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Getting the Right Things Done
Change keeps happening. Perhaps you have noticed. Sometimes change is welcome, and other times it is something feared or dreaded. Change can come in all sizes, ranging from the gargantuan to the relatively minor. It can be strategic in form (“We are now going to enter a new line of business”), or it can be relatively tactical (“Here’s our new sales model”). It could stem from an unanticipated problem (the customer is upset because the order arrived wrong), it could come from installation of a new computer system, or it could show up as a disaster requiring an emergency response. More often than not, though, change is simply something that is unexpected and brings with it a lot of work.
In the corporate world, when things change, the usual mantra goes something like, “Don’t just sit there; do something!” Even if you are a one-person shop, you have probably experienced the phenomenon. Something unexpected happens, and some part of you gets anxious, sure that you need to get busy and do something. What’s wrong with doing something? you may ask. Nothing, really—as long as you can answer a more important question: Does the something you are doing actually matter? In other words, should you join the fire drill or look for some kind of workaround?
As soon as you jump onto the “do something” bandwagon, you risk just doing something instead of doing the right things. Part of doing something meaningful involves knowing what you should stop doing so that you have room to do what matters most. If you are already busy, how are you going to respond when the next change shows up and you are faced with adding even more tasks to your already overflowing plate?
WHEN THE STATUS QUO GOES UP IN FLAMES
I once had a consulting client in Michigan, a company that manufactured car parts. The company had an aligned set of goals, and every manager and supervisor had his or her own comprehensive lists of tasks aimed at achieving those goals.
A couple of months after we finished the engagement, the company had a gas line rupture, and its main facility went up in flames overnight. Fortunately, no one was injured. As I was watching a news report about the crisis, my phone rang. It was the CEO of the manufacturing company. He told me that as soon as the fire broke out, the management teams began assembling at a hotel across a field from the now burning plant.
Each team had its lists of tasks linked to everything from key customers and product groups to key projects and next actions. Each team quickly reviewed what was on its plate and ran through a basic triage exercise to determine what needed to be addressed right away and what could wait. By midnight, the staff had a list of customers who were going to be impacted and began to put together a response plan to cover customer needs. By 3:00 A.M., they had identified alternative sources within their own system as well as from competitors, and they began putting together a plan to get needed materials to their customers. By 9:00 A.M., they had contacted their customers and competitors, confirmed the level of need, and begun arranging alternative supply choices.
By noon, the company had its emergency plan in place to fulfill immediate customer needs. The senior team then turned its attention to planning for longer-term supply options, while another team set about the planning process for a new plant.
DIRECTIONALLY CORRECT VERSUS PERFECTIONALLY CORRECT
Instead of asking, “What should I do?” the question should become, “What’s the right thing to do?” By “right,” I don’t mean right compared with wrong; rather, I mean what would be directionally correct. Are you taking action that will reasonably move the project forward? Will the action you take help resolve the issue at hand?
My good friend and former partner David Allen (Getting Things Done) has long counseled that you don’t need to know all the steps in a project in order to get started. At a minimum, you do need to know the desired outcome and an appropriate next step. As long as you know the outcome and the next step, you can make progress.
To be effective, matching an outcome with a next step requires some thinking and a modicum of planning. When management decides to change directions, and the orders go out to get busy, rarely is there an accompanying order to stop doing something else. A smart manager realizes that herein lies an opportunity for making a real difference in not only how things get done but also which things get done. One of the singularly most important things management can do when issuing the “get busy, do something” dictum is to actually think about what no longer needs doing.
For example, if you are going to start deploying a new qualitycontrol process, are there old processes that need to be abandoned? If you are implementing a new data-tracking system, are you still tracking old data that no longer matter? If the company is taking on a whole new strategic direction, you may need to add all kinds of new goals and plans, but you also need to identify old goals and plans that should be taken down. After all, if people are already up to their ears in work, and someone tells them to add something to the mix, sooner or later either they will break down, the system will break down, or both.
FEELING GOOD ABOUT GETTING THINGS DONE
For those who already feel as though they are working perhaps too hard, allow me to ask two seemingly dumb questions: Have you ever exercised? And, have you ever cleaned a refrigerator by accident?
How Work Is like Exercise
If you’ve ever engaged in a decent exercise session, how did you feel when you were finished? Sure, at first you might’ve been a bit tired, but once your respiratory rate stabilized, how did you feel? Unless you had just finished something truly grueling, such as a marathon, you probably noticed that within a few minutes of finishing, you felt pretty good. In fact, most of us wind up feeling better than when we started, as though we had more energy. Logically, that can’t be the case. After all, you just finished expending considerable energy, burning calories. Surely you must now have less energy than when you began. Right?
