If you make a complete list of all of the things you want to have happen in your life and work at this level, you'll discover that there are actions you need to do that you hadn't realized. Just creating this objective inventory will give you a firmer basis on which to make decisions about what to do when you have discretionary time. Invariably when people get their 'Projects' list up-to-date, they discover there are several things that could be done readily to move things they care about forward.
Very few people have this clear data defined and available to themselves in some objective form. Before any discussion about what should be done this afternoon can take place, this information must be at hand.
Again, if you've been putting into practice the methodology of
You may have some of these roles already defined and written out. If you've recently taken a new position and there's an agreement or contract about your areas of responsibility, that would certainly be a good start. If you've done any kind of personal goal-setting and values-clarifying exercises in the past and still have any materials you created then, add those to the mix.
Next I recommend that you make and keep a list called 'Areas of Focus.' You might like to separate this into 'Professional' and 'Personal' sublists, in which case you'll want to use them both equally for a consistent review This is one of the most useful checklists you can create for your own self-management. It won't require the kind of once-a-week recalibration that the 'Projects' list will; more likely it will have meaning on a longer recursion cycle. Depending on the speed of change in some of the more important areas of your life and work, this should be used as a trigger for potential new projects every one to three months.
If you're not totally sure what your job is, it will always feel overwhelming.
You probably have somewhere between four and seven key areas of responsibility in your work, and a similar number person-ally. Your job may include things like staff development, systems design, long-range planning, administrative support, marketing, and scheduling, or responsibility for facilities, fulfillment, quality control, asset management, and so on. If you're your own business, your attention will be on many more areas than if you have a very specialized function in a large organization. The rest of your life might entail areas of focus such as parenting, partnering, church, health, community service, home management, financial management, self-development, creative expression, and so forth.
The operational purpose of the 'Areas of Focus' list is to ensure that you have all your projects and next actions defined, so you can manage your responsibilities appropriately. If you were to create an accounting of those and evaluate them objectively, in terms of what you're doing and should be doing, you'll undoubtedly uncover projects you need to add to your 'Projects' list. You may, in reviewing the list, decide that some areas are just fine and are being taken care of. Then again, you may realize that something has been 'bugging' you in one area and that a project should be created to shore it up. 'Areas of Focus' is really just a more abstract and refined version of the 'Triggers' list we covered earlier.
Every client I have coached in the last twenty years has uncovered at least one important gap at this level of discussion. For instance, a common 'hat' a manager or executive wears is 'staff development.' Upon reflection, most realize they need to add a project or two in that area, such as 'Upgrade our performance review process.'
A discussion of 'priorities' would have to incorporate all of these levels of current agreements between yourself and others. If you get this 'job description' checklist in play and keep it current, you'll probably be more relaxed and in control than most people in our culture. It will certainly go a long way toward moving you from hope to trust as you make the necessary on-the-run choices about what to do.
When you're not sure where you're going, you'll never know when enough is enough.
I'm blending the three uppermost levels together here because situations often can't easily be pigeonholed into one or another of these categories. Also, since
For our purposes, the focus is on capturing what motivators exist for you in current reality that determine the inventory of what your work actually is, right now. Whether your directions and goals should be changed—based on deeper thinking, analysis, and intuition—could be another discussion. Even so, there are probably some things you can identify right now that can help you get current in your own thinking about your work and what's important in it.
If you were to intuitively frame a picture of what you think you might be doing twelve to eighteen months from now, or what the nature of your job will look like at that point, what would that trigger? At this level, which is subtler, there may be things person-ally you need to let go of, and people and systems that may need to be developed to allow the transition. And as the job itself is a moving target, given the shifting sands of the professional world these days, there may need to be projects defined to ensure viability of the outputs in your area.
In the personal arena, this is where you would want to consider things like: 'My career is going to stagnate unless I assert my own goals more specifically to my boss (or my boss's boss).' Or 'What new things are my children going to be doing next year, and what do I need to do differently because of that?' Or 'What preparation do I need to ensure that I can deal with this health problem we've just uncovered?'
Through a longer scope you might assess: How is your career going? How is your personal life moving along? What is your organization doing relative to changes in the environment, and what impact does that have on you? These are the one-to-five-year-horizon questions that, when I ask them, elicit different and important kinds of answers from everyone.
Not long ago I coached someone in a large international bank who, after a few months of implementing this methodology and getting control of his day-to-day inventory of work, decided the time was right to invest in his own start-up high-tech firm. The thought had been too intimidating for him to address initially, but working from the 'runway level' up made it much more accessible and a natural consequence of thinking at this horizon.
If you're involved in anything that has a future of longer than a year (marriage, kids, a career, a company, an art form), you would do well to think about what you might need to be doing to man-age things along that vector.
Questions to ask yourself here are:
• What are the longer-term goals and objectives in my organization, and what projects do I need to have in place related to them to fulfill my responsibilities?
• What longer-term goals and objectives have I set for myself, and what projects do I need to have in place to make them happen?
• What other significant things are happening that could affect my options about what you I'm doing?
Here are some examples of the kinds of issues that show up at this level of conversation:
• The changing nature of your job, given the shifting priorities of the company. Instead of managing the production of your own training programs in-house, you're going to outsource them to vendors.
• The direction in which you feel you need to move in your career. You see yourself doing a different kind of
