Page 58 - Make Work Great

Overtness About Task

Be Overt About Your Progress
CREATE VISIBILITY SYSTEMS

• Imagine the achievement of one of your summary outputs and the
appearance and feeling of the result(s).

• Consider what you must complete in the next five to seven
workdays to move toward that result.
• Design a simple visibility system that will make it apparent whether
you’re progressing toward your goal.

and start to actually check off your items or verify your run rate as
part of your workday.
Of course, all of this is easier said than done. The specifi c focus on
the appearance of a positive outcome and the deconstruction of that
outcome into tangible, incremental steps takes effort, especially if it
is a new way of thinking. Rest assured that diffi culty does not equal
impossibility. As with most skills, it gets faster and easier with prac-
tice. Whatever you do, don’t allow yourself to get overwhelmed by
the idea of handling all of your summary outputs at once. Remember,
your goal is incremental progress; see how well a new system serves
you in one area before moving on to another. A little visibility goes a
long way.

5. Be Overt About the Resources You Need
A productivity engineer once told me a story about resources that
I will never forget. She supported a factory that produced complex
parts. Each part was run through multiple pieces of equipment, the
most expensive of which cost tens of millions of dollars. As a practi-
cal matter, the factory bought as few of the expensive machines as
possible, and so had barely enough capacity. When those machines
stopped, the factory stopped.

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