Our weekly Level 10 Meeting™ Issues List has ballooned to over eighty items because our team lists every minor complaint and future idea to prevent agenda drift during other sections. How do we curate this list so we do not waste time sorting through clutter?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

An oversized Issues List is a symptom of a team that does not know how to filter. When your list is eighty items deep, it ceases to be a tool for execution and becomes a graveyard of unaddressed thoughts. This creates decision fatigue and dilutes your focus during the critical IDS® portion of your Level 10 Meeting™.

To clean up this clutter, you must separate your active weekly Issues List from your long-term issues list. Your weekly Issues List must only contain items that are immediate bottlenecks, obstacles to achieving your quarterly Rocks, or critical weekly To-Dos that were missed. Everything else belongs somewhere else.

If a team member has a long-term idea, a strategic pivot suggestion, or a non-urgent system improvement, it does not belong on the weekly agenda. It belongs on the V/TO® long-term Issues List, which is only reviewed and prioritized during your quarterly and annual planning sessions.

The facilitator must ruthlessly curate the list before every meeting. Introduce a strict rule: if an issue is not impacting our operations or our Rocks in the next ninety days, it gets moved to the V/TO®. Additionally, consolidate duplicate issues. If three people put on different versions of the same operational bottleneck, combine them into one clear, concise issue.

By keeping your weekly list tight and focused only on the current quarter's execution, your team will arrive at IDS® with clarity. You will solve the issues that actually move the needle today, rather than debating future projects that you have no capacity to implement right now.