Set specific goals for the next week or month, especially for longer-running projects (and tracking those goals), and then try to stick to those. This involves both considering external outcomes (“10 people visit this site”) and your personal outputs (“I share a doc on a given topic with [some people] by [date]”).[1]
Note: I’m hoping to get better at this — I think I have a lot of room for growth here. To the extent that I do it, it really helps me. (Thanks to my teammates, who’ve been great at pushing for this!)
How this helps
When there are a lot of things to do, it’s much easier to prioritize when I’m setting goals on somewhat longer time scales [2]
I can look at my list of 20 tasks, estimate how long each will take, and realize that I can’t fit all of that in the next week. This forces me to deliberately decide which I will deprioritize. I think the alternative tends to be more like pretending that time doesn’t exist, and that I can just work longer or harder to avoid tradeoffs like this, which can mean that I’ll spend a bunch of time working on something of medium importance, and then need to scramble to get the really important tasks done.
It also makes it easier to stop myself from saying yes to new things that pop up. And on the flip side, when there’s a time set aside for answering “what are the important things I need to do this week/month?” I notice things that I might miss if I don’t ask myself that question.
The prioritization also tends to be better when I’m tying it to specific and pre-decided goals,[3] as opposed to thinking about whether I think a task or project is good on a case-by-case basis — I think in the latter case it’s easier for me to just be excited about something and want to do it based on that.
It helps me feel like I’m actually getting stuff done (& fight impostor syndrome)
I sometimes feel like I’m not accomplishing anything. When I’ve been planning OKRs (4-6 weeks, for us) or sprints (1 week), I can look back on that period, see what tasks I planned to do — which I know I thought were promising/useful — see which I’ve done, and fight against the feeling that nothing happened.
It saves time
Switching between tasks costs time. When my approach is more opportunist — I finish a task, then think about what I should do next — I think I lose a lot of time in between tasks (in total, more than if I’d just planned ~everything in one chunk). If I’ve got a list of tasks in my Asana, I can just start working on the next thing.
When I have a big and long project, it’s much easier to make regular progress on it when I have regular events or meetings when I deliberately break the long project up into pieces that I can make progress on in the next week/month.
Before working at Rethink Priorities, I’d mostly done research and assorted education-adjacent jobs. I had mentors for research, but they were usually quite hands-off, and the research often involved me kind of floating around reading things for a while before scrambling to produce something at the very end. Working with a manager to systematically break longer projects up into sub-goals/milestones was a revelation for me when I was a fellow at Rethink Priorities (see more), and I think made it much easier to actually make progress.
Keywords: OKRs, sprints (I think the online team does something a bit different and more individual-based, but close enough)
The thing that’s really worked for me is working with people who are better than I am at this. (And having managers who push me to do this.)
Some notes on how I do this (I’d love to hear how others do it, as I don’t think my processes are great):
My job involves some amount of reactive work — things that come up during the week, etc. — so I just leave some space for that kind of thing.
To get more objective/external goals (to track outcomes), I might set up some slightly silly operationalizations/metrics, like “we get N substantive comments on [a thread],” “the moderation team uses the handbook for X% of incidents in the next month,” “[my teammates] rate [this internal document] to be an improvement of at least 4 (on a 1-5 scale where 3 is neutral) over the last iteration.” (These are fake.) I think that I’ve often ended up tracking outputs — things like “I share [a doc on a topic]” over outcomes, and I’m trying to be more outcome-oriented.
Other people might have suggestions! I’d be interested.
Set specific goals for the next week or month, especially for longer-running projects (and tracking those goals), and then try to stick to those. This involves both considering external outcomes (“10 people visit this site”) and your personal outputs (“I share a doc on a given topic with [some people] by [date]”).[1]
Note: I’m hoping to get better at this — I think I have a lot of room for growth here. To the extent that I do it, it really helps me. (Thanks to my teammates, who’ve been great at pushing for this!)
How this helps
When there are a lot of things to do, it’s much easier to prioritize when I’m setting goals on somewhat longer time scales [2]
I can look at my list of 20 tasks, estimate how long each will take, and realize that I can’t fit all of that in the next week. This forces me to deliberately decide which I will deprioritize. I think the alternative tends to be more like pretending that time doesn’t exist, and that I can just work longer or harder to avoid tradeoffs like this, which can mean that I’ll spend a bunch of time working on something of medium importance, and then need to scramble to get the really important tasks done.
It also makes it easier to stop myself from saying yes to new things that pop up. And on the flip side, when there’s a time set aside for answering “what are the important things I need to do this week/month?” I notice things that I might miss if I don’t ask myself that question.
The prioritization also tends to be better when I’m tying it to specific and pre-decided goals,[3] as opposed to thinking about whether I think a task or project is good on a case-by-case basis — I think in the latter case it’s easier for me to just be excited about something and want to do it based on that.
It helps me feel like I’m actually getting stuff done (& fight impostor syndrome)
I sometimes feel like I’m not accomplishing anything. When I’ve been planning OKRs (4-6 weeks, for us) or sprints (1 week), I can look back on that period, see what tasks I planned to do — which I know I thought were promising/useful — see which I’ve done, and fight against the feeling that nothing happened.
It saves time
Switching between tasks costs time. When my approach is more opportunist — I finish a task, then think about what I should do next — I think I lose a lot of time in between tasks (in total, more than if I’d just planned ~everything in one chunk). If I’ve got a list of tasks in my Asana, I can just start working on the next thing.
When I have a big and long project, it’s much easier to make regular progress on it when I have regular events or meetings when I deliberately break the long project up into pieces that I can make progress on in the next week/month.
Before working at Rethink Priorities, I’d mostly done research and assorted education-adjacent jobs. I had mentors for research, but they were usually quite hands-off, and the research often involved me kind of floating around reading things for a while before scrambling to produce something at the very end. Working with a manager to systematically break longer projects up into sub-goals/milestones was a revelation for me when I was a fellow at Rethink Priorities (see more), and I think made it much easier to actually make progress.
Sort of related: minimizing the time between when you have an idea and when your customer benefits from that idea
How to do it / get better at it
Keywords: OKRs, sprints (I think the online team does something a bit different and more individual-based, but close enough)
The thing that’s really worked for me is working with people who are better than I am at this. (And having managers who push me to do this.)
Some notes on how I do this (I’d love to hear how others do it, as I don’t think my processes are great):
My job involves some amount of reactive work — things that come up during the week, etc. — so I just leave some space for that kind of thing.
To get more objective/external goals (to track outcomes), I might set up some slightly silly operationalizations/metrics, like “we get N substantive comments on [a thread],” “the moderation team uses the handbook for X% of incidents in the next month,” “[my teammates] rate [this internal document] to be an improvement of at least 4 (on a 1-5 scale where 3 is neutral) over the last iteration.” (These are fake.) I think that I’ve often ended up tracking outputs — things like “I share [a doc on a topic]” over outcomes, and I’m trying to be more outcome-oriented.
Other people might have suggestions! I’d be interested.
Also related: having theories of change (e.g. see discussion here) and back-chaining.
I’m sometimes tempted to think that I prioritize fine on a day-to-day basis, but I currently think I’m deluding myself when I think that
This relies on trusting the goals to be more accurate than your intuitions, which I think we should normally do.
This seems like a good intro on OKRs: https://rework.withgoogle.com/guides/set-goals-with-okrs/steps/bring-OKRs-to-your-organization/