"Rule of Five" will help better manage teams

When a boss walks around you and demands a success report, your first reaction will most likely be to report on a huge list of very important and extremely exciting projects you are working on.

Let's look at things realistically: despite the fact that these tasks are not a complete fiction, in fact they do not exactly reflect what you are really wasting time on. This is normal for you - want to prove that your work carries value for the company. But ask any manager, and he will answer that you can hardly surprise him with the number of your “priorities”.

As Michael Pryor, CEO of Trello, says: “You do not have to prove to me that you are busy. I know that you are busy. ” The argument is the classic “quality, not quantity”: if you are working on a million tasks, can you really accomplish each one effectively?

Consider the following: instead of reporting a complete list of tasks for which you spend only a fraction of your attention, limit your list to just 5 points.
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Manager's dilemma

Joel Spolsky, co-founder of Trello, oversaw a team of 10 people at his software development company Fog Creek. He saw everything that was assigned to each of the team members, but he could not tell which of the tasks active work was being carried out at the moment.

“The long list of thousands of individual tasks, from which everyone takes 25, does not really give an insight into what everyone is working on,” explains Joel.

Another dilemma is to know whether employees prioritize tasks that Joel considers as such as their manager. “It seems to me that most of the time people are working on a huge number of small tasks and do not know that the main priority of the company lies elsewhere,” he says.

When he decided to sort things out, he saw that, as a rule, his employees mixed short-term and long-term goals, as well as urgent priorities with superficial tasks, but never really explaining what they were working on at the moment. Most of these tasks were not really in the forefront, and did not reflect the work that was being done.

At that time, Joel already managed Fog Creek and StackExchange at the same time, and he came to the conclusion that he needed a tool to quickly figure out what was going on in his companies and what his people were working on.

He created a virtual whiteboard on which people could indicate the tasks they are working on. There was only one rule on this virtual board: a person could indicate only 5 points. There are two tasks that he performs now, two that he plans to work on in the next stage, and one that he will probably work on later, but her priority has not yet been determined.

Now he had only 5 tasks per person to check. If you count, it goes 50 items in total, which is much easier to track. As a manager, he received a clear understanding of what was going on, and also such a process helped his employees prioritize their work and really achieve something.

And there are two of them left

The brain, in fact, can absorb and process only a limited amount of information at a time. One of the concepts that all productivity methodologies agree on is that productivity means focus.
Assigning two tasks helps to understand the specifics of the work of a particular day or week.

“They can switch between two main projects, but if they think that they are working on three problems, surely enough of one of them will not do enough work,” says Joel.

This will guide managers and employees to what the brain is currently dealing with. Because of this, they will not ask you questions that are not relevant to the current task.

When you have two tasks, you can switch from one to the other if you get stuck or if you get bored. If there are more than two of them, you will begin to worry about the choice, be exposed to risks, or simply do not know where to start.

A look into the future

If you specify two more tasks that you will work on after you complete the current ones, this will allow you to create a real plan of your work. This will help you and others evaluate what will happen next and act accordingly.

For example, if you are a developer, and indicated that next week you will start developing a new exciting feature, the marketing team will find out that they can start planning promotional materials.

Or imagine that you are working in a large team of lawyers involved in the verification of contracts, and you specify two documents that you plan to consider next. Your assistants will be able to easily prepare the relevant materials, other team members will know which contracts are already occupied, and your supervisor will be able to plan which contracts should be put into operation as follows.

Or, for example, you are a content manager who paints his thematic plan, and your photo editors need to know which articles they need to prepare graphics for. All they have to do is look at your list of priorities.
Discard unnecessary tasks

By specifying a task that you do not plan to work on, but which others are expected to accomplish from you, you will be able to inform your team about what is happening. This can happen for several reasons: lack of time, interest, or simply because it is not in your priorities.

“It may sound like:“ It will never be done, because it does not make sense, ”or“ It will never be done, because we don’t have time for it, ”explains Joel.

Most importantly, it will help people understand why this particular feature or article will not be published in the near future. When expectations are true, a more satisfactory result is obtained for all.

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