This past summer, I didn't take a vacation. Instead I strapped down to do the Y-Combinator StartUpSchool, to see what I could learn about building startups, that could help my favourite project – CommerceCore™. The time I invested paid off handsomely in new knowledge I gained, that I never had the opportunity to in all these years as an entrepreneur.
One of the concepts I learnt was Impact Tables.
The idea is simple. Rate every activity that you or your team would be undertaking by the impact it would have in "High", "Medium" or "Low".
You ask, "but impact on what"? Fair enough..
Impact on a key metric that you and your team are working on driving.
The first thing that crosses your mind would be revenue. Sure, you can assess the impact of every activity you undertake by the impact it is expected to have on revenue!
But there could be other metrics that you are working on, or individual teams/people around you are working on. For example, the impactful-metric for your website team could be conversion-rate. And for your customer success team would be retention, and development team could be features released.
Within weeks, our teams fell in love with this way of prioritising their activities. Every activity started to be critically singled out for the effect it would have on strategic or tactical goals.
At some point, we realised that our calendars should be carrying this parameter, so we spend more and more of our workday on stuff that matters, rather than getting "carried away" by everything that sounds/looks important. Dwight Eisenhower's Importance vs. Urgency 2x2 matrix comes to mind.
Btw. since we have started to like Odoo v16 so much, we might actually adapt the Odoo Calendar across the board (which means ditch our current Google-Calendars), and adapt it to track Impact and our common metrics.
To top off this method, you can play with introducing Complexity (of completing the Activity) as a third parameter. This could be a (easy) 1 day activity, (not-so-easy) 2-3 days activity or a (hard) 5+ days activity. You'd be surprised at the high-impact easy tasks that you can think of, and low-impact hard tasks you can avoid.
