August 2020 – Parag Arora

Goals-based management ( cutting through random shit )

Doing 10x efforts require a lot of patience and control to not do 1x or 0.5x things. And there has never been any clear playbook to do 10x. To do 10x, you have to only set goals you see as 10x and only do tasks that have medium or high impact to these 10x things. Framework to achieve such is very simple.

Define your goals or KPIs you want to follow. Minimum you should do is next quarter goals or KPIs you are chasing
Create tasks in each such goals and tag each task with impact and complexity. There can be 3 levels of impact – high, medium and low. There can be 3 level of complexities – easy, medium and hard
High impact tasks are ones that directly contribute to the goal, medium impact is ones that contribute to something that directly contributes to these goals. Low impact tasks are ones where there is no clear visible impact that can be derived towards goals or impact is 5-6 hops away.
Easy complexity are tasks that can be done in less than a day, medium are ones which takes 1-3 days, hard are ones which will take more than a week.
Set timelines for each last task which will be achieved in the goal as a week before the end of the quarter.
Now set timelines for each task so that its easy to understand what tasks need to be achieved every week.
Do weekly planning by the above mode. Make sure you pick high impact, easy or medium tasks, and not low impact, hard tasks. If you have a high impact, hard tasks – divide them into medium or easy tasks.

And finally, God Speed! Let me know if you need any help in framework prioritization. I have started using notion.so and have templatized project management by the above philosophies already there, happy to help. Feel free to reach out over para[dot]arora[at]gmail

There are a lot of actions happening in the company, by people. People are just faces and never judge people or try to classify people. People keep growing or changing. Just keep seeing their actions and make remarks about actions, never people. Eventually, accountabilities are defined by groups of actions or directions of actions which are needed and they are grouped in such a way that logically it makes sense that since they are interrelated, it’s easier to find in a single person or a single person can grow to doing those set of actions defining a role for accountability. If they are not able to do all such actions as a collective single individual, either they are in the wrong seat or organization has misjudged all such action capabilities can be one individual and need to remove or divide them into more grouped accountability or roles. Whatever you do or practice, remember always to give direct feedback about the actions of people (oh, and never miss giving feedback) and never to the character of people or generalizing a human.