Old way: Manage work by email and chat messages.

New way (not so new 🙂 ): Improve your skills to work better asynchronously.

Create systems where everyone has transparency and clarity around priorities and workload. I’m giving you four ways on how to do that in practice:

Using collaborative digital tools is essential

Public dashboard to align and track Goals

Map lessons learnt during the journey and pivot when necessary:

• To have clearer communication of the direction you want to achieve;
• Adapting OKR good practices is a simpler way to do it.

Roadmap breaking down the Goals

Ideally, in ‘Now-Next-Later’ format, or Quarterly.

It’ll always be a hypothesis, and this format (‘Now-Next-Later’) can be less stressful to keep this artefact alive.

A Weekly or Monthly Roadmap can be overwhelming to keep and stimulates other problems:

• It’ll stimulate micromanagement without a clear vision for the long term.
• It’ll constantly change week by week, day by day, and impact your whole plan ahead.

Encourage yourself, your peers and teams, to see the big picture, always connecting with your Goals and desired outcomes/problems to solve.

Kanban Board

Tools that you can use to create Kanban Boards, and manage work daily: Trello, Notion, Jira.

Experiment and learn with Flow Management good practices.

Shared Artefacts

For brainstorming, brainwriting, frequent feedback and updates with explicit plans and policies (e.g., public shared Drive, docs, wikis, Notion, Miro, Mural).

Experiment and learn with Backlog Management good practices

Continuously plan, refine and (re)prioritize.

Identify unnecessary ideas as soon as possible and discard them frequently.

Experiment and learn how to prepare and facilitate effective meetings

Use and abuse of visual ways to facilitate the meeting (examples above with digital tools).

Set clear goals for each session.

Don’t fall into the “it’s only 5min” trap, it’s rarely “only 5min” 🤡 🙃

Focus blocks

Set in your agenda for deep work, and keep a distance from what normally distracts you (e.g., cellphone, ~120 tabs in your browser)

It’s a good practice to pair with someone (the why/science behind it).

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This ‘new way’ (not so new 🙂 ) won’t eliminate email/chat messages, BUT, I guarantee you’ll feel less overwhelmed and it’ll sustainably enhance your productivity 💪❤️

🔗 Link to my Free Masterclass YouTube Playlist, if you want to dive deeper into the content of this post.