One Thing to Fix in January

Why lists produce nothing

Most businesses end December with a list of everything they intend to improve, and most reach February having done none of it.

That is not weakness. A list of fifteen items has no order, so every item competes with every other, and the urgent work of January beats all of them.

A single item behaves differently. It can be scheduled, it can be finished, and finishing it produces the appetite for the next one.

The difficulty is entirely in choosing, which is why the choosing deserves more thought than the doing.

Choose by cost, not by appeal

The selection rule, and it produces a different answer from instinct.

The item you want to do is usually the interesting one: a redesign, a new channel, a system.

The item worth doing is the one currently costing the most, which is frequently dull: unanswered calls, a price that has not moved, a supplier consuming your attention, or a form nobody has tested.

Put a rough figure against each candidate, in money or in hours per month, and take the largest.

That number is usually available within a minute and the ordering it produces is rarely the one you would have chosen.

Where the largest costs usually are

• Enquiries not answered quickly enough.
• Prices below what the work is worth.
• Time spent on something that could be removed.
• Work accepted that should be declined.
• A recurring cost producing nothing.
• Something one person alone can do.

None of those is a marketing project, which is worth noticing, since marketing improvements dominate most January lists and rarely dominate the cost list.

Define what finished means

The step that prevents a chosen item from becoming an ongoing intention.

Improve our response times is not finishable. Every enquiry answered within four working hours, with somebody named as responsible, is.

Write the finished state in one sentence, with a date, before starting.

That also tells you whether the item is genuinely one thing. If the finished state needs three sentences, it is three items and you have not chosen yet.

The date matters as much as the definition, since without one the work expands to fill the year.

A worked example

A business ended the year with fourteen improvements listed, headed by a website rebuild.

Putting rough costs against each moved the rebuild to eleventh.

The most expensive item was that enquiries arriving after five in the afternoon were answered the following afternoon, and a proportion of those people had already gone elsewhere.

The fix was neither expensive nor interesting: a named person checking at nine, a standard acknowledgement, and a stated response time on the site.

It was done in the second week of January and finished by the middle of the month.

The measurable effect over the following quarter exceeded anything they had expected from the rebuild, which they eventually did the following year with a clearer idea of what it was for.

Do it in January specifically

The timing argument, which is not incidental.

January is the quietest month for a large number of businesses, the month with the most available attention, and the month furthest from the next busy period.

An improvement made in January has eleven months to compound. The same improvement made in September has three.

It is also the month when the year's habits are set, and something completed in the first fortnight changes what the rest of the year feels like.

Deferring the one thing to a quieter moment later is how it becomes next December's list.

Then stop

The discipline that makes this work rather than becoming a list by another name.

When the one thing is finished, resist immediately starting three more.

Let it settle, watch whether it produced what you expected, and choose the next one in February with that information.

A business that completes one meaningful improvement each month is transformed within a year, and almost none manage it because they attempt four in January and finish none.

Sequence beats simultaneity, and the sequencing is the whole method.

Keep the list, but subordinate it

A note on what happens to the other fourteen items.

Do not discard them, since they are real and the exercise of listing them was useful.

Keep them in one place, ordered by the rough cost you assigned, and revisit the list when the current item is finished.

Several will have resolved themselves, become irrelevant, or turned out to be symptoms of the thing you fixed, which is a common and satisfying outcome.

The list is a queue rather than a plan, and treating it as a queue is what makes it survivable.

Tell somebody what it is

A small addition that changes the completion rate noticeably.

Say out loud, to a colleague, a partner, or an accountant, what the one thing is and when it will be finished.

That converts a private intention into something somebody may ask about, which is most of what a deadline does.

Where the improvement involves other people, telling them is necessary anyway, and framing it as the single priority for the month prevents it competing with everything else they are being asked for.

It also produces a useful reaction. If the person you tell is surprised by your choice, that is worth two minutes of discussion before you start rather than a month afterwards.

The counter-case

One thing at a time is too slow for some situations.

A business in genuine difficulty may need several changes simultaneously, and sequencing them carefully is a luxury it does not have.

Some improvements are also genuinely parallel, requiring different people and no shared attention, and forcing them into a queue wastes capacity.

There is also a risk in choosing an item so large that it consumes the whole year, which is single-tasking in name and paralysis in practice.

Choose one that can be finished in a month. If nothing on the list can be, the list is a set of projects rather than improvements, and it needs breaking down before anything else.

Choosing it

1. List everything you intended to improve.
2. Put a rough monthly cost against each.
3. Take the largest, not the most interesting.
4. Write the finished state in one sentence.
5. Give it a date in January.
6. Finish it before starting anything else.
7. Choose the next one in February.

Step two takes about ten minutes and reorders the list in a way that instinct does not.

Judging the whole site against the business is covered in which pages earned their place.

Frequently asked questions

West Coast Media Solutions Inc. provides web design, web development, hosting, digital marketing, and business consulting to organisations across Canada, drawing on more than twenty-five years in the field.