Don’t Prioritize Your Tasks, Task Your Priorities
We often think, what should I do first? when we really should think what is most important. Should I do the report my boss wants, work on planning for the week, or return a stack of support emails?
Short Term Tactical
This approach leads us to think what to execute first. What we forget is why we are doing these things in the first place. It could be that we are focusing on the most urgent tasks and if we don’t get them done today or this week, it will be a big problem.
Long Term Strategic
What about long term things that could really help us. For example, we can automate the report or outsource it completely. This would eliminate spending time on making the report every week. We could improve the quality of our business so we don’t get so many support emails with problems in the first place.
Think Differently
We can change our thinking a little to combine both short term urgent matters and longer term strategic issues.
Define our Goals
What are the goals that are really important to us. Lets say we want to “improve customer satisfaction”. That is always a great goal, happy customers refer friends, purchase more, and have less problems. How can we measure this? We can look at customer satisfaction scores and we can also look at referrals and repeat purchases.
Output Goal
Lets set a goal to increase Customer Satisfaction Score from 6 to 8 by July 31, 2022.
Notice how the goal is measurable, has a start, and an end value. This is what we want for an outcome but we don’t control it directly.
Input Goal
In order to increase customer satisfaction score we need to take action. Our input goal could be to “Fix 10 product issues that customer often complain about” by March 31, 2022. Our theory is that if we do that, the customer satisfaction scores should increase. I.e. the Input should drive the output. (Our support emails should also go down)
Task Our Priorities
Now that we have an Input Goal we can create tasks to actually do the work. We create a task to fix problem #1 customers complain about. We also create tasks for the other 9 problems. For each of those we can break down the work into smaller pieces and even add time estimates to them.
Track Our Progress
We can track how many of the customer issues are being fixed and if we are on schedule to hit the Input Goal of 10 fixed problems. Once the input goal is achieved, we can see if it had the expected impact on the Output Goal (higher customer satisfaction scores).
If there was a correlation between our Input and Output, we pat ourselves on our back and keep going. If there wasn’t we try to find out what are other reasons customers are giving us low satisfaction scores. We then repeat the above process.
Methodical and Effective
This approach is methodical, effective, and has been used by thousands of companies to achieve results. The above is being used at Google, Intel, Amazon, and many others with great success.
The Yomez App supports the above concepts and allows you to be methodically effective like these very successful companies.
