How do you manage the noise to create space and build momentum?
It’s often a challenge to build momentum. You might be wondering how to create space to be able to focus on the things you’ve prioritised. Here’s the method I’ve developed over the years…
The first step is to have an inventory to see where you’re spending your time and if it’s effective.
As part of my 90-day planning sessions – and to some degree my sprint review & planning sessions – I review where I’m spending my time and how that aligns with my strategy and goals. I use three categories to sharpen my focus and identify specific actions to transition to this state:
- Prioritise. Activities that’ll get me closer to my goals
- Optimise. Important activities, and they’re often enablers of the activities to prioritise
- Minimise. Distractions or activities that won’t directly help me get closer to my goals. Sometimes things move to this category temporarily to create space for what needs to be prioritised and optimised
Example: This is a real example from December 2020 when I needed to create space to write my book Solve Problems That Matter. Most of the things in the minimise category were there temporarily and later moved back to prioritise or optimise. I also listed specific actions to make the transition and set expectations.
Prioritise
- Coaching social enterprise founders and leaders
- Designing and delivering programs (high value and impact)
- Writing Solve Problems That Matter
- Running Jetpack sessions and coaching/office hours
- Designing and testing our products and offers
Optimise
- Strategy and high-level planning
- Marketing and comms plan. Social posts and blogs
- Sprint review and planning
- Time/finance reconciliation and reporting
Minimise
- Strategic design on client projects
- Digital/tech solution architecture and build direction
- UX/UI design direction
- Meetings/giving free advice where it’s not strategically aligned
- Business development, sales, and proposal writing
One of the specific actions I took to manage expectations was to set an email autoreply. The autoreply let people know my replies to email would be slower than usual because I was focusing on writing my book and batching email replies. I also gave an alternate way to contact me if it was time-sensitive.
The message has changed but I still have an autoreply that lets people know that “to help me focus, do deep work, and spend quality time with my clients – I check my email a couple of times most days and batch my replies”.
Take Action: Your Time Inventory & Creating Space
The first step is to create your time inventory by listing all of the things you spend your time on. This doesn’t need to be limited to work-related things. Getting a full picture, including your personal responsibilities, is powerful.
How do you currently spend your time?
In the context of your 90-day plan and OKRs, review your inventory list and decide if each point is something you need to prioritise, optimise, or minimise. You can also do this for the next sprint.
Prioritise
What are the activities that will get you closer to your goals?
Optimise
What are the important activities you need to optimise and do as efficiently as possible? They’re often enablers of the activities that you’re prioritising.
Minimise
What activities are a distraction and won’t directly help you get closer to your goals? Which activities are you minimising temporarily?
Actions
You don’t want to drop things and let people down, so you need to proactively set expectations and make the transition. What actions will you take?
Manage the Noise
Creating the inventory of what you spend your time on has probably highlighted some interesting things.
At times I get caught in a reactive cycle, and I know I’m not spending my time and headspace on the things that will get me closer to my goals. This is a very frustrating feeling – and for me it’s driven in part by commitments I’ve made, and also allowing other people’s expectations and priorities to dominate my own.
How do I deal with it? With one of the least popular pieces of advice I give. I track my time.
I’ve found knowing how much time I’m investing in different areas of my business and various ventures gives me the data and patterns in the data to make more informed decisions. I also believe every founder needs to know this to be able to calculate the true cost of their idea and factor it into net breakeven calculations.
Example: I track my time using a simple mental model I created years ago. I use the same across multiple ventures.
- Think. Strategy, high-level planning
- Run. Operations, people, partners, finances, admin
- Grow. Business development, marketing, sales
- Build (or Deliver). Research, design, and build solutions
As part of this process, I set personal goals for the number of hours I work each month (sometimes it’s to work more, often to work less). I also set targets for the number of hours I spend on categories that directly generate revenue compared to those that don’t. This fits with my personal wellbeing plan.
In summary, I strongly recommend you track your time. There are plenty of great tools for this, including many free ones. Start simple, even if that means a spreadsheet, and you’ll work out what level of time tracking is useful for you.
Get in the Flow
When we build momentum and get in the flow, things move forward with a lot less effort.
The way we approach each day can play a big part in this. You’ve probably heard people talk about decision fatigue. Research shows that we make an average of 35,000 decisions each day, and these decisions deplete our energy a little. Our self-control and willpower generally deteriorate during the day.
The common advice is to do the critical work and make important decisions in the morning. Happiness habits can play a key role here too. By being mindful and having some awareness of your chronotype, you’ll notice some patterns about your energy. Working with this, and prioritising types of work based on how your energy ebbs and flows, can be powerful.
I find things flow best for me late morning, and then after a lull, my energy normally builds into the evening, and I often do my best work late at night. Some people are the opposite. What’s your normal pattern?
Something I’ve found useful is from Michael McQueen’s book Momentum. He calls it the Productivity Blueprint. It involves thinking about “your day as a series of blocks of time”. Rather than just diving straight into the most important work, which is often the most complex, he recommends approaching it in the sequence of simple, then the more complex work, and finishing with more routine tasks.
The rationale for this is it’s easier to build momentum with the simple tasks and feel like you’re making progress – and then build on that momentum to work on the more complex tasks. This prioritises what is often the more important work rather than constantly finding that you’ve run out of the time and energy to focus on it.
You might find this approach helpful when juggling your idea with all of your other responsibilities. Working with your energy to get in the flow will help you build momentum.
Good luck creating space to build momentum…
Solve Problems That Matter
This is an excerpt from my book Solve Problems That Matter, where I go into a lot more detail on all of the things I’ve covered in this post… and plenty more.
It’s a playbook with actions and worksheets to help you take a human-centred design and living systems approach to design, build, and launch your idea. Ideas that customers love, make money, and do great things for people and our planet… all while increasing wellbeing.
Let’s Collaborate
We specialise in coaching, training, and working alongside leaders.
A key way we do this is by designing and delivering action learning experiences with masterclasses, workshops, innovation sprints, and leadership, design thinking & innovation programs.
These sessions build personal, team, and organisational capability to solve problems that matter with more:
- 🌿 Confidence to navigate complexity and solve problems that matter for your teams, customers, shareholders – and build momentum with more certainty and less risk while increasing your wellbeing
- ❤️ Clarity to empathically engage your stakeholders, make better decisions, and collaborate to create solutions that your teams and customers love, make money, and do great things for people and our planet
- 🎯 Purpose that drives progress on your goals and creates meaningful value that you’re proud of for all stakeholders – and build the relationships, workflows, rhythms, and habits for success
Ready to have fun collaborating to solve problems that matter?
