creating sustainable results in growth and performance

Most time management specialists start with vision, mission, and strategy before moving on to objectives and work. An alternative route is to start with what's in people's heads and piled on their desks, and overflowing from their in-boxes.  In that sense it starts from the bottom up.

Between the reason why a person is alive on the planet, and their 300 unopened e-mails, there are many levels of importance to what gets our attention during the course of the day. By starting with what has our attention, often the more mundane and pressing tasks, we free people to move steadily up in level until they have the time and ability to take care of what matters most.

Although focused on the individual, workflow management has a great impact within organizations as well. If all employees manage their workflow, the organization gets to move on to bigger problems sooner. If workflow management is in bad shape generally, then it's likely that few people are really taking care of the bullet point they inherited when they walked out of the last meeting. Add that up across the board, and you have an organization with a lot of wind spilling out of its sails.

Peter Drucker said that the biggest challenge for any knowledge worker is to define their work. What's your work? Prepare a list of your 67 different projects. Didn't know you had that many? I’m not surprised. Most people don't have a clue what their inventory of commitments actually includes. Between registering their children for summer camp, restructuring the department, hiring a new assistant, refinancing the mortgage, and researching a potential strategic alliance, there are probably 30 to 100 things on the plate of the average executive.

Very few have that inventory clearly and objectively distributed outside of their head, in some sort of system where they can actually see it. Once you make the list, it usually takes 6 to 12 hours for you to go through and make all the decisions you've been avoiding.  Only then will you be able to figure out the action steps necessary to make forward motion on all those commitments.

Most people work instinctively and intuitively. They understand that at some point they have to make decisions about their commitments and action steps. But few have trained themselves to make those decisions on the front end and actually cleared their minds of the commitments that are otherwise cluttering their thinking. This discipline is not automatic, but it is learnable. Once the discipline has been embraced, it can improved.

Yes it’s simple. Easy, no: if it were easy, you wouldn't have stacks on your desk. Most people avoid making a lot of these kinds of mundane decisions. Smart, creative people are the most handicapped because they are afraid of closing off options and ideas. Workflow management is not a closing off but an opening up. Making the list enables you to recognize when a commitment is distracting attention. Once you’ve tried working in this way, you will understand how liberating it is to make an action decision to move forward. People don't need perfect ; they just need forward motion.

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