Getting the Important Things Done

As all of us set increasingly high expectations of ourselves both professionally and personally, it’s easy to get pulled in so many directions that getting the really important things done can seem impossible. And if you are like me, you often find yourself with too many responsibilities and what seems like not nearly enough time to get them done.

Getting the large, significant and challenging things done requires far more focus and relentless prioritization than it did earlier in my career – when I had less responsibility and fewer demands of my time. I’ve come to develop an approach in my professional life to make sure I’m getting done what really matters most, and it includes four key principles that I wanted to share, as you might find them to be useful in your professional life as well:

1. Focus on the Mountains. These are the most important goals that will make a significant difference in moving the organization forward or transforming the business. There are so many ways that we can become distracted from that focus which will easily consume our days if we let them (such as email, calendars packed with non-impactful meetings, disruptions from colleagues, etc.). To focus on the mountain, each day I choose 1-2 really important things to get done that will progress the business forward in significant ways. Since I’m a morning person, I like to get up early and do this before the rest of the world is making demands of my time and before I go into the office. If can complete 1 or 2 important things before 8:00 am that get me further up that mountain I’m aiming to climb, I feel more in control of my day and can focus more on the needs of my team and helping others’ climb their mountains.
2. Polite Persistence is Magic. While it’s critical to create win-win situations to get things done, the more powerful and often overlooked approach is sheer persistence. I’ve found that focused persistence does more than anything to create change within organizations. Most organizations today suffer from an ADHD approach to priorities – what’s a hot topic today is often forgotten tomorrow as the team or company focuses on the next big thing. Over time, this can seem like a game of whack-a-mole and to survive this, many in the organization wait and hope that initiatives quickly die a natural death. When you are aiming to get something hard done, it can be difficult to get your team or colleagues attention as they may secretly be just waiting for the initiative to go away, like all the others. This is where polite persistence enables you to stand out – if your team, peers, or superiors know you are simply not going away, they soon realize that it will be far easier for them to just help you complete the initiative. I have also found success here in taking an agile approach – having my team track and regularly report out on our top priorities, or scheduling update meetings every two weeks with colleagues I’m dependent on and setting expectations for progress between each meeting. You’ll make much more progress if those you depend on for that project know you’re not stopping until the job is done and that you have high expectations of them that they are going to help you get there.
3. Time as your most Precious Resource. As I've become a leader and then an executive, I've come to realize that my time is my most limited resource. While I can throw money, people and other types of resources at a business challenge, I can’t magically produce more hours in my day. So instead, I have to actively manage those hours - guarding my time fiercely, which requires a lot of preparation and organization. I find that meetings are the biggest killer of productivity and that if not managed carefully, they will consume my days in a cornucopia of topics and people that serve as a massive distraction from the important things. Therefore, each week as I look at the days ahead, I always ask myself whether I uniquely need to be in all the meetings stacked on top of each other. Could I delegate? Is the meeting informational rather than action-oriented? Do all the meetings on my calendar revolve around decisions that only I could make? Could we collapse several meetings into one? I also find that I am often asked by peers and superiors to take on large initiatives – extra-curricular projects – that while in themselves might be worthwhile, will serve as a big distraction to getting the important things done. Saying no with grace is an art and I’ve learned it’s done best if I can suggest another person that would be better suited than me – perhaps a subject matter expert on my team or a less time-constrained peer as an alternative to me. In all of this, it’s critical to manage your time as a rare resource – more important than the money in your wallet – as once spent, you never get that time back again.
4. Give Ownership and Empowerment. I spent 7 years at Amazon Web Services and one of the many things I appreciated about Amazon was the corporate leadership principles. My favorite principle is Ownership – the expectation that all employees are owners, acting on behalf of their team and company. It’s not uncommon for leaders today to believe that they are only doing a good job if they have their hands in everything in their organization. I believe this is a big mistake, as decisions will not happen as fast, people will not feel as empowered to take action and too many small things will dominate the leader’s time. A well-functioning organization needs to have very clear lines of ownership, with leaders that are focused on empowering their team – pushing decisions down into the organization as low as possible. This frees up the leaders at the top to spend their time on getting the really important things done – climbing the mountains, thinking longer-term and being strategically focused on the things that will grow the business. As a leader, it’s one of the most overlooked approaches to time management – if I’m empowering my organization to own their business, making progress and key decisions without me, then it leaves me with much more time to have significant impact. And I'll have a happier, healthier and more satisfied team.

Getting important things done requires a very conscious focus – it’s much easier to move from meeting to meeting, and email to email throughout each day and week than it is to carefully plan out how you’ll set up your days and weeks, focus your engagement on the people you are dependent on for the big things, and ensure you are providing strong empowerment and ownership to your team. Yet, taking this focus is what makes the difference between leaders that transform and leaders that simply operate the business.