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Dear friends,
Happy New Year! I hope all of you had a chance to take a break over the holidays and are starting 2018 full of inspiration. Since the New Year is all about making resolutions, this month I am sharing a strategy to execute on those goals.
Many of you are familiar with my general approach to goal setting and planning. (Perhaps overly familiar and bordering on exasperated!). For a few years now, I set annual and incremental goals for my projects on the huge white board in my office. Here’s an example:
| Project Title | 1-3 months | 3-6 months | 6-12 months |
| SF-HINTS | Finish data collection (calendar date) | Data cleaning (calendar date) | Abstract, APHA (due date) |
| Summary tables (summary date) | Methods paper submitted by (date) |
Every week my team looks over the whiteboard and we discuss progress, roadblocks, and assign tasks. This standard practice worked fine for us, but it did not feel optimal. Then this fall I came across a book called The Twelve Week Year by Brian Moran and Michael Lennington. The core concept is that making short-term work goals is more effective than annual planning. (The rest of the book is fairly standard productivity advice like prioritizing important tasks before email, how to calendar everything, track your time, etc. I don’t think you need to read it.) Around the same time, a friend who is an executive coach told me that career development groups often work in 8 to 12 week “sprints.” She believes setting a smaller goal requires less activation energy and therefore can push past inertia. Our team decided to try it. It worked out that we had about 12 solid work weeks left in 2017, so I changed the column headings on my white board, as below:
| Project Title | Current week | 4 week goal | 12 week goal |
| SF-HINTS | Last remaining Spanish-language male age 40-60 surveys - 2 community days scheduled | Data cleaning (by Data Ninja, finish date) | Abstract, APHA (due date) |
| Summary tables for next group meeting on (date) | Share with SF-CAN Steering committee (on date) |
We started using this shorter time frame in our weekly meetings. After testing it out for a complete 12-week cycle, I am amazed by how much it increased our effectiveness. Thinking shorter term led us to identify bottlenecks in real time. I also understood better what was on everyone’s plate from week to week, which helped with distributing work. It became evident when I needed to delegate or let go of a task. For instance, I realized that there was no way I could approve all final versions of SGIM abstracts we would be submitting. Looking across all of them on a short time horizon helped me prioritize my time where it was most needed. Finally, deciding every week at our team meeting either (a) what progress should be made on each project or (b) that we would consciously set some work aside prevented us from ignoring or losing track of tasks. I’m glad to say that this process helped us get some long-delayed, lingering manuscripts out the door.
In addition to the concrete recommendation about 12-week sprints, I hope this message inspires you more generally. Maybe that means trying something new in the way you work. Working in the same ways leads to the same results, after all. You should expect to try and discard new systems and approaches, and even something that works for a while may not be right for you as you advance. As always, I’m eager to hear how you implement this advice. Send me any news! I love to amplify your important work on social media. My favorite part of sending these emails is hearing back from all of you! I wish you all a joyful, productive, and fulfilling 2018!
Warmly,
Urmimala