Logic notwithstanding, most of us will feel as if we have even more energy. Why? Because humans are programmed to produce energy by burning energy. Once you get the system in motion, the body starts to notice that it is burning energy. As available gas in the gas tank goes down, the body starts to burn fat (stored energy) so that it can continue to fuel the engine. Even when you stop exercising, the body keeps on producing energy for some time. Obviously, this won’t go on forever if you don’t stop, replenish, and rest from time to time. Nevertheless, the salient point is that you produce energy by expending energy.
The same is true regarding work, with a couple of minor differences. On the work front, many of us have tasks to perform that lack the kind of clarity found in exercising, especially in terms of a defined purpose, outcome, and deliverable. If you can assign yourself these attributes for your work, you may notice that you actually start to feel the same kind of response as when you exercise. Completing a task takes some effort, but it also produces its own reward. If others notice, comment, or acknowledge your contribution, so much the better. Either way, simply getting things done that you set out to accomplish will begin to produce something akin to the exercise phenomenon—the more you get done, the more inclination you will have to get even more done.
If you’ve ever had to just sit around all day and do nothing, you might have noticed how tiring doing nothing can be. Doing something is, of course, better than doing nothing. However, it’s even better when you have a defined purpose, outcome, and deliverable by which to measure the fruits of your labor.
Cleaning a Refrigerator by Accident
Perhaps you were sitting at home once, reading a book or watching TV, and you decided you wanted a snack. As you were grazing in the fridge, you noticed some leftovers that had become something like a science experiment—kind of green and growing fuzzy things that didn’t look all that safe. So, you toss the science experiment into the trash, and then curiosity takes over. What else is in there that no longer belongs?
Pretty soon you’re opening jars, discovering more fuzzy growing things, disposing of old veggies, and generally getting rid of products that should have been thrown out long ago. Then, as you stand back admiring your work, you notice the dry, brown crusty stuff that used to be a liquid. Out comes the sponge, the drawers hit the sink, and without much thought or real effort, the refrigerator is clean again. From there, you probably even took that sponge to the countertops and did a bit of kitchen cleaning as well.
The simple act of going to grab a quick snack led to cleaning a refrigerator, which led to a sense of accomplishment, which led to even more cleaning and to even more accomplishment. I seriously doubt that you would have had “Clean refrigerator” on your to-do list, and yet something inspired you to dive into a job that ordinarily would have been akin to drudgery.
You Feel Great When You Get Finished
What do exercise and refrigerators have to do with workarounds? In the world of work, unfinished tasks, projects, and objectives all hold a certain amount of your mental energy, attention, or focus. When you get something done, whatever energy, attention, or focus you had invested in that incomplete item is released and becomes available to you. In a way, incomplete goals, objectives, projects, or tasks are like the fat you carry in your body. They’re both stored energy, and both can be released simply by your getting going. As you complete your unfinished work, you generate more energy, which in turns makes it easier to accomplish even more.
The refrigerator example shows what can happen when you come up against a real-world situation that is beyond what you consider to be the normal bounds of acceptability. When you compared how that refrigerator looked with how it was supposed to look, you quickly moved into action. The old, incomplete tasks clogging up your mental refrigerator become even more compelling. The only person who can identify and do anything about these kinds of “science experiments” on your task list is you. That’s why you have to clean out everything from your mental refrigerator to your in-box.
Just as with exercising, you feel great when you get finished.
YOU’RE NOT OVERWHELMED; YOU’RE EMPLOYED
In the 30 years I have been helping organizations execute their strategies, I have had the opportunity to help a whole lot of folks up and down the organization get better organized so that they can get more things done. In today’s world, the constant mantra seems to be about doing more with less, getting more work accomplished with fewer resources and reduced head count. I understand the necessity for this kind of thinking. I also contend that we can get there without driving everyone crazy.
As people make lists of all the items on their plates, the good news is that they get a whole lot of stuff out of their minds and onto sheets of paper or electronic files. The bad news is that the sense of dread about everything that needs to be done can become overwhelming. That’s because some part of you thinks you are actually supposed to get it all done. Now.
Big problem.
The first counsel I offer is that having more to do than you can get done is actually welcome news. You may ask, what’s so wonderful about having more to do than can readily be done? It’s called having a job. You’re employed. By definition, a job means having more things to do than can get done. That’s why it’s not a temporary job. Things keep showing up that need to get done, and you were hired to help. Not to get everything done, but to keep everything moving.
