6 Tell-Tale Symptoms Of A Broken Workflow
Are any of these things part of your normal day-to-day?
- You are constantly being pulled in a million directions.
- You are constantly reacting to the "emergency of the day."
- You are constantly needed for approvals and reviews.
- You can't get your own work done because you are a slave to others'.
- You start early and finish late but still can't seem to get everything done.
- You feel busy all day, but you can't really point to anything specific that you finished at the end of it.
If you experience any one of these on a day-to-day basis, you could be in trouble.
We all experience these symptoms from time to time, but if it happens for too many days (or weeks) in a row, something is broken.Don't panic.It's normal to ebb and flow like this. What's not normal is experiencing these symptoms chronically.
Here are some things you can think/do/remember that will help alleviate these symptoms:
There is always an infinite amount of work to be done--so working harder or longer isn't a feasible long-term solution.Just because it's urgent doesn't mean it's important. Define what's important first, then go after what's important AND urgent.I can admit, it feels good to be needed, but if people can't move forward on their work because they need something from you, YOU are the bottleneck. Your team is counting on your to empower them with the tools and resources to move faster without you overseeing every little thing.Being busy doesn't mean you're productive. Productive means you have a measurable output. Busy is just an "energy consumption" metric that tells you your RPMs.
2 Minute Action:
Here are some options for today.
- Look up the Eisenhower Decision Matrix and use it to prioritize your tasks for today.
- Schedule a "retrospective" with your team, partner, colleagues, or clients. In it, you should ask "what went so well that we should keep doing it?" and "what should we stop doing or could be improved?"
- Create a Scrum board that makes it really clear what is done and what is still being worked on.
It's your responsibility to identify and solve problems in yourself, for your clients, for your patients, for your students, or for your team.Until you train and empower them to, no one else is going to do it for you.
How To Align Your Team, Continuously Improve Work, And Make Everyone Stronger
Every morning, I ask my team to stand in a circle to have a 5 minute meeting.
Everyone answers 3 questions:
- What did I accomplish yesterday?
- What will I accomplish today?
- What is in my way?
At the end of the sprint (in our case, one week of work), we review how we did.
This is called the Sprint Retrospective.
We look at how much stuff we did and whether we did the right stuff by asking two questions:What went well? (So we might replicate those things in the next sprint)What could we improve?From there, we turn the most notable things into action items, sometimes requiring teams to assemble around them.
It sounds straightforward and easy, but do you know what the hardest part about this is?
Not skipping the meeting.It feels like it’s just this one time or that we don’t really need to have the meeting because not that much stuff happened this week . . .
I’ve never run a Sprint Retrospective that hasn’t generated meaningful action items.
It’s this discipline, early on in your work that is the compounding interest of your project.By staying the course, you will continuously be aligned as a team, you will be focused on the right work, and you will have a team that feels capable in the face of challenges.
2 Minute Action
Since it’s Saturday, chances are you just finished a work week.Take today’s 2 minutes to ask yourself “what went well?” and “what could be improved?”
A Simple, Fast Way To Start Seeing Results
There’s something strange that happens when you measure things.
They improve.Just by knowing the benchmark or the baseline, human brings just naturally want to improve.Do that in your life and work and you will set yourself up for success automatically.It’s all tuning after that.
2 Minute Action
I don’t ask anyone to measure tasks by saying “how long will that take?”Or worse: “how long should that take?”I use points.Tasks should be assigned point values based on uncertainty. (Have you done this before? Do you have the skill set on your team to execute this? Do you need a consultant to get this done?)As tasks get uncertain, they tend to get really uncertain (because we don’t know all the things we don’t know).So you’ll want to use a point system that goes up roughly exponentially, like: 1, 3, 5, 10, 21
It’s up to you to decide how to assign the point values.
Its up to you to measure how many points you score in an allotted period of time (the “sprint”).Don't try to get it perfect.Just do it.
Just start measuring.
If you don’t want to use points, fine.Use T-Shirt sizes to start (Sm, Med, Lg, XL).You will do better every subsequent time.It can be tasks, pushups, lives saved, attendees, happy clients, or whatever you want.