Our leadership team maintains a 90 percent To-Do completion rate on paper, but leaders are checking off action items that are only half-finished or merely in progress just to preserve the metric. How do we kill this fake completion and define real done?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A weekly To-Do in EOS is a binary commitment. It is either one hundred percent complete within seven days, or it is incomplete. There is no middle ground, partial credit, or credit for good intentions. When leaders check off tasks that are merely underway, they artificially inflate the team metric, hide capacity bottlenecks, and undermine the integrity of the Level 10 Meeting.

During the To-Do review, the facilitator reads each item and the owner responds with one of two words: done or not done. If a leader says done, that means the deliverable is fully completed, communicated, and out of their hands. If the leader says they sent an email, started drafting the policy, or made progress, that item is officially not done.

The facilitator must enforce this standard without apology. When someone gives a conditional answer like it is basically done or I just need to hit send, the facilitator must immediately record it as not done. If a task cannot be completed within seven days, it was improperly framed during IDS. To-Dos must be single-action, seven-day bites, not multi-week mini-projects.

Do not fear having the weekly completion rate drop below 90 percent on the board. The 90 percent target is designed to expose operational friction. When the true number is visible, whether it is 60 percent or 75 percent, the team is forced to confront the root cause during IDS. You might discover that leaders are overcommitting, that Accountability Chart seats are overloaded, or that people are assigning fuzzy action items that lack a clear finish line. Clean numbers force clean problem solving.