End of the year always put one in a retrospection mood.\u00a0 You think about the year passed, the what ifs,\u00a0what could have etc. I was browsing some posts when I came across this.<\/p>\n
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\nIdentify and focus on your top priorities \u2013 because if you don\u2019t, wtf are you doing?<\/h3>\n
Is the top priority the top priority?<\/strong>\u00a0What\u2019s the single most important thing you need to be doing? If you don\u2019t 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 \u2013 it guarantees that you\u2019ll be working on unimportant things and wasting your precious time.<\/p>\n
There will always be an endless stream of things to do. It\u2019ll 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\u2019s better to make 5-10% progress on the most important thing than to finish lots of tasks that don\u2019t actually move the needle.<\/p>\n
What are you accountable for?<\/strong>\u00a0Everybody in an organization should own\u00a0something<\/em>. Ideally, it should be a metric that is tied to your top priority.\u00a0 If it isn\u2019t, you should discuss it with your manager or boss and establish what your top priority really is. Once you\u2019ve 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\u2019ll want to make sure that you know as much as possible about how to make a positive dent in this metric.<\/p>\n
Dominate your area of responsibility.\u00a0<\/strong>You want to be really good at the thing that you\u2019re 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 \u2013 keep the main thing the main thing.<\/p>\n
Make your goals and targets precise.<\/strong>\u00a0If things are vague or ambiguous, set aside time to make them precise. Don\u2019t work with ambiguous plans \u2013 it\u2019s a recipe for distraction and scope creep. Learn to identify vagueness in your own thinking, writing and communications, and weed it out.<\/p>\n
Manage yourself like an important, valuable resource \u2013 because you are<\/h3>\n<\/blockquote>\n
It sounds a bit selfish, in this era of distractions, it is easy to forget about yourself.<\/p>\n