1: What if we worked backwards?
What if we did the year in review? But at the beginning of the year?
“With slides and a full presentation about how we hit our sales numbers.”
That’s how Google productivity expert Laura Mae Martin describes “one of the greatest leaders I’ve worked with” in her book Uptime: A Practical Guide to Personal Productivity and Wellbeing.
This leader conducted an annual “pre-postmortem” in which he imagined “where we hit pitfalls and wasted some time, where we really excelled and why, and what we could have done better,” Laura writes.
The impact on the leader’s team was powerful. “Even though it was all speculation, it put us exactly in that place a year from now where Future Us as a team would be sitting,” she writes. “We even visualized how we would feel if his predictions were correct (and how we would feel if they weren’t).
“This strategy paved the way for a successful year,” Laura notes, “and got the team thinking in that ‘end-of-year Future-Us’ mindset, before it even happened.”
2: Yesterday, we looked at the power of knowing and being able to articulate our top three priorities.
“The first step for productivity is defining clearly what we want or need to do,” Laura writes. She uses the word priorities intentionally “because it indicates present intention, focus, and fluidity.”
That’s step one. Next, we must consider how to achieve these priorities. We must outline the two or three high-impact tasks that lead us to completion..
“More specifically,” she writes, “how do these tasks show up on my calendar? How will I be able to recognize them?
“The process of working through specific tasks related to our priorities helps us recognize how meetings, emails, workouts, to-do’s, work blocks, school events, and other things that take up time directly relate to our priorities when they come across our desks.”
One tip? Laura suggests we task with an action verb.
Here’s an example from an executive with whom she was working.
His top three priorities for the quarter were:
- Completing a large reorganization of his team
- Spending more time with his young kids
- Defining a next-year vision for the organization he was leading
“Reading those overarching priorities, we may feel that they look and feel vague,” Laura observes.
So the next step was to outline the necessary high-impact tasks:
“Priority #1: Reorganize my team
- Meet with my HR rep to discuss new org chart options and open positions
- Schedule skip-level meetings to understand roles and responsibilities
- Conduct interviews for new and open roles
“Priority #2: Spend more time with my kids
- Leave work by five to make family dinner three to four times a week
- Work from home on Fridays so I can do school drop-off
- Attend three school events during business hours this quarter (for example, concerts or conferences)
“Priority #3: Come up with my next year’s team vision
- Prioritize unplugged/ unscheduled “think time,” walks, brainstorming
- Host an all-day off-site with my direct reports to gather feedback”
Laura writes: “Defining the high-impact tasks that support our top priorities is crucial. It helps with not only what we should be focusing on generally, but also how we should be spending our time and energy points to support those priorities. It also provides a great opportunity for discussing priorities with key people in our work and life–managers, teammates, partners, spouses, and others.”
3: Laura has an additional suggestion. We ask ourselves: How are we tracking now?
“After I ask an executive I’m coaching what their top three priorities are, I pull out their printed calendar from the last few weeks,” she writes. “I give them a highlighter and ask them to circle every meeting, task, or individual work time that relates to those three priorities.”
What happens next? “It quickly starts to become clear whether or not time spent is lining up with priorities,” she observes.
It’s all there on the page. How highlighted is my calendar? The next natural question is: How much time are we spending on our top priorities?
“Our time is our greatest form of currency—what we’re spending time on is what we’re prioritizing,” Laura observes. “The calendar is the truth teller. It fact-checks whether we’re actually spending your time on the things that matter.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Have I visualized my best-case end-of-year outcomes, and am I intentionally mapping my daily tasks to make those outcomes a reality?
Action: Conduct a pre-postmortem for the year ahead, then review my calendar and highlight which activities directly support my top three priorities.