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.
Desk
Desk Workflow
Focuses on how individuals and teams choose what to do next and keep work moving without extra tracking.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.