Bringing Better Results Through Deprioritizing

Working with a large book of business and covering multiple roles is a big challenge. When, on top of that, you need to get involved in several additional initiatives, it’s only a matter of time before your results become poor. In many books on productivity, as well as in hundreds of posts on LinkedIn and other professional communities, people talk about prioritization. Every time I read about it, a question popped into my head: “How do you prioritize when all the items on your to-do list are important?” Luckily, one of the leaders here at Wrike shared an important thought that I immediately implemented into my life: “Good leaders are characterized by their ability to make a decision on which balls to drop.” A large portion of work prioritization is actually about choosing which items can and should be deprioritized. So, how do you prioritize, and what are the best practices here?

Usually, the fact that the team has too many priorities on its plate can be spotted by the following common indicators:

• Team members explicitly state that they’re torn between too many activities, with each of them highlighted as “critical” by the leadership
• The team’s workload has increased even though key business metrics haven’t changed much (e.g., the size of the book of business, quarterly targets, etc.)
• You notice that the overall results delivered by team members have worsened, even though you’re confident that employees have the right qualifications and experience to perform the job
• The time you spend tracking the results of various activities has increased dramatically compared to previous periods (e.g., month or quarter)

Here at Wrike, we plan our work based on OKRs — Objectives and Key Results. One of the key ideas is that OKRs are aggregated up, so the objectives of a single team contribute to the objectives of the department, and the latter contributes to the global company goals. It seems that a couple of quarters ago, I got a bit overexcited about all the cool initiatives that our team might engage in, and as a result, we ended up with 12 OKRs. Today, I understand it was not a good decision to move forward with so many of them.

Team members were confused the whole quarter over what was of top importance, what was not that critical, etc. And in the end, we had to postpone or cancel some of the OKRs as we didn’t have the bandwidth to cover them all. One of the indicators that I probably should’ve spotted much earlier was that during the weekly team meeting, it took me the whole 15 minutes to review of our OKRs and our progress toward their completion. Moving forward, we decided to cut the number of OKRs per quarter.

By decreasing the number of priorities, you immediately get the following benefits:

1. Better team focus

With fewer priorities, each team member has a clear understanding of what they need to focus on daily. They also gain visibility into how their daily activities contribute to the end result.

2. Less pressure on the team

Even when the team’s workload is manageable, having too many priorities becomes an additional source of stress. It has been scientifically proven that switching between activities requires some time, and as a result, time is wasted (see the book “Your Brain at Work” by David Rock for more information on this). The time during the workday is not spent in the most optimal way, even when the team members are working extra hard. As a result, they’re not fully satisfied with what they have accomplished, which leads to stress. Having fewer priorities reduces that stress level.

3. Easier to track

The fewer goals your team has on its plate, the easier it is for you as a manager to track their progress. This becomes particularly important if some of the objectives require complicated reporting that takes up a lot of your time or requires assistance from a different team. Here’s an example from the Customer Success area — the team might decide to evaluate the impact of two different email campaigns on the rate of calls scheduled by the customers in response (basically, A/B testing). If the number of calls is large and there’s no one-click way to download the information for analysis, this goal should probably be scheduled for a quarter where you don’t have numerous similar priorities.

Let’s now switch to the how part and discuss which of your team’s activities can be deprioritized. I recommend asking yourself the following questions: Which activities have a direct impact on your team’s key metrics, which ones are useful but have an indirect impact, and which do not contribute to these metrics at all? As a result of this exercise, all the activities would be grouped into three buckets:

• Mission-critical — has a direct impact
• Secondary — has an indirect impact
• Optional — doesn’t have an impact

Activities from the third group can be deprioritized immediately. If you feel that these activities still bring noticeable value to the organization, consider having a group brainstorming session with leaders of other teams to discuss whether they have the bandwidth to take them over. Then, perform another round of prioritization of activities in the second group and decide which of these activities can be discontinued. You may be tempted to keep all of them, but remember the main goal: creating a balanced workload for your team members to allow them to consistently hit their targets. Would they be able to do this if all of the activities in the second group were retained? If not, you’ll need to make a hard decision. All activities from the first group must be continued. But in a certain amount of time (e.g., next quarter), it might be a good idea to reevaluate the list — maybe at that point, some of the activities will move to a different group, and new decisions will need to be made.

Some of the activities that fall into either group may be characterized not as operational work but project-based. In such case, if you feel there’s value in the team working on these projects, determine how many the team would be able to complete in a month/quarter/year. Then, choose the specific activities you’re taking on. Create a clear backlog location for the remainder so that in the next period, you will already have a list to choose from.

I would also like to take the opportunity here to pass over a valuable recommendation I got from my manager regarding work prioritization. The fact that the team has been focusing on something for a long time is not a good enough reason to continue engaging in it. Every “we’ve always been doing it, so why stop now” action should be reevaluated regularly to confirm that it still complies with the main prioritization/deprioritization criteria I described above.

On a personal note, I have to say that it was very challenging for me to accept this since I usually get very invested and attached to the projects I build and drive forward. The very idea of giving up on them was quite stressful. But after I completed this prioritization process a few times, it became easier.

Choosing which balls to drop is essential to achieve business-critical objectives. Only by consciously deciding that certain activities cannot be put on the team’s plate do you create room for productivity and avoid work overload.