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When you’re part of a team

What do I mean? Let’s say you have a task you’re respon­si­ble for that is one step in a longer process involv­ing many peo­ple. One after anoth­er, you each do what you need to do in a spe­cif­ic order, and even­tu­al­ly the result is deliv­ered and that par­tic­u­lar instance of the process is completed.

Always top priority?

When I talk about pri­or­i­ti­za­tion with par­tic­i­pants in my cours­es and lec­tures, ​“some­one is wait­ing for me so they can take the next step” often comes up as a rea­son to give a task high pri­or­i­ty. It sounds rea­son­able and wise. If some­one is wait­ing to take over, it’s good if I do my part quick­ly so the process can continue.

But just because some­one is wait­ing for your hand­off doesn’t nec­es­sar­i­ly make it urgent. It depends on the over­all dead­line for the process and on how much work still needs to be done before then. It may be that you can pri­or­i­tize oth­er, more urgent and impor­tant tasks first and still deliv­er in plen­ty of time for the team to meet the final deadline.

Forced pri­or­i­ties affect oth­er things

If these tasks always received the high­est pri­or­i­ty, oth­er tasks would suf­fer, and you wouldn’t be able to meet their dead­lines. Or you would suf­fer, because you’d have to push your­self unnec­es­sar­i­ly hard to fin­ish them on time.

There­fore, deter­mine how much cal­en­dar time is need­ed down­stream of you for recur­ring process­es in which you par­tic­i­pate, so that the final dead­line can still be met.

Do this

1. Make a list of the recur­ring process­es in which you per­form tasks.
2. If there is a des­ig­nat­ed process own­er, ask them what your gen­er­al dead­line is in order for the final dead­line to be met. For exam­ple, you can express it in terms such as ​“Day D minus 14 days.”
3. If there is no process own­er, or if they can’t give you an answer, do your own inves­ti­ga­tion. Map out the steps that fol­low yours and esti­mate how much cal­en­dar time they need based on your sol­id expe­ri­ence. Or ask the oth­er par­tic­i­pants how much time they need to com­plete their sequen­tial tasks and cre­ate your own map.
4. Doc­u­ment your find­ings in some kind of ref­er­ence doc­u­ment. Bet­ter yet, share it with the oth­ers in the process so that you devel­op a com­mon under­stand­ing of how it works. Per­haps this could be the begin­ning of opti­miz­ing the process so it flows more smoothly.
5. The next time you get the ball, find out when it ulti­mate­ly needs to reach the goal and cal­cu­late your actu­al dead­line for the task this time.
6. Now you can pri­or­i­tize more accu­rate­ly because you know how urgent — or not urgent — this task real­ly is, and you can weigh it against all the oth­er tasks on your list.

Time stretch­es further

If you deter­mine the true dead­lines for your process-step tasks, it becomes eas­i­er to pri­or­i­tize cor­rect­ly, which helps you make bet­ter use of your time and keep your weeks manageable.

Doesn’t that sound nice?

How do you do it?

How do you deter­mine the dead­line for tasks that are part of a chain? Is it explic­it­ly stat­ed every time, or do you have a trick you usu­al­ly rely on? Write to me and tell me — I’m curious.

(Have you ever expe­ri­enced that your under­stand­ing of a dead­line has been inter­pret­ed dif­fer­ent­ly by oth­ers in the project? My tip is to make your dead­lines spe­cif­ic!)