Reinventing Routine

Morning to night, consistency in what we do dictates how we function on a regular basis. When our routines are consistent and sustainable, we’re significantly more productive and when change shows its face, we can bounce back faster by having something familiar to adhere to. This is why constantly reinventing routine is so important.

This week, we discuss what we’ve learned in Task Management when it comes to staying on top of daily routines, while being flexible with others. Its this balance of consistency and elasticity that we’ve also engineered into Telescope as a whole.
 

Stick To A Format: This is a sticky subject but deserves a magnifying glass over the topic. Think about how you schedule appointments, calls, tasks, meetings. Lunch at that new cafe that just opened up. Whenever you jot down the tiniest item, you probably do so the same way every time, don’t you? Most people have their own flavor of routine note-taking and labeling- problem is, when you combine 20 people into a group of two managing individuals to oversee the works, the little things stick out more clearly. Simply forgetting basic punctuation or ordering can significantly slow down your reporting and progress when others are quickly looking for issues at hand. Discuss with your team how to best label, define and notarize your work as a collective. You’ll be surprised how much easier and understandable things are by doing this, and it’ll become automatic for most in about a week.

Start Off As A Satellite: As ridiculously simple as it is to understand the “Zoom-In” concept of visualizing your team’s work each day by starting from a 50,000-ft. view and closing-in from there, typical managerial distractions- whether working at home or office – present glass obstacles that most people don’t notice but prevent team leaders from getting the ‘scoop from afar. You’re alerted to a particular task a team member paused and told you about, so you make a beeline to that item and eventually explore the rest from a now outside-in approach. This is especially detrimental when it turns out a member was stuck because of something much further down the line in their workflow that you didn’t see. Focus on the whole garden before trimming your flowers each morning. In Telescope’s case, view all your boards first (from the main screen) and tend to irregularities accordingly from there.

Be Water In The Same Cup: Ok, we totally took most of that from the legend, Bruce Lee. The point is, there’s a certain amount of fluidity and adaptability that needs to be permitted in your daily workflow. This is an ever-changing challenge you will face, because as your team grows, so do their own work practices. The biggest mistake many team leaders often make through no intention of their own is to preach the expectation that the dots of collaboration should be connected as straightly as possible. This is useful, however, for making reliable predictions when it comes to deadline projections and phasing. If you’re going to focus on reinventing routine, the trick here is to let the granular things move around as need be, while keeping the overall shape of the goal intact. The best way we’ve found in determining this is to use our CustomBoards (available in the Business version) to structure team goals in the same board, allocated to different teams. From there, you order your columns into a sequence with a goal of eliminating as many as you can until you have only the essential items remaining. It’s a fun game of Chess without everyone needing to play the pawn.