A. What are your plans?

Are they written down? Have you shared them with others to get help, resources, and be held accountable? So far this year, are you focused on the big items? What has been added; do you need to refocus? Consider quarterly evaluation (see C below) to learn and adjust priorities. It not too late to create your strategic and annual plans, link to more.

B. In your role, what are your responsibilities?

What are the biggest items you are responsible for? Do they bring value to the customer or user of your output? Is this where you are spending your time? Is this where resources are assigned? Consider evaluating your responsibility vs. skill to understand what knowledge and skills to develop. Also consider a mentor, coach, or technical assistance provider for extra guidance and help along the way. A great way to increase your value add is by relentlessly identifying and eliminating the waste activities in your day.

C. It is a great time to reflect and find lessons learned

Periodically pause and evaluate your performance. This 4-step approach is used at the end of a meeting, throughout the year, end of a phase or the end of a project. It is a simple yet quick and effective technique to learn from the past, change the present, and create the future. Stop reliving the same mistakes and frustrations; instead learn and change! Link to learn this, see "learn from the past, change the present, create the future" and SRLD™:

1.  STATUS: What have you accomplished vs. your targets? 
2.  REASONS: What helped or hindered your accomplishments?
3.  LEARNINGS: What are the underlying learnings or root causes why you did / did not perform as desired?
4.  DIRECTIONS: What actions need to be taken to learn from the past and keep getting better?   

D. Continually prioritize your time.

How are you starting your days? Do you have a prioritized list of items to accomplish today or this week? Is data used to judge your priorities? Here is a link to the recent webinar with some prioritization methods. We also teach prioritization in Yellow, Green, and Black Belt trainings (Learn more).

E. Often 80% is great AND perfection is not always needed. Which would you prefer 1) 1 month to get 80% improvement or 2) 6 months to get 99%? Improvement is continual; perfection is sometimes more than needed. Improvement involves problem solving, trying something, measuring results, learning, and over time continuing to identify more innovative changes to go beyond the 80%. Kaizen is an advanced improvement method that helps you get big (45%-90%) change in work process times and quality defects. Kaizen is done in rapid fashion (5 days). Spending very focused time pays off with results and impact sooner. Kaizen is also fun and engaging for the team; thus another win-win strategy to use time wisely and rapidly reap the benefits. Link to more

Increase your time in value-added activities to make the most of the remaining 80% of 2022.

 *from Virgil's Georgics, line 284, book three