Be Passionately
Curious

ELIMINATE DOWNTIME BY ALWAYS  KNOWING WHAT’S NEXT.

Focus your energy and resources to maximum effect.

The Top Priorities tool is a method used to streamline focus and productivity by identifying and prioritizing the most important tasks to work on.

What to do:

❶ List all potential tasks, projects, or objectives that require attention. This could include personal goals, work-related tasks, or any other areas of focus.
❷ Assign the tasks to an individual and list them in priority order. You could use a first-in-first-out approach or assess the importance and urgency of each item on the list. 
❸ Narrow down the list to the top five priorities based on their significance and timeliness. You should identify the number of tasks you should be able to achieve in one day, or one week, depending on what will work best for your company.
❹ Working from the top down, you could have clarity in the first priority, and when you complete or get stuck on that task, you have the next one on deck. If you have a project or traffic manager, they should always be one task ahead of what anyone else will be working on.
❺ Hold a daily or weekly huddle with the team to make sure everyone is on the same page and has everything they need to start and complete each of their top priorities for the period.
❻ If any tasks are going to take longer than one week to complete, break down large tasks into smaller, more manageable action items to make progress more achievable and predictable.
❼ The list of current priorities and future tasks slotted below, or in another place used as a queue for items to be added to the priority list when items are completed and removed, could be accessible to all through a shared spreadsheet, sticky notes on a wall, or using tools like Trello. Each item on the list should be easy to interpret for who, what, and when. If you use project numbers, deadlines, estimated hours, or any other mandatory and useful information to enable self-reliance, you should include that information. You may have status labels or other indicators used by your team to indicate health of the task, whether it’s all systems go, an issue holding it up, scope change, late, or complete.
❽ Review the results weekly, make sure the tool is always up to date, make improvements to enable performance to improve each week, and build a culture where people are comfortable to share when they didn’t get something done, and work together to understand the root cause and do something about it.