Page 57 - Make Work Great

It Starts with You

How can you create overt visibility into your progress? First, focus
on just one of the items on your summary outputs list. Visualize your-
self having achieved it, and imagine that you are refl ecting back on
that achievement. Is it a single accomplishment—like a product, phys-
ical structure, or report—that you completed at one point in time? Is
it a physical or conceptual “stack” of work, such as forms completed
or parts assembled, that resulted from your sustained effort? Is it a
string of requests or problems, like customer support queries, that
you addressed as they arose over time? Get as specifi c as you can be
about what it will look, sound, and feel like to succeed.
Next, consider what will be required of you over each of the next
fi ve to seven workdays to achieve that output in the future. If your
objective is a report or project, you’ll fi nd yourself thinking in terms
of small milestones to be reached in the coming week. If your goal is
a batch of completed items, you’ll be thinking in terms of a processing
rate per week, day, and hour. If your output requirement is a group
of problems to be solved, you’ll imagine your response rate or how
quickly you’ll solve each one.
Finally, ask yourself the fundamental question for the fourth type of
overtness: “How can I make it obvious to myself that I’m making prog-
ress?” Ask yourself what progress looks, feels, sounds, and smells like.
How do you know, in any given hour of the day, whether you’re on
track? What can you do to make your progress even more obvious?
Look for answers that require little extra effort on your part and
also support the completion of your goals. Perhaps you can turn your
small milestones into a checklist of tasks for the day and week that
you mark off as you complete them. Maybe you can convert your
completion rate per day into an hourly run rate. Or perhaps you can
use your problem response rate to develop a personal tracking system
for issues as they arise and are solved and in the process begin to
notice which ones arise most often.
Seek easy, straightforward approaches. In this case, pen and paper
are often preferable to software; simple lists are better than complex
plans. For this system to work, it needs to be one that you can use
easily. And you won’t know that for sure until you put it into practice

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