How We Work 1/3: Principles
(How We Work is a three part series on time, focus, and priorities)
I worked at home, or at least remotely for about eight years. I was successful. But this time, it’s different. I’m producing a lot, but I’m hitting a wall, and it’s hard to find clarity.
I have two kids.
They don’t necessarily understand.
I have several levels of employees indirectly.
I manage businesses in various different states.
I have to manage my wife’s schedule of stakeholders with mine now, 'because zoom calls' (or equivalent)...
So, for this reason, I thought it was an opportunity to give some thought to how we organize this concept called “work”. Stuck, too? Too many “money do’s”? Read on, friend.
Work is defined by the root of how we manage our time and priority. So how do we prioritize, organize, and determine what really matters? Tune in for the next series of snapshots.
(This set of ideas are not all my own, but I’ve conglomerated it into the distillate that you’ll find here. I’ll do my best at providing sourcing where possible but never scored high marks in college on all the ?? within the parentheses, let’s be honest...)
Whether you are on your own, or solving the puzzle for a larger shared result, work is really the down-flow of the following.
Your ability to organize, measure, adjust, or jettison any of the following will ultimately determine your success:
- Mission: what you or your organization provide, what the benefit is, who is it done for, and what’s important to you or the group working on the aforementioned.
- Vision: crisp future oriented declaration of a set of aspirations
- Strategy: a roll up of top level “how we’re going to do this” containing the three elements below
- >> Archetypes: people , and their associated skills and task expectations
- >> Tasks: what, how long, and how urgent
- >> Goals: X to Y, by when, of the archetypes and tasks
- Output: measurement of results (if a task, b result)
- Ideas: a backlog of strategies, goals, and/or tasks to be plugged into the above.
(Credit to the Quantic MBA for my crisp definitions on mission and vision, specifically. I fondly remembering them using the term ‘senseless word salad’ in the program which is what I always thought of things like mission and vision statements in a prior life)
Most importantly, at a time like this when time and people are managed differently than ever and your idea book is growing larger, your key behavior needs to be creating and deploying a system to manage both ideas and work. This consists of 100% of the following two things (not one): a method to store the above, as well as decision criteria to promote or demote the above items.
Your alignment on the above is critical, and if your house is out of order, any amount of time you work will leave you coming up empty on your wishes.
Next concept up: time.