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Ideas are plentiful, but finishing projects is what truly matters for business success. This approach helps you manage your brilliant ideas and turn them into completed tasks, whether you’re a natural idea generator or find yourself frustrated by constant new suggestions. It’s about focusing your energy effectively.
Key Takeaways
- Separate ideas into "quick wins" and "long-term projects."
- Prioritise one easy, high-impact task first.
- Commit to one larger project and see it through.
- Run workflows manually to clarify steps before automating.
Managing Your Ideas: Quick Wins vs. Long-Term Bets
When faced with a flood of ideas, the first step is to sort them. I like to split everything into two piles: easy wins and long-term successes. Anything that doesn’t fit into these categories gets set aside for now.
An "easy win" is something simple, quick to implement, and has a noticeable positive impact. If a task can be completed in under half an hour, it’s usually worth doing. These small improvements can make a big difference to customer service or staff morale. For example, a simple rule like allowing purchases under £50 without needing authorisation can save a lot of administrative hassle. It empowers people to make decisions quickly, as long as it’s within reason, of course.
More complex ideas, even those with the potential for significant business impact, require more resources and time. These are your "long-term bets." It’s important to be very selective about which of these you pursue, and usually, it’s best to focus on just one or two at a time. Trying to tackle too many big projects simultaneously can lead to delays and frustration.
Focusing on One Big Project
When I start working with a business, I often have many conversations and come up with numerous ideas. However, the real goal is to pick just one or two of the most impactful ones to focus on right now. Ideally, this includes one easy quick win and one more complex project that can be delivered relatively quickly.
It’s important to keep track of all the other ideas, even if they aren’t being actioned immediately. There’s a lot of good stuff that can be done later. Artificial intelligence is a good example; there are many potential applications, but perhaps the first step should be creating a clear policy. This involves assigning someone responsibility for AI, developing guidelines, and getting staff to sign off on them to prevent random experimentation.
The Challenge of Execution
While ideas are great, getting things finished is the real challenge. If you’re constantly jumping from one new idea to the next, it’s incredibly difficult to make progress. For the companies I work with, this can be a source of frustration – lots of ideas, but a lack of completion. My focus is on picking one thing at a time and seeing it through, because you simply can’t do everything.
This is especially true if you’re not involved in the day-to-day operations full-time. You have to be strategic about where you invest your energy. Sometimes, the technology or the readiness to implement a project isn’t quite there yet. In these cases, it’s easy to put a project on hold and move on to something else. This is why having a mix of quick wins alongside longer-term projects is beneficial. The quick wins provide momentum, while the longer-term projects, which are essentially research and development, can sometimes get stuck.
Tackling Overwhelming Tasks
When dealing with areas like cybersecurity or lifecycle management, the same principle applies. You might want a comprehensive policy with a budget and a plan, but this can take a significant amount of time, especially if the current situation is a mess. It’s easy for these large tasks to become overwhelming. This is certainly true with cybersecurity or artificial intelligence; there are so many things that need to be done, it’s hard to know where to start.
The simplest approach is to pick one thing and get it done. If you have multiple cybersecurity issues, identify the biggest risk that can be addressed in the next couple of hours and tackle that. This moves the needle forward. You also need to make progress on the bigger, more strategic goals, but you can’t do everything at once.
Therefore, when deciding what tasks to focus on, I recommend picking one or two small wins and one big project – your "whale" – to work on. It’s okay if this approach doesn’t work perfectly every time. The key is to be aware of your own working style and to adapt as needed to ensure that projects actually get finished.
