How to improve focus and achieve more at work

I don’t meet many people that would not describe themselves as ‘super busy’. And when I ask people if work is ‘under control’ or whether you are feeling ‘spread thinly / stretched’, the answer is usually on the feeling ‘stretched’ end of the spectrum. 

The root cause for this for most of us is not having clear goals, having too much on the go at any one moment, and not having enough time to finish things. Common reasons for this include:

• We don’t sequence work and prioritise

• We don’t or can’t say no to new work

The obvious value in having clear goals and managing work more effectively is performance and wellbeing - being overloaded is stressful!

Where to start

Agile working is a great place to start. The basic ideas behind agile working are simple.

• Focus on the core value you need to deliver

• Know which goals you’re working towards and what success looks like

• Make work visible, discuss and agree what will be worked on next and over a short period of time like a fortnight

• Have short daily or weekly conversations to align priorities and solve any issues holding you back

• Don’t have too many ‘active’ units of work - complete work and before starting new work

• Learn, share and apply those learnings to future work

• Because work and progress is visible, allow people to work flexibly and autonomously 

The idea of having a backlog of things you could work on not only applies to tasks, it applies to goals as well. With common goal frameworks including OKRs and SMART - you can read about OKRs vs SMART here. 

Making work and priorities visible

One of the most impactful things when working in a company and a team is to make work and priorities visible. That means not only sharing goals and their progress on an ongoing basis, it means sharing what you’re working on now, this week and in the future.

What happens when you do this is not a surprise:

• Fewer catch-up meetings in your calendar

• More time to focus more on doing what needs to get done

• A reduction in interruptions – ‘have you got 5 minutes?’

• Consistent on-time project delivery and goal achievement

What is more of a surprise is most people don’t have clear goals, roles and responsibilities. Most people don’t know what each other's priorities are, or how much work is being done.

If work was more visible then we are less likely to be assigned work that is less important than the work being done, we would work on more relevant projects and less irrelevant work. We’d also know the ‘why’ behind the work is being done, the rationale behind it is clear.

Try it

What are your biggest opportunities and problems to solve right now? Are they to improve a KPI, a process or even deliver a big project? If you could work on only one or two of them, which would you choose and would your team agree?

What would success look like if you worked on these goals? What would change and what would improve? How could that improvement be measured?

Then of course, what could you do to achieve this and what should you do first off that list?

These and simple questions like these are the key to performance improvements, wellbeing and work-life balance.

Photo by Stefan Cosma on Unsplash