That said, having seen thousands of lists over the years, I have noticed that people inside organizations can have all kinds of entries on their lists that no longer matter. These are simply legacy actions that might have made sense way back when but that no longer have much value. Keeping them around is akin to carrying an extra 20 pounds of fat on your body. It’s tiring, to say the least, and it slows you down in any number of ways. These are the folks who are on the road to becoming overwhelmed and burned out. It’s notable that the only people who become overwhelmed and burned out are the ones who actually care! They would prefer to be engaged in meaningful work, getting things done that matter, and to have someone notice the results of their efforts.
What you need to know is that being overwhelmed and burning out do not have as much to do with all the things on one’s plate as with how little those items matter. No one relishes the thought of going to work today to produce another load of “same old, same old.” That’s just shorthand for “I have no idea why this matters; they just pay me to do it.” Sooner or later a load of inconsequential activity can, well, just overwhelm you. Now that you know that, what can you do? How can you work around that sense of dread and of being overwhelmed?
You can start by taking a comprehensive look at the list of things you have on your plate and then simply asking yourself three questions: “Why is this on my plate?” “What difference does it make?” “Who would notice if I didn’t do it?” We’ll return to these three questions shortly. For the moment, consider what might happen if you identified a number of items on your plate that really don’t make much difference. How much time and energy would you free up if you could circle those low-value tasks and just drop them altogether?
START, STOP, CONTINUE: THE ANTIDOTE TO BEING OVERWHELMED
If people are already up to their ears in things they need to get done, how are they going to create room for all the new stuff without going completely crazy? All types of organizations seem to be caught in some kind of schizophrenic bind: on the one hand, they want to encourage a proper work-life balance, and on the other, they want to have more work performed by fewer people consuming fewer resources.
This feat can actually be accomplished with a slight twist on how you articulate the goal. Is it about having fewer people get more things done, or is it about getting more of the right stuff done? Is it a simple scorecard tracking actions and tasks, or is it a more sophisticated scorecard tracking meaningful results accomplished? Obviously, the primary goal should comprise meaningful results.
If an organization is going to efficiently change directions, adopt new strategies, or simply set new goals, a worthwhile exercise would be to ask three basic pruning questions:
• Based on the new direction, strategy, or goal, what should we start doing?
• Based on the new direction, strategy, or goal, what should we stop doing?
• Based on the new direction, strategy, or goal, what should we continue doing?
It’s that middle question that matters most. Are there tasks, procedures, processes, or systems in place that no longer serve our current or future directions? There is evidence that organizations can free up as much as 20 percent of someone’s time and effort by simply exercising the discipline to review what’s already on people’s plates and eliminate the stuff that no longer matters. It’s a lot easier to get people following a new direction if the organization can create a little relief from the already mind-numbing amount of no-longer-meaningful work that awaits them.
So, what do you do if your management keeps adding to your plate without providing any relief?
How about reviewing your list of goals, projects, and tasks and matching them up to the new direction, goals, projects, and tasks coming down from on high?
If you do so, you can then triage the list into the three previously cited buckets:
1. Start: What should you start doing as a result of the new direction?
2. Stop: What should you stop doing as a result of the new direction? What no longer matters?
3. Continue: What should you continue to do that still matters?
Once you have reviewed your lists and matched them to current goals and regular support functions, you can then go to your manager and frame the conversation around being able to get more done and improving the odds of achieving critical goals. If you can proactively show improvement opportunities absent of whining or complaining, you may not only gain some relief for your own workload but also inspire others to do the same.
Imagine what would happen if the whole team wound up saving 20 percent of its time? Think anyone would notice or care that some tasks were eliminated? If we don’t do something to create a little more space, to provide a modicum of relief from what’s no longer meaningful, we will surely drive ourselves crazy accomplishing all kinds of things that no one will really notice.
In the mid-1980s, I found myself teaching a course for the plastics division at GE’s storied Learning Center in Crotonville, N.Y., which has since been renamed the John F. Welch Leadership Development Center. GE was famous for having its most senior leaders spend time teaching relative new hires at Crotonville, and Jack Welch himself was the leading proponent of this practice.
The story goes that Jack Welch asked a version of the “Why is this on my plate?” question early on in his tenure as CEO of GE. Every day when he showed up at his office, there would be a fresh stack of z-fold computer printouts more than a foot high waiting for him. He asked one day, “What’s this?” He was told, “That’s your overnight worldwide sales and inventory report.”
What? It’s true: he was getting a report every day on what was sold globally, as well as how much was in inventory, right down to warehouse location, country by country, business unit by business unit. What value did this report have? None that he could see and none that anyone could explain, other than to say that his predecessor liked having it. So, he simply had it stopped. That freed up a small team of people who assembled it overnight. From there, he is said to have issued a dictum that if you were producing something for which you saw no apparent reason or value, you had permission to stop producing it and engage in a conversation about purpose, value, form, and substance.
