The Done Manifesto

Did you make New Year’s resolutions? How are those working out for you? (Seriously.) Are you clearing them off the list quickly?

If one of them was to stop procrastinating, drop everything right now and read this infographic and, more importantly, the accompanying text. (If, however, you have a profession like airplane pilot or safety engineer, please ignore most of it – it’s for people like me who spend their time doing much less consequential stuff.)

I’m particularly taken with the idea that “Done is the engine of more.” I do find that unfinished tasks, un-taken decisions, clutter up the future and keep me from clearing a path to the next great thing that lies ahead – and I see this with my clients, too. One of the most important disciplines in our marketing consulting business is defining what “done” looks like. Without that, we would spin our wheels, endlessly researching and analyzing, without moving forward to something that we call completed, so we (and our clients) can move on.

I find – both with clients and with our own management of The Mezzanine Group – that it’s very easy to get bogged down in decision-making. We never have perfect data; we don’t necessarily know what the outcome of a given decision may be. We frequently don’t even know the import of a given decision when we’re making it. One of my recent blogs, title ‘Making Better Decisions about Making Decisions,’ wrote recently about how making decisions is itself tiring, and the more so if the decisions are tough. So it’s critical, I think, to think frequently about how we can make things happen faster, decrease cycle time and get through things to get onto the next thing.

Even to write something like this – how many times should I edit it? How perfect does it need to be? What does done look like? And, maybe the most important question, what am I going to move on to once this is done? What can finishing this enable me to accomplish next?

So, as we head further into 2012, can we embrace the idea of Done? What would happen in your business, in your client base, in your product development, if you adopted more of these principles? Do you already use them? What are they doing for you? Are there risks of using them that should be considered?