Your team has been submitting 15Fives, you're getting valuable insights on how their time has been at work, but you're curious about how to best utilize Priorities. You may be asking how are they different than objectives? Also, you want to know which priorities you should include week in and week out?
What Priorities are good for?
Objectives are great for big, longer term, aspirational goals. They paint the bigger picture of the goal you are trying to achieve, including specific key results that act as your deliverables along the way. We all know that there is a lot more work that goes into each key results. The key results don't accurately reflect the day to day work involved. Usually a key result will have a whole list of tasks that must be done in order to create that deliverable. This "list of tasks" are great candidates for the Priorities section on your 15Five.
Priorities help structure your work week. Priorities on your 15Five can be rearranged to display the most important tasks at the top. Priorities can also include put the day we want to get the task done in the priority field itself. These two ideas allow the Priorities section to double as a task management tool, without the clunkiness of a task management tool.
Now, for some examples.... 👇🏽
Use cases for Priorities in 15Five:
- Weekly routine tasks
- "The fresh start effect” and Flexible Priorities
- Task management/Daily self-assignments
1️⃣Weekly routine tasks
Let's say you have a recurring weekly task. You want to use 15Five as a reminder to complete that task and then show that the task is done. Perfect use case for Priorities. From your 15Five check-in, you can mark the priority as complete, use the arrow option to repeat the priority on your next check-in, and submit.
2️⃣“The Fresh Start Effect” and Flexible Priorities
According to the fresh-start effect, people are more likely to take action towards a goal after temporal landmarks that represent new beginnings. "Examples of landmarks that trigger the fresh-start effect include the start of a new week, month, year, school semester, or birthday."
You can take advantage of the fresh start effect by taking advantage of flexible priorities after your 15Five check-in was initially due and submitted. Let's say you report weekly on Fridays. Fridays are common due days because it allows reporters to look back and celebrate wins for the week. With the fresh-start effect in mind, your team would continue to report on Fridays, but would revisit their check-in on Monday and add/edit the priorities for the week.
See more information on how to set and edit your priorities in this article.
3️⃣Task management/Daily self-assignments
Priorities can be used to document of all the little tasks you have to do/have done during a busy work week. If you are feeling slightly worried that you may forget everything that you need to do or just want to document everything you accomplished during the week- use Priorities!
You can list your priorities day by day to make sure you are focusing on only one task per day. "Do less and obsess" is a saying we are fond of around here. The alternative is seeing a big list, not knowing what to focus on, and then feeling overwhelmed. Organizing your priorities by day is a great way to avoid decision fatigue.
Again, if you have more than three it may be helpful to put an asterisk or two (**This is priority #1) before your top three priorities, denoting these are the three that you must get done before all the rest.
Have a scenario regarding Priorities and need some help? Reach out to our Support Team.