What To Do When
Everything Is Urgent
And Important
Showroom 5, The Workstation
Tuesday 6th June 2017
www.redvanilla.co.uk
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What To Do When Everything Is Urgent And Important
What To Do When Everything Is
Urgent And Important
Timings
Content
9.30 – 9.40
Introductions and aspirations
10 minutes
9.40 – 10.10
1 Grids
30 minutes
3 Techniques for managing others’ impact on you
1.1
1.2
1.3
Stakeholder Analysis
Partnership Relationship Grid
Stop, Start, Continue
10.10 – 11.00
2 Managing and Agreeing Expectations Early
50 minutes
2.1
2.2
2.3
2.4
11.00 – 11.15
11:15 -11.35
Break
3 Cost Benefit Analysis
Under Promise and Over Deliver
Touchpoints
Moments of Truth
The Planning Fallacy
20 minutes
11.35 – 11.50
4: Staying Flexible Whilst Having A Plan
15 minutes
11.50 – 12.05
5: Taking Precious Time Out
15 minutes
12.05 – 12.15
6: Notes, Ideas and Feedback
10 minutes
12.15 – 12.30
Informal Conversations and Close
2
What To Do When Everything Is Urgent And Important
1.
Grids
1.1 Stakeholder Analysis
For some of your tasks and projects, stakeholders may strongly influence your
workload.
Understanding what stakeholders want from you, clarifying your understanding with
the stakeholders themselves and agreeing timescales may help you manage your
workload.
Level of Stakeholder Influence and Power
Stakeholder Analysis
Meet their Needs
Key Player
Least Important
Show Consideration
Level of Stakeholder Interest
Ask your manager to decide priorities
Consult with your stakeholders about your priority decisions
Ask for other people’s views on how you are prioritising
Seek help from colleagues
Delegate
3
What To Do When Everything Is Urgent And Important
1.2 Partnership Relationship Grid
High
Low
Achieving Your Objectives
Giving Relationship
Lose-Win
True Partnership
(Win-Win)
Your partner/stakeholder
achieves their objectives at the
expense of your objectives.
Both parties are happy and
meet objectives.
Negative Relationship
Lose-Lose
Receiving Relationship
Win-Lose
Neither party meet their
objectives
You meet your objectives at
the expense of your
partner/stakeholder.
Low
Achieving Their Objectives
High
4
What To Do When Everything Is Urgent And Important
1.3 Stop, Start, Continue
You
Me
Actions that I would like to
ask you to take that would
help me
Actions that you would like me
to take to help you
Stop
Things to stop
doing or do less
of
Start
Things to start
doing or do
more of
Continue
Things to
continue doing
as they work
well
5
What To Do When Everything Is Urgent And Important
2.
Managing and agreeing expectations early
Analysing and mapping customer journeys – to help manage expectations.
A customer journey is a method of looking at a customer’s experience of the
service you provide from start to end. Customer journeys can be of any duration,
for example from a 5 minute phone call to deliver of a 4 week project to arranging a
12 month placement.
Mapping key customer journeys can help you consider how effectively you manage
people’s expectations at the start, middle and end of a process or activity.
Start
Set expectations at
the start of the
journey
2.1
Middle
End
Manage
expectations
during journey
Check
expectations were
met at the end
Under Promise and Over Deliver
Under promise and over deliver involves building in a
contingency or buffer-zone when promising to get
something done, so that you can always deliver on
your promise.
.
“I’m just going
to put you on
hold for a
moment”
“We’ll get back
to you as soon
as possible”
“I’ll email the
information to
you by the
end of the
day”
6
What To Do When Everything Is Urgent And Important
2.2
Touchpoints
Touchpoints are all the situations where people interact with you before, during and
after their journey.





Face to face
Telephone
Email
Website
Social Media
2.3
Moments of Truth
Touchpoints that are:


Especially important to customers
Create a relatively high emotional response
McKinsey & Company found that there was a correlation between ‘emotionally
charged’ moments of truth and the purchasing decisions of customers.
2.4 The Planning Fallacy
The Planning Fallacy suggests that when we try to predict how
much time we need to complete a future task, there is an
optimism bias i.e our predictions underestimate the time
needed.
This phenomenon occurs regardless of our knowledge that past
tasks of a similar nature have taken longer to complete than
generally planned.
The bias only affects predictions about one's own tasks.
