Topic: Rocks

Over the last few months, I’ve been hearing a common theme among my clients. They keep saying, “I have a day job and a Rock job.” At first that confused me a little bit. Then I realized that one of two things is true. One possibility is that we chose the wrong Rocks for the quarter. The second possibility is that the team member is spending most of their time on useless activities.

Are you frustrated that everything isn’t getting done from one meeting to the next? You’re not alone! Many of my client leadership teams have expressed similar frustrations over the last year. Frustrations were cropping up in two main areas that had a low completion percentage:

• Rocks – the priorities that people committed to over the last 90 days
• To Dos – 7-day action items that come out of weekly meetings

Teams were only seeing completion rates of 40-50% of their To Dos, but they drastically increased their weekly completion percentage to 90%+ consistently.

Want to see your team’s completion rate skyrocket like that? Here are 7 steps to getting all of your team’s To Dos done every week.

Business leaders have a lot to do. The number of tasks that need to get done keeps expanding, and as a result the To Do list grows and grows. Some people manage tasks through sticky notes, some use technology tools such as Asana or Trello, while others use hand-written lists of stuff they need to get done.

There are a lot of ways to manage tasks, but the majority of us are still overwhelmed by our To Do list.  Here’s what I experienced when I took the helm of running our 3rd generation family business.

This blog post was prompted by a December 2015 blog post from Seth Godin that I tucked away for inspiration, called, “Is it too little butter, or too much bread?” Here is the gist. When is the last time you complained about having too many resources in your business? Too many engineers, too many clients, too much revenue?

Let me guess. The answer is probably never. It is always the opposite. The engineering plan for this year to too expansive – we don’t have enough…fill in the blank – time, money, people. And so on.

I define a business as a group that takes human energy and creates value. Since humans are an integral part of any business, we need to think about their limitations. Actually, as humans, we have a lot of limitations. We can’t run 60 miles an hour, we are not able to teleport, and the one that upsets me the most, we can’t fly.

One that is less obvious but just as much a limitation is that we don’t have the ability to focus for more than 90 days. This limitation is one of the main reasons strategic planning or yearly planning falls short.