Prioritisation
Agreeing on completion criteria for a deliverable
Write observable completion criteria with the recipient, separate standing quality checks from deliverable-specific needs and manage changes clearly.
Archive
October 2026
Async Work
Asynchronous work habits
Asynchronous work lets people contribute without being online at the same moment. It succeeds when an update carries enough context for the next person to act …
Process Experiments
Avoiding productivity metrics that reward shortcuts
Check productivity targets for shortcuts, inspect quality and displaced work, and revise measures that misrepresent results.
Team Workload
Building recovery time after a major delivery
Plan aftercare, qualified cover, breaks and agreed leave before a major delivery ends, then adjust the next commitments.
Prioritisation
Choosing one productivity problem to investigate
Choose one productivity problem using its consequences, available evidence and ability to act, then investigate without assuming the cause.
Async Work
Choosing when an asynchronous update is enough
Decide whether a written update can replace a meeting by checking the purpose, context, response window, owner and need for live discussion.
Process Experiments
Choosing when to move a long message thread into a decision record
Recognise when a thread needs a findable answer, distinguish pending from settled decisions and record the current outcome.
Meetings
Choosing who must contribute and who only needs an update
Including everyone in a decision can slow it without improving it.
Prioritisation
Comparing planned work with completed outcomes
Review original commitments, completed results and work added later without hiding approved changes or unfinished dependencies.
Prioritisation
Comparing two ways of handling incoming requests
Set up a fair trial of direct assignment and a shared intake queue, then compare ownership, usable resolution, quality and effort.
Prioritisation
Comparing urgent requests with agreed priorities
Assess an urgent work request against current commitments, identify the response window and agree on what moves if it takes precedence.
Prioritisation
Deciding what not to do this week
Make a realistic weekly plan by explicitly deferring, reducing, transferring or stopping work that will not fit.
Meetings
Decision efficiency
Teams lose time when a discussion has no named decision, the wrong people are asked to approve it or a settled choice is debated again without new…
Prioritisation
Defining useful output for knowledge work
Define a knowledge-work output by its recipient and use, then check quality before relying on counts or claiming a wider outcome.
Prioritisation
Distinguishing a capacity problem from unclear priorities
Use current commitments, available skills and an agreed work order to tell whether a team needs clearer priorities, more capacity or both.
Team Workload
Distinguishing a temporary deadline push from chronic overload
Use duration, frequency, severity and recovery to distinguish a bounded delivery push from a recurring workload problem.
Prioritisation
Distinguishing busy schedules from completed outcomes
Trace scheduled work to usable outputs and intended outcomes without treating a full calendar or unfinished tasks as a productivity score.
Async Work
Email and message workload
Manage email and chat workload with clear message routes, routine review times, named owners and accessible decision records.
Meetings
Escalating a blocked decision with clear options
Escalation works when the recipient can decide without reconstructing weeks of discussion.
Prioritisation
Estimating work without pretending the estimate is certain
Define the work, state a useful estimate and its assumptions, separate effort from delivery time, and update the forecast when the basis changes.
Async Work
Finding existing work before creating a new document
Search by purpose, inspect likely matches and decide whether to reuse, update, adapt or start a document from scratch.
Focus
Focus and interruption management
Manage interruptions by defining urgent routes, service coverage and usable focus periods, then check that the whole team’s work still moves forward.
Prioritisation
Giving a clear outcome instead of a vague task
Turn a vague assignment into a usable result with clear authority, inputs, boundaries and an early checkpoint.
Async Work
Giving enough context for a teammate in another timezone
A teammate waking up hours later should be able to continue the work without waiting for you to come online. Put the objective, current state and next decision in …
Async Work
Grouping routine communication into manageable review times
Set practical email and chat review times around service duties, with a clear exception route and checks for missed work.
Focus
Identifying the main sources of avoidable interruptions
Trace interruptions to their causes with a brief work-level review, then choose a change that preserves necessary service.
Prioritisation
Identifying unclear briefs before work begins
Spot missing outcomes, audience, scope and authority in a work brief, then ask focused questions before committing to the deliverable.
Process Experiments
Improving team productivity without more activity tracking
Improve team productivity by defining useful results, finding where work stalls and changing the process without adding activity tracking.
Async Work
Keeping asynchronous decisions findable
A decision made in a chat thread or recording can be invisible to the person who joins the project next month. Give it a stable home near the work it governs.
Process Experiments
Keeping reusable templates current
Assign a template owner, track change triggers, identify the current version and review the template against real work.
Team Workload
Knowledge reuse
Choose what knowledge to keep, make it findable and current, and help colleagues reuse it safely in everyday work.
Focus
Limiting work in progress
Choose what a work-in-progress limit covers, decide what happens when it is full and review blocked work without hiding demand.
Process Experiments
Measuring a process change before applying it to everyone
Define a trial’s result, implementation and safeguard measures before deciding whether a process change can be used more widely.
Prioritisation
Measuring cycle time for recurring work
Define start and finish points, track comparable work and interpret cycle time without hiding open items or quality problems.
![Is your recurring meeting still useful?: Define purpose: 'We meet so that [people] can [do something] and leave with [a result].'; Inspect past sessions using agendas, decisions and feedback from affected teams.; Decide to keep, improve, reduce or end based on whether the result is consistently achieved. Measuring whether a recurring meeting has a purpose](/covers/measuring-whether-a-recurring-meeting-has-a-purpose-640.webp?v=0504aac5)
Meetings
Measuring whether a recurring meeting has a purpose
Review a recurring meeting's stated purpose, recent outcomes and participant feedback before deciding to keep, change or replace it.
