Quick Insight
Three of the most powerful ways to improve your projects is to ruthlessly prioritize, clearly define success, and don’t look back. I explain more about each below.
1. Ruthlessly Prioritize: You don't have time or money to waste. Pausing to prioritize frees you from distraction. Only choose projects and tasks that follow your critical path to success. Poor planning produces poor performance.
2. Clearly define success: Vague task definitions allow people to claim completion when much work still needs to be done for the project to continue. Tasks need explicit and objective ways to assess completion. Define who will do what by when. Everyone in a small company has many roles with multiple tasks competing for their precious time. Assign a deadline for each task and pick who will make sure that the task gets completed on time.
3. Don't look back: Don't squander scarce resources by falling for the sunk cost fallacy of continuing projects you should have killed. Past time and expenses are irrelevant sunk costs. Constantly challenge whether the future benefits of a project exceed future costs. You will explore and discard many ideas. Scrapping weak ideas is progress, not failure.
I wish you the clarity and focus that drives successful projects. I wish you well.
- Rob Stephens
Further Insight
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