A Power Up For Every Employee Every Day - Especially You

There's a scene you might remember from near the end of the first Star Wars movie (Episode IV: A New Hope):

What messes everyone up at work is our incredible ability to be distracted. The reason quite often are that there are so many noble overlapping challenges. You know, the kind that when you hear them, you think, "I should totally handle this. It's something important and someone else has brought it to me and that means it might be urgent and..."

Humans Have a POWERFUL Tribal Emotion Mirroring System

If I yawn, you might too. If I get super excited and my eyes are wide and sparkly and I'm nearly jumping up and down in my seat, you're going to feel it. When I move, you move. It's hard to help it really. Just like that.

So when someone comes with a distraction or an important project or some kind of "I need you for 20 minutes" task, it's easy for you to throw your "eyes on the target" focus right out the window. We all do it. I'm doing it right now. I have a big (but less vital) priority that keeps getting pushed aside because of more energetic interruptions.

One Tool to Help: Object Permanence

When I'm doing my job well, I'm a slave to the kanban system of organizing my work. I currently use Trello for this (though I'm eagerly awaiting Whiteboards to show off their version). I'll explain what the board does for me:

I have a "backlog" area (if you've done agile stuff, you know what I mean) that I call "projects" and one that I call "coaching." (So these are the two "raw" buckets of where I keep what's most important to my role. I have a holding area one called "ideas," which are either something I've noted, something I won't take on yet as a project, or something I might prefer to delegate.

I then have the typical "This week," "Today," and "Working On" columns so that I stay on target ("Stay on Target!") and do what I'm supposed to do.

That Trello tab stays open all day. If someone starts to talk to me about a new idea or project, I switch to Trello and write the person's NEW stuff into my "ideas" until I decide if I'm going to tackle it at all. Being right on the board means I can look at just how long that "project" backlog is before saying yes. I can decide just how many other projects I'll be messing with if I accept a new one. And sometimes, I can prioritize and know that I can slip something through rather quickly for somebody without throwing out the success of the empire. Uh, company.

The Key to the Key

Here's the hardest part: if you don't assess what's in your "projects" / "ideas" or other backlog areas often, and if you don't ask yourself "Is this what will advance the company's success?" all the time, you're bound to work on whatever's easiest to cross off.

Checking something off a list gives us a dopamine rush, which is generally good, except that we can generate false or undeserved rushes by putting too many easy, unimportant, busy-work, and low-hanging fruit projects into our backlog. The key to the key is to keep our projects or other backlogs full of IMPORTANT targets, and not just "things to do."

This is one of those "top secrets of millionaires that we've discovered" secrets that you hear in every 13th blog post online. The secret is that a to-do list isn't super effective, but a priorities list is. (Not mentioned in this conversation is the value of a checklist - neither a to-do or a kanban board - so we can talk about that another time.)

Are you ready?