The Strange Lesson My Whiteboard Taught Me

I walked into my office today and saw some brainstorming I had done over a week ago.It was all over my whiteboard.

It was a map that helped me see some of the dependencies and workflows in my team—visibility here is critical for making improvements.

But then I realized that if I wiped it away to make room for the new problem I needed to solve right then, I would lose a lot of my progress.Sure I can take a photo, but those so easily get tucked away into the bottomless digital pile.It’s so easy to do some of the work without doing all of it. If you don’t do all of it, it’s easy to waste all the work you did do.

And that’s the lesson.

You will develop an incredible amount of work waste unless you’re careful not to do some of the work without doing all of it.You will move faster if your work progress is documented or if a decision is made at the end of the time you’ve set aside to work.

2 Minute Action

Get all of your “to-dos” into a single pile. Pull them all in from everywhere you keep them.Your notepad. Your inbox. Your sticky notes.Get them all in a list and prioritize them. Each one must fight for its life to stay on the list.You are much less likely to have work waste when you have a single place to store tasks and review projects.Nothing gets lost.The work you’ve done so far gets recorded in the same place as everything’s else.

The Most Overlooked and Practical Application For Trust

Missed meetings that stay on the calendar.A pile of to-dos.In fact, a big long list of to-dos with dates that are WAY overdue.Seems innocent, though, right?What harm could it do?You're just adjusting. You're still striving. You're just on your way there, right?

Here's the problem:

When you stray from the structure you've laid out--whether it's a calendar event, to-do, or whatever--you're building distrust.You're teaching yourself that you can't trust the calendar to tell you what's important because sometimes there are events you can miss.You're teaching yourself that you can't trust your to-do list because it's packed with tasks that don't matter and clog up your view of priorities.You're teaching yourself that you can't trust yourself to get things done or honor the schedule.If your calendar is sacred, you will trust it.You'll have a good relationship with your calendar and you'll enjoy using it as a tool--because it will actually be useful.You'll have a good relationship with your to-do list and you'll enjoy using it because it will also be useful.

2 Minute Action:

Scan your calendar for the week. Delete anything you KNOW won't happen. Reschedule, kick back, block off a chunk of time to get something done--whatever you need.Do it now.In tomorrow's post, I'm going to tell you more about how to prune and reset your to-do list.