Do A's first... no, wait: B's

When it comes to getting stuff done, one of the key elements of doing so is to prioritise what is important over what is unimportant. It sounds so easy, right? Ha, ha: yeah, right.

We can all be rubbish at this. A key line I remember from some early management training is "Do A's first". That comes from the punnet chart from a management book accompanying this post (Covey et al., 1994, p. 37).

But actually, what the authors said was that we should go through and prioritise our work so that we spent most of our time in the B area: that we  focus on our "preparation" and "prevention" work so we avoid later problems, on identifying our values so we have a clear philosophical sense of where our work is going (this makes later decision-making so much easier), on planning, on building relationships so we know what our clients need, what success will look like, and what our joint expectations are, on creating value, and on helping all parties to be empowered (Covey et al., 1994).

If we get the Bs sorted well, we will have few As. However, if we ignore the Bs, we will have a never-ending stream of As. The As are the crises of our own making because we haven't tackled our Bs early enough, or consistently enough. Our B problems become "pressing", and "deadline driven" because of our slackness in not planning and preparing for our projects and meetings. If we are in a crisis, we need to throw enough A time at it, but we still shouldn't stop all our B work (Covey et al., 1994). 

The D items are easy. It is the garbage that soothes us, but adds nothing to productivity (Covey et al., 1994). Nice labels on our folders. Alphabetising our bookshelf. Holding onto old software that takes three times as long for us to manually punch our accounts, rather than biting the bullet and automating the process. Ds we simply find a better way for.

It is the C items which can be hard to sort out (Covey et al., 1994). Some interruptions, emails and phone calls may prevent a later A, or it might be a B. An initial dump into the C category is probably likely to need a re-sort into either A, B or D. However, some stuff that is 'popular' in the workplace - such as monthly reports or annual reviews - may benefit from a skullduggery-ish, creative solution. If you think it worth the risk, try a 'save as' on last month/year's report, extract the numbers from the system (and if numbers take lots of massaging, then throw some time at creating a spreadsheet to automatically massage the numbers), then use ChatGPT to reword it. See if anyone queries it. Most report writing is really busy work. Template everything that can be templated. Automate everything that can be automated.

None of this is difficult. It is understanding that planning what to do is a key task that should come first, and prioritising those tasks.

 

Sam

References:

Covey, S., Merrill, A. R., & Merrill, R. R. (1994). First Things First: To Live, to Love, to Learn, to Leave a Legacy. Simon and Schuster.