Many of our weekly Level 10 Meeting to-dos are so complex that they cannot realistically be completed in seven days, leading to them being pushed week after week. How do we keep our to-dos strictly weekly without turning them into minor Rocks?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

If your team is consistently pushing weekly to-dos to the next week because they are too complex, you are letting your Level 10 Meeting™ turn into a planning session rather than an execution pulse. A weekly to-do must be an action item that can realistically be completed within seven days. When you allow multi-week projects to clog your to-do list, your completion rate drops, and accountability suffers.

To fix this, the facilitator must act as a filter during the IDS® portion. When a solution is agreed upon and a to-do is proposed, ask the owner if they can realistically get it done by next week's meeting. If the answer is no, do not accept the to-do in its current form.

Instead, force the owner to break the task down into a smaller, bite-sized milestone that can be finished in seven days. For example, if the solution is to write a new customer onboarding manual, the weekly to-do should not be to write the manual. The weekly to-do should be to outline the table of contents or draft the first chapter.

If a task cannot be broken down and must take several weeks of sustained effort, it is not a weekly to-do. It is either a quarterly Rock or a special project that belongs on your V/TO® long-term Issues List to be scheduled during your next quarterly session. Keeping your to-dos strictly weekly ensures your execution stays fast and measurable.