Our Level 10 Meeting™ Issues List has grown to over fifty items, and we waste valuable minutes every week just sorting through them. How do we aggressively purge and manage a bloated Issues List so we only focus on what matters now?

Question

Tyler Smith · Accepted Answer

A bloated Issues List is a hiding place for lazy prioritization. When you have fifty items on your list, you do not actually have fifty issues; you have a collection of minor complaints, long-term ideas, and unassigned tasks that are cluttering your focus. This visual noise makes it impossible to solve your most critical challenges. To clean up your weekly pulse, you must aggressively purge the list using these operational rules:

- Move any issue that does not need to be solved in the next seven days to your long-term issues list on the V/TO®.
- Review the list before the meeting and delete any items that are actually just updates, converting them to brief People Headlines if necessary.
- Combine similar or overlapping issues into a single, comprehensive issue that addresses the underlying systemic problem.
- Force the team to pick only the top three issues to solve during each meeting, completely ignoring the rest until those three are resolved.

Keep your weekly Issues List lean and mean. It should rarely exceed ten to fifteen active items. By keeping the list focused on immediate, high-priority operational obstacles, you ensure your leadership team spends their valuable energy solving the things that are holding the business back today.