End of the year always put one in a retrospection mood. You think about the year passed, the what ifs, what could have etc. I was browsing some posts when I came across this.
Identify and focus on your top priorities – because if you don’t, wtf are you doing?
Is the top priority the top priority? What’s the single most important thing you need to be doing? If you don’t have an answer to this, you should drop everything and figure out what the answer is. Having an answer here forces clarity and focus. Not having an answer is dangerous – it guarantees that you’ll be working on unimportant things and wasting your precious time.
There will always be an endless stream of things to do. It’ll be tempting to do whatever is easiest, or most fun, or most familiar. But this is a trap that will screw you over in the long run. It’s better to make 5-10% progress on the most important thing than to finish lots of tasks that don’t actually move the needle.
What are you accountable for? Everybody in an organization should own something. Ideally, it should be a metric that is tied to your top priority. If it isn’t, you should discuss it with your manager or boss and establish what your top priority really is. Once you’ve settled on a metric (and you usually need to have some sort of counter-balancing metric, to try and mitigate the problem of perverse incentives), you’ll want to make sure that you know as much as possible about how to make a positive dent in this metric.
Dominate your area of responsibility. You want to be really good at the thing that you’re supposed to be handling. Sounds kinda obvious, but sometimes it can be tempting to try to do a bunch of secondary things. Go back to point 1 – keep the main thing the main thing.
Make your goals and targets precise. If things are vague or ambiguous, set aside time to make them precise. Don’t work with ambiguous plans – it’s a recipe for distraction and scope creep. Learn to identify vagueness in your own thinking, writing and communications, and weed it out.
Manage yourself like an important, valuable resource – because you are
It sounds a bit selfish, in this era of distractions, it is easy to forget about yourself.
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