Step 1: Set single source of truth

Do you know this feeling? You come to the office in the morning. There’s something already planned in your calendar. You have several unread emails, some of which will result in extra work. As you start going through them, Slack notification kicks in - more work. Then the phone rings. Does that sound familiar? You think you know what’s most important, but do you? Of course, every now and then you will get so bogged down that you will miss something truly important.

Now, multiply it by number of people in your team.

OUCH!

You need a system!

What kind of a system? Well, it needs to:

• Contain all work to be done;
• Be easily accessible and transparent;
• Make it easy to see what’s most important;
• Allow for people to assign themselves to specific tasks.

Which, if you’re all seated in one office, brings us to this:

Or, rather this:

Or (quite likely), THIS:

Just put them all together somewhere - many teams use whiteboards.

Now, if your team or its stakeholders are distributed, post-its won't work that well. Or, at all. You may use any collaboration tool. The simpler it is for you and your team, the better. Don’t jump into something used by your IT or software department, as these things tend to be unnecessarily complicated. You can use shared spreadsheet, like Office 365, iCloud, or Google Docs. You can also use dedicated simple tool like Trello.

Important thing is that the tool doesn’t matter that much as long as it’s convenient and easy for your team to use AND allows everyone to clearly see what’s the next thing to do, clearing your mind and ensuring you missed nothing.

Wrapping up step 1 - set single source of truth

I recommend you to pause this training and create your single source of truth. Simply dump ALL your existing tasks into one place.