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Timing is everything, right? That’s how you succeed in most of life's pursuits. “Where the rocky road of preparation intersects the freeway of opportunity.” This is a great way to think about education, preparation, practice, discipline, and work ethic. It’s not always the best way to prioritize work.
Without management intervention, work is often prioritized based on timing:
Programmer/Analysts can be lured away from their work when they are writing design documents. When debugging software, they may be unresponsive to anything else.
Sometimes it’s hard to be proactive, and easier to respond to urgency. A project worker may be easy to distract in the morning when reading their email. Others may be easier to distract after lunch, late in the afternoon, or if you phone them. Project work is often placed on the back burner simply because the worker is ready to be interrupted.
For software companies and IT divisions, minor defects are often reported that are not immediate priorities. These issues may be important, but they can get lost in the chaos and forgotten when the time comes to clean them up. Bad timing leads to lost opportunities for improvement.
As professionals, we are paid to think not just about today, but the future as well. When inspiration strikes and great ideas materialize, the organization may be too busy to deal with them. How many times has an innovation been lost this way? One day, the innovator may be told to get back to work. On a different day, the idea may have become the next great product or money saving idea for your company.
Let’s say that a system failure seriously disrupted your business last month, and was overcome without solving the root cause of the problem. It has not happened since, so it’s ‘off the radar screen’. Something more fun comes along now and gets attention, consuming resources, because fun ideas can seem urgent. Would those resources be better used in preventing another system failure?
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An idea should not consume your resources simply because it has good timing. Nor should an idea be forgotten simply because it has bad timing. One Task List helps to avoid decisions based purely on timing. |
>>>Next: Focus on managing today's work
