobiles etc. I’ve had teams self impose a “quiet time” so that they can focus on their task. This works really well when the whole team is into it and agrees, but essentially the individuals in the team choose to shut down their notifications on their laptop and mobiles (putting them in “do not disturb” mode) so that they can get into the flow for their task. Very soon you’ll have your team and each team member kicking goals and actually making their days much more productive!

Once you can see you’re running out of stuff in the focus list, start thinking about what’s going to be on the next list! Keep it going!

I hope you can use this technique to help yourself or your teams to be more productive! Try it out and let me know how you go.