What's the next action

Workflow strategies

18 05 05 - 22:24 - Bookmark this post

Chris Murtland posted an interested article last month about resolving workflow strategies. I didn’t get to read it, but fortunately it is in my Reading List in OnFolio (yeah yeah yeah I know…) so it popped up this afternoon. I discovered one fine benefit of living closer to work: You get to spend time reading at home which gives me a more relaxed way of reading and thinking about the stuff I read. I already noticed a different approach to my reading pattern this afternoon. But that’s for another post.
Back to Chris’ article about different approaches to his daily workflow. In addition to David Allen’s threefold model for evaluating daily work, he introduces some of his own models. They are all very recognizable as I use them quite often myself. Especially the “big chunks of time on certain projects” and “newest first” on “panic-days”. I would like to add another strategy and that’s the one where I most need to talk with my projectteams. I work on different projects at the same time with different teams (sometimes the same person is on more than one team) and I try to touch base with the most urgent projects in one chunk of time, let’s say a day. So instead of “big chunks of time on certain projects” I try to do “divided chunks of time on different projects”. I try to meet with all the folks in one day or part of the day. I focus on a succesfull outcome of the project during those meetings, get the most urgent matters on my agenda and create Next Actions of those matters. These get processed, organized and reviewed. And ofcourse done on the proper moment. Sometimes right away (call a client for a certain RGB-color) sometimes they get on my calendar and sometimes they end up in my Tasklist under the appropriate context and project.
Do some actions fall between the cracks. Sure, it happens. But less and less. Not everything is done just in the right time, sometimes, some actions tend to get “stale” and actually not done by me. Why is that? Because the action is to diverse? Because the context is out of order? Because it really isn’t a next action? Something to think about for me on my bike to work tomorrow morning…