As a strategic planning consultant, I focus a lot of my energy on helping groups grapple with a 2-5 year time-frame. Too often we’re so focused on the current moment that we never look beyond to define who we are, where we want to go, how to get there, and how we’ll measure progress.
Yet, even as I write that sentence, I know that the current moment matters. This year perhaps more than most.
And as I talk to Executive Directors, I often find a haphazard approach to how they prioritize their work and track their to-dos on a daily or weekly basis.
Nonprofit leaders – more than just Executive Directors – need workable systems for short-term planning and to-do management.
Too many just wing it.
I recently was challenged to describe the elements of a useful system.
Here are four essential requirements for a nonprofit short-term planning and accountability system
1. Tracking to-dos
This is the basic building block. This should include a nutshell version of the task, an opportunity to provide more details (preferably with a hyperlink to external information of relevance), a due date, and the ability to track progress (including marking the item as completed when appropriate).
As tasks are completed, they should be archived, but not deleted, so that it remains possible to search them or even reopen them if it turns out something wasn’t actually completed.
Ideally the system should allow for recurring to-dos, that automatically get a new due date upon completion of the prior one or that always occur on specific dates of the week, month, etc.
2. Project level organization of tasks
A flat to-do list with hundreds of tasks (as most Executive Directors probably could identify if pushed) can feel overwhelming and makes forward-looking planning challenging.
Ideally tasks should be categorizable by a list of “projects.” I’m using the word project largely because the various online systems that can be used are often referred to as “project management” tools.
For most nonprofit Executive Directors, the projects might be the bigger categories of their work (fundraising, board governance, fiscal management, communications, etc.).
Ideally, the projects should be able to be broken down into sub-projects, so that fundraising from individuals can be kept separate from grant fundraising.
The point of breaking things down into categories is so that you have the opportunity to view all your tasks either as one long list, presumably sorted by due date, or alternatively to just see all your tasks within a specific project – or even sub-project.
While the long daily task list is great for when you start your day and want to see what needs to be done, the “project” view is nearly essential when it comes to forward-looking planning that involves adding things systematically to your to-do list.
Did you just schedule your next board meeting? Take 5 minutes to add all the tasks associated with the upcoming board meeting (crafting the agenda, pulling together materials, sharing the agenda, etc.). Did you just get invited to submit a grant proposal, take 5 minutes to add all the tasks associated with pulling together the proposal and accompanying materials.
Yes, you could do this with an entirely flat list, but it’s much easier to think of all the to-dos when you’re looking at a partial list focused on just that project.
I used to accomplish the above in an Excel spreadsheet where I had a column for the broad area of work, a column for the task, and a due date column. I could sort the Excel spreadsheet either by due date or by the broad area of work and also due date. And then re-sort back when appropriate.
Of course, in the pre-computer age you could also accomplish this with detailed handwritten notebooks.
3. Collaboration
While the above three requirements are sufficient for an individual, organizations are team endeavors and whatever system you utilize needs to provide some means by which multiple individuals within the team can share with each other what they’re working on and even collaborate on the same projects and to-dos. This is where the dozen or so most robust online project-management tools really shine.
Reassigning tasks, sharing deadlines, showing how task A by person A needs to take place before person B can begin Task B, sharing links/comments on tasks taken on by others. These are just a handful of the most basic boosts to collaboration that can now be secured at a very low cost. I can only wish these tools had been realistically available in my years as an Executive Director leading a team!
Getting everyone onto the same system and getting them to use it isn’t necessarily a hill to die on, but if I were a nonprofit leader I’d push really hard to make that happen, absent a really compelling reason otherwise.
4. Some connection to longer-term planning
The above system is a great way to plan for and accomplish a lot of things. But how do you know that you’re prioritizing the right things? When you’re an Executive Director staring at the long to-do list and realizing that 3 out of the 10 things you put into your to-do list for the week you’re just not going to be able to do, what gets triaged?
Or better yet, never gets put in at all because you’re thinking about your own capacity as you identify to-dos.
Whether it’s a strategic plan or some other tool, you (and your team) need some method to identify priorities. This may show up in your project management system where you pre-identify the essential tasks from the “icing on the cake” tasks.
What system to use? There’s nothing magic here. But having alignment around your broad, long-term aims, the major methods you’ve identified to advance those aims, and how to measure progress is a great start.
Then taking stock – probably monthly – and saying: what’s most important in the next month or two?
Then going back to your project management system and verifying that the things you want to prioritize are definitely incorporated into your projects/tasks. And perhaps deleting or moving out in time those tasks that you’d still like to eventually do, but that aren’t priorities in the short or medium-term.
Is this too much planning?
I can already hear a couple people I’ve known saying: “Who has time to do all that planning? As an Executive Director, if I’m not running 100%, things will fall apart.”
My response: Better to spend 4 hours/week planning and 36 hours/week doing. You may do 10% less “activity,” but you can feel far more confident that you’re doing the right activity, especially in alignment with your team. You’re also far more likely to be proactive than reactive to events.
In my experience, leaders who operate with a higher degree of planning and project management also feel less stress. Not zero stress. But less, because they can more easily take stock and see with their own eyes what needs to be done by when and make adjustments accordingly, rather than relying on intuition and hope. This means less burnout and a longer-term ability to stay in the role.
If you have specific project management tools or approaches you recommend for others, please share as a comment!