Marissa Mayer and "Ruthless" Prioritization

How do we get it all done?   With the competing demands at work - forget about a 40 hour work week, it often doesn't seem possible to get it all done in 60 or 70 or more hours.

So let's take a short lesson from Marissa Mayer.    Ms. Mayer made news several months ago when she was lured from her long-term executive position at Google to take the helm at Yahoo.   She made news again when she just returned to work from a two week family leave after giving birth to her son.   When asked how she gets everything done, Ms. Mayer, the youngest CEO of a Fortune 500 company, responded with this piece of advice.

"You have to ruthlessly prioritize."

She's right;  one of the key responsibilities we have as leaders is to make great use of our resources through prioritization.    Often we are so slammed - do this report, get this analysis done, attend this meeting, etc -  we perceive that we are too busy to prioritize.  In fact, to maintain some semblance of work/life balance and to do good work, we need to make prioritization, well, a priority.

Establish for yourself how you are going to prioritize.  Here's a few ideas to get you started:

• What is business critical?   What absolutely must happen that will either make business much better or disallow a shortfall in business?
• What (even though perhaps not critical) will make a substantive difference to your business or team?
• What are other team members relying on you to deliver so that they may do their jobs?
• If I do this piece of work - will it make a difference?  To anything or anyone?
• Evaluate importance given relativity.   Something that may have seemed very important, and do-able last week may not be viewed in the same light given the circumstances of this week.
• Does it matter?   At times we do reports, or repetitive work that at some time, some one deemed important - is that still the case?   If not, get rid of it.  Be unafraid to challenge the status quo.
• Can it/should it be delegated?   Use strong delegation as a tool to not only increase learning among the team, but also use it as a tool to get the project with the right expert.   Sometimes projects come your way that really would be better off with another professional.
• Have the courage to say "no" or "I can't manage your request right now, but I can do it in the foreseeable future."

The team that I managed evolved to a state of continuous prioritization.   This was not an exercise of mindlessly moving projects around;   this was active thinking about the business, the human and financial resources we had available at the time and how to best use those resources to advance the goals of the company.   

If we don't prioritize, projects and issues that don't really matter get in the way of big ideas that really move the business forward.   When we prioritize those big ideas, we are not only driving the business but we were leading the mission of the company.