This tactic is kind of like spring cleaning, only for office systems, procedures, and processes that have piled up. Oftentimes, you’ll come across work that might have been meaningful early on and that has become embedded into the culture of the organization. As new goals, projects, and tasks show up, they are automatically added to the stack of things that people “need” to do.
Rarely does anyone question the necessity of keeping older methods, projects, or processes in place. After all, “that’s just the way we do things around here.”
Workaround: Let Go of the Old
A relatively easy workaround is to periodically question what’s on your list of goals, projects, or tasks. Using the control-influence-respond model we addressed in the first chapter, you may find that simply asking three questions of yourself is enough to streamline what’s on your plate. Start by reviewing your list of tasks, projects, or to-dos, and then ask these three questions about each item you have cited:
1. Who needs this done?
2. Why do they need it?
3. What difference will it make?
This is a handy little low-tech questioning process that may prove exceptionally valuable if done regularly—say, monthly. At a minimum, you should run through these questions whenever a new goal, direction, or strategy looms. If this is where we are headed, how do the things on my task list align with the new goal, direction, or strategy?
When I work with senior managers on implementing their strategies, I always like to ask a version of these kinds of questions. Just as trees need pruning in order to stay healthy, getting rid of the deadwood in your environment opens up room for growth. Practices, systems, and “ways of doing things” just seem to develop over time and stick around, much like the dead branch on the tree. Pruning old processes and methods can be a powerful act.
Enforcing Nonexistent Regulations
A good friend of mine has served as a director for the state of California under several governors, overseeing the distribution of funds to social services programs. Tim has all kinds of stories about systems and processes that need workarounds. One of my favorites: In his role, Tim was tasked with making certain that not-for-profit agencies received their funding and also followed appropriate state and federal guidelines. As part of the funding process each year, not-for-profit groups had to sign a contract that was 100 pages long, while finance officials audited both the state agency and the receiving groups to make certain everything was in compliance.
Sounds reasonable, doesn’t it? Well, not to the not-for-profit groups. Working with the auditors on even a single item of potential noncompliance could suck up more than 40 hours of work. That’s time they could have spent delivering services. Instead, they were struggling to comply with rules and regulations. Tim sat down with representatives of one of the not-for-profit groups that had complained to him. As they pored over the contract, Tim was stunned to learn that there were multiple clauses that existed without any apparent reason. There were even compliance clauses for laws that were no longer on the books!
You would think that an obvious workaround would be to disregard those useless clauses. However, pity the poor recipient who chose not to follow the nonexistent regulations. Even though the laws were no longer in force, noncompliance could result in anything from withheld funding to demands to have already-spent funds sent back. Yikes!
Once Tim understood the scope of the problem, he met with a team of staff members, auditors, contract officers, and principals from a couple of not-for-profit groups. They reviewed the contract line by line, paragraph by paragraph. As a result of this rather simple but tedious workaround, old regulations were removed. Requirements that no one understood were investigated, and many of them were also dropped over time. The final product was a contract that shrank from 100 pages to 20 pages. A whole lot of wasted time and energy was recovered for the funding recipients as well as for the three state departments involved in overseeing the distribution of funds.
WORKAROUND QUESTIONS
There are several layers to the workaround required for getting things done and responding to change. If the issue is managing your sense of being overwhelmed, the workaround can be as straightforward as organizing what’s already on your plate so that you can make better choices about where to direct your efforts. If the issue is preparing for a planned change, then the workaround still involves knowing what’s on your plate, so that you can determine what needs to stay and what can go, and then you can plan for what needs to be added.
Each area requires a variant of the start-stop-continue analysis. Before you can accurately analyze your choices, you need a complete list of what’s on your plate right now. So, before going any further, make a comprehensive list of all items large and small that you are responsible for doing, including goals and objectives you are responsible for achieving.
Managing an Overwhelming Workload
1. Challenge each item on your list:
• Why is this on my list?
• What goal, objective, or management process does this support?
• Does it still matter?
• What would be lost if I stopped doing it?
2. Review your list of tasks that are no longer relevant with your boss for agreement.
3. Make a new, shorter list of only those items that matter.
Responding to Change
1. Review your list of things to do and goals to accomplish.
2. Map each item to goals and objectives that you are responsible for achieving.
• Which items appear to be no longer relevant and can be dropped?
• Which items link to current goals and processes that still need doing?
• Which new tasks should become part of your responseability for achieving new goals, objectives, or strategies?
3. Review this list and your underlying logic with your boss for agreement.
4. Finalize your new list, including goals, objectives, and tasks.