One of the objections I hear most when I’m running offsites for executive teams comes right when we ask them to get really picky about priorities. We’re trying to find five or fewer things they say really matter over the next few months, so they can spend as much of their time, energy, and attention on those as possible.
Inevitably, someone on the team says some version of: that might work for other organizations, but ours isn’t that simple. We can’t pick four or five things to focus on for the next three months. We have too much going on.
It happened to me about a month ago. And the team tries to go back to twenty plates spinning, their main job being to keep the plates from falling and breaking, spending enormous energy on all of them at once.
I say this with love. That organization does millions of dollars in revenue and has maybe a hundred people on the team. But I’ve worked with companies doing hundreds of millions. I’ve learned from people who oversee billions in investments and choose how to grow and steward them. I’ve worked with some really high-performing startup founders, where there’s a huge amount of growth and decision-making happening at the same time. And the people who do it effectively are able to condense their priorities down to five or fewer things.
It reminds me of a mentor I had when I was a CEO. He’d run people development, and before that marketing, for a huge construction equipment manufacturer that did a third of global sales for some of the brands it carried. He’d owned sports teams. He’d been involved in massive organizations. And he told me: “I’ve found throughout my life that if I have more than five things in my hand, things slip through my fingers. I can only carry as many things as I have fingers.”
So if you run into this need to simplify and something in you says, “I wish my life could be that simple, I just don’t have that luxury,” know that there are people leading companies bigger than yours, accomplishing more, who’ve been around longer, and they condense their priorities to fewer than five. If they can do it, you can do it. And it’s worth the time and energy to get picky.
It’s one of the most important things we do as leaders, next to building an environment where people can thrive. Being choosy about what our companies say yes to. Being choosy about where we put our time, energy, dollars, and resources. Those resources are finite. They get split across however many priorities we choose to have. And the more complexity, the more confusion sets in, and the more stopping and starting and task-switching takes place.
If you’re leading a company: sit down and coalesce the priorities you want the company to tackle over the next three months into five or fewer. Write them on a piece of paper to start. Then work with your executive team to implement them and redirect resources.
If you’re an individual trying to have a green thumb for your own piece of the work: regardless of what your project management tool says you need to do today, get out pen and paper. Some of the most productive, technologically savvy people I know start every day this way. They write down the five things they want to accomplish, prioritize them one through five, and work on number one until it’s done, pushing whatever they have to push to get it done. If they get that one thing done, they call it a good day. Stack those days on top of each other and you will accomplish a lot.
Your life, your business, your work is not so complicated that you can’t condense it to five or fewer priorities.
— Craig