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A large proportion of traditional approaches to prioritization and goal setting, both on a personal and an organizational level, are really best understood as enablers of avoidance of to sort of help you or help senior management believe that no sacrifices need to be made, that no tough choices need to be made with time for the next quarter, for the next six months. And then of course, they don’t actually work and, everyone has to sort of adopt a new one after a while because they were never intended to actually work.
So that willingness to be rigorously sequential, to say, if we are going to make these kinds of progress on this and this, all these other things that would be so good to do are going to have to wait outside in the corridor till it’s time. Not because they’re not worthwhile and meaningful, we don’t have to persuade ourselves that we never really want to do them in the first place, but just because some choice has to be made for anyone finite using finite time.
Absolutely central to this is the willingness to have both sides of the conversation. Where if you’re setting a goal, if you’re asking a team to focus on one or two things above all others for the next period, you’re also willing to have the conversation about what are we going to move from the front burner to the back burner. This is already the case. If you’re prioritizing one thing, you’re deprioritizing something else. Once you’re no longer attempting to get your arms around absolutely everything, to spread and dissipate your focus over far too many different things, it becomes both easier and just more enjoyable to kind of pour your time, energy, and attention into making concrete progress on the handful of things that you’ve chosen to focus on.