Meetings
Meeting productivity
Choose when to meet, prepare around a clear outcome, capture what changed and review whether recurring meetings still help the work.
Prioritisation
Personal work planning
Build a personal work plan around commitments, next actions, available time and review points, then adjust it when the work changes.
Focus
Planning focused work around service responsibilities
Protect time for detailed work by mapping service duties, assigning real coverage and reviewing both delivery and customer response.
Team Workload
Planning workload around realistic capacity
Build a workload plan from usable time, skills and service cover, then resolve commitments that do not fit.
Meetings
Preventing repeated debate over a settled decision
A team may revisit a decision because the result was never recorded, because implementation is hard or because genuinely new facts emerged.
Prioritisation
Productivity for managers
A practical guide to managerial productivity: make timely decisions, set clear outcomes, review useful progress and remove obstacles.
Prioritisation
Productivity measurement
Choose useful team productivity measures and interpret completed work alongside quality, changed demand and employee feedback.
Prioritisation
Protecting time for decisions that cannot be delegated
Find the decisions that need your authority, prepare them for review and protect time to answer without becoming the team's bottleneck.
Team Workload
Rebalancing work after an unexpected absence
Triage live duties, arrange qualified cover, revise affected promises and protect privacy when a colleague is unexpectedly absent.
Team Workload
Recording an answer the team repeatedly needs
Turn a repeated team question into a short, checked answer with clear scope, a useful location and an owner.
Meetings
Recording the decision a discussion needs
A meeting can be full of useful facts and still end without progress because nobody stated the choice to be made.
Process Experiments
Reducing rework
Find where completed work returns, clarify briefs and completion criteria, time reviews well and address recurring causes of rework.
Async Work
Reducing unnecessary recipients in work messages
Choose email and chat recipients by their role, use Reply all deliberately and reserve group alerts for messages the group needs.
Process Experiments
Removing an obstacle instead of adding another report
Find the blocked step, choose a remedy that changes it and check whether work can proceed without shifting the problem elsewhere.
Meetings
Reviewing feedback that arrives too late
Triage late review comments, make scope and deadline trade-offs explicit, and set an earlier review point for the next deliverable.
Focus
Reviewing progress without constant status requests
Use a shared work record, proportionate checkpoints and clear exception rules to review progress without repeated status chasing.
Prioritisation
Reviewing unfinished tasks at the end of a week
Check the real state of unfinished work, decide what to advance, wait on, revise or close, and leave a clear starting point for next week.
Process Experiments
Reviewing whether an efficiency gain simply moved work elsewhere
Trace a process change across every hand-off to find displaced effort, longer queues or added corrections before declaring a gain.
Prioritisation
Separating an urgent alert from an ordinary update
If every message is marked urgent, people cannot tell which one needs immediate action. Define urgency by impact and response time, then route it differently from routine status.
Async Work
Setting team expectations for response time
Agree on response windows, ownership, working hours and escalation so ordinary requests and live service issues reach the right person.
Team Workload
Showing workload without ranking people by task count
Choose workload signals that reveal timing, effort and role constraints without turning a shared view into a task-count league table.
Team Workload
Spotting overloaded roles before deadlines slip
Find role bottlenecks early by comparing upcoming hand-offs with skills, service duties and available review time.
Process Experiments
Stopping an experiment that makes work harder
Set stopping rules, stabilise open work, investigate added burden and decide whether to end or revise a process trial.
Prioritisation
Sustainable productivity
Plan useful work at a pace the team can maintain. Account for real capacity, deadline pushes, recovery and effort shifted to other roles.
Team Workload
Team workload visibility
Build a useful view of team commitments, service duties and capacity so workload conflicts lead to clear decisions.
Meetings
Testing a smaller meeting schedule
Trial fewer or shorter recurring meetings while checking decisions, handovers, support and work shifted into messages.
Team Workload
Tracking why completed work repeatedly returns
Keep a simple return record, investigate repeated reasons and check whether a targeted process change prevents the same rework.
Prioritisation
Turning a large deliverable into manageable next actions
Define a deliverable, divide it into checkable parts, identify next actions and dependencies, and check that the parts produce the agreed result.
Prioritisation
Turning a repeated task into a practical checklist
Define the task, select the checks that matter, write clear actions and review the checklist against real work.
Team Workload
Using employee feedback without treating it as objective output
Ask employees about workflow friction, interpret responses fairly and keep reported experience distinct from recorded output.
Prioritisation
Work prioritisation
A practical way to order team work, handle new requests, make trade-offs visible and review priorities against real capacity.
Process Experiments
Work process experiments
Choose a work problem, set a bounded process trial, check useful results and unintended costs, then decide whether to keep, revise or stop the change.
Meetings
Writing a decision-oriented meeting agenda
Build a meeting agenda around the decision, options, essential input and approval route, then close with a clear outcome or next step.
Async Work
Writing an update that does not require a follow-up meeting
An effective update answers what happened, what it changes and what the reader must do. Write for someone who has not followed every message in the project channel.
Prioritisation
Writing requests with an owner and a needed outcome
Write a work request that names the owner, needed result, relevant context, timing and place for the answer.