On the importance of Quick wins

Photo by Carl Heyerdahl on Unsplash

At work or at home, making lists of things to do is common enough. When those things are many, unappealing, or take real effort, it is just as common to look at the list with hesitation, and with fairly relative enthusiasm about starting…

Finding the Quick Wins

When motivation is short, there is a simple and easy technique: find the Quick Wins — the items on the list that cost little and take little effort. As a way of getting the engine started, it should not be underrated. In Klaro it takes about 5 minutes to create those two dimensions, Effort and Cost, and sort the cards by them.

The idea is then a simple one: isolate the Quick Wins, and get to work, card after card.

One thing leads to another

I rediscovered recently, working on some housework I had very little enthusiasm for, that one thing leads to another… and you move quite quickly from this:

to this:

At Klaro we know the lift that closing a card gives you so well that we made a special feature of it: it is even better when the cards disappear. The game then becomes emptying the board (without cutting corners, mind). After that it is a break, done, holidays, relax, whatever.

"But these are unimportant tasks"

You may object that cards which are both low cost AND low effort are generally of low importance too. Of course — but:

• it is the accumulation of those closed cards that creates the value, once you can do several dozen of them in a few hours or days (depending on the context).

• the motivation the process generates can quickly be turned on the bigger files, the ones that looked insurmountable until then on a Monday morning. And that value — being able to get going again — is often beyond price.

Quick Wins at work

The technique set out here may look anecdotal, or confined to small domestic chores. If that is what you are thinking, think again. It comes into its own, alone or as a team:

• facing a software project backlog listing hundreds of bugs and features to implement,

• facing a pile of 150 documents to review or correct,

• facing 250 pieces of student work to mark,

• facing a mountain of comments from a thesis supervisor,

• facing an endless list of prospects to call,

• facing hundreds of videos whose subtitles need translating,

• facing a renovation project needing several dozen consultations and visits,

• facing the organisation of a large event that needs serious preparation,

• and so on.

Two pillars of agile

In every one of those cases the effort needed is considerable. The Quick Wins technique is not a formal prioritisation tool, and indeed puts no emphasis at all on the importance (or the value) of the tasks it picks out. It would be a mistake to underrate it, all the same: applied regularly, it maintains a few of the essential pillars that explain why agile teams do well:

• a team that performs is a motivated team. Hence the importance of a sense of achievement,
• a team that performs delivers continuously. That is only possible by breaking the big files down into smaller tasks — into quick wins.

In all the cases above, and plenty of others, these agile techniques that our blog brings to light are of course supported by Klaro. We are listening, ready to help, or to co-create new ones with you.