When outside observers predict task completion times, they
show a pessimistic bias, overestimating the time needed.
7
The Planning Fallacy
was first proposed in
1979 by Daniel
Kahneman a
psychologist who
worked on the
psychology of
judgment and
decision-making and
Amos Tversky a
cognitive and
mathematical
psychologist who
wrote about the
systematic human
cognitive bias and
handling of risk.
What To Do When Everything Is Urgent And Important
3.
Cost Benefit Analysis
Prioritise the most beneficial project.
In some instances you may be forced to make a decision about NOT getting
everything done.
In this case you may need to consider the costs and implications of not completing
tasks and weigh these up against the benefits of completing a task.
The deadline for Task A is July; the deadline for Task B is September. However the
cost of not completing Task B is greater than that for not completing Task
A….therefore if you CANNOT complete both tasks, leave Task A.
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
Task A Deadline
Cost of NOT
completing Task A
Cost of NOT
completing Task B
Task B Deadline
The Planning Fallacy and Cost Benefit Analysis
In 2003, Lovallo and Kahneman proposed an expanded
definition of the Planning Fallacy as:
The tendency to underestimate the time, costs, and risks of
future actions whilst overestimating the benefits.
Are there any time management decisions you envisage
where a cost benefit analysis may be useful?
8
Delusions of Success: How
Optimism Undermines
Executives’ Decisions
Dan Lovallo and Daniel
Kahneman
Harvard Business Review July
2003
What To Do When Everything Is Urgent And Important
4.
Staying flexible whilst having a plan
Getting Things Done: The Art of Stress-Free Productivity
David Allen published his book Getting Things Done in 2001 It is
often referred to as GTD.
Key GTD concepts:
1.
2.
3.
4.
5.
Record planned tasks and projects
This moves tasks and projects out of the mind
Break tasks and projects into actions
This helps focus attention on taking action
Reduces or avoids stress from recalling actions
A revised edition of the book was released in 2015
Capture
Clarify
Organise
'Stuff' that
needs
attention
What you
need to do
with stuff
Put stuff
where it
belongs
9
Reflect
Engage
Review
frequently
Do the
actions
What To Do When Everything Is Urgent And Important
Capture
Use an in-tray, notepad, digital list, apps such as www.wunderlist.com or voice
recorder to capture everything that has your attention. Little, big, personal and
professional—all your to-do’s, projects, things to handle or finish.
Clarify
Take everything that you capture and ask: Is it actionable? If no, then trash it,
incubate it, or file it as reference. If yes, decide the very next action required. If it
will take less than two minutes, do it now. If not, delegate it if you can; or put it on
a list to do when you can.
Organise
Put action reminders on the right lists. For example, create lists for the appropriate
categories—calls to make, errands to run, emails to send, etc.
Reflect
Look over your lists as often as necessary to trust your choices about what to do
next. Do a weekly review to get clear, get current, and get creative.
Engage
Use your system to take appropriate actions with confidence.
A paper in the journal Long Range Planning by
Francis Heylighen and Clément Vidal of the Free
University of Brussels showed "recent insights in
psychology and cognitive science support and extend
GTD's recommendations".
10
Getting Things Done:
The Science behind Stress-Free
Productivity. Francis Heylighen
and Clément Vidal
ECCO - Evolution, Complexity and
Cognition research group
Vrije Universiteit Brussel (Free
University of Brussels)
http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/Papers/GT
D-cognition.pdf
What To Do When Everything Is Urgent And Important
5.
Taking Precious Time Out
Source: https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/240082
Greg McKeown, New York Times Bestselling Author
“Requests come at us from all angles and we are unprepared to discern between
them. As a result, we start saying yes to them without really thinking. This fuels a
busyness cycle where the more we take on the less time we have to discern what
we should take on. Our discernment force field becomes weak and our choices
become a function of other people's agendas.”
“I recommend every 90 days you take a day to go somewhere away from the
deafening digital noise and usual routine of your busy life and reflect on what really
matters”
Do you already do this?
Could you do this?
Would it make a difference?
11
What To Do When Everything Is Urgent And Important
6.
Notes
1.
Stakeholder Analysis, Partnership Relationship Grid, Stop Start
and Continue
2.
Managing and agreeing expectations early
3.
Cost Benefit Analysis
4.
Staying flexible whilst having a plan
5.
Taking Precious Time Out
12