Define Done: Outcome Blocking Is Key to Enhancing Your Impact - E75

Speaker A: You have done an exceptional job. You've blocked time on your calendar. You built the ideal week calendar. You protected your most important asset. And when that window opened up, you showed up for it, and you were present for every single minute. But have you ever gotten to the end of that block? That time that you set aside to accomplish the most important thing or meet with the most important person and wondered, what did I actually accomplish? Did I get done what I expected? Did I actually accomplish anything at all? And if someone asked you right now, what is different because of the time you spent, the time that was allocated on your calendar, could you answer that question? Now, here's what I want you to hear before you listen to anything else I'm going to say. You did not waste your time by setting up an ideal book calendar. You are not undisciplined. In fact, you did the hard part, which is defending that time in the first place. Whether it's an hour or two hours or half an hour, you put it on the calendar and you made sure that the time was allocated. The challenge is that too many of us never articulate with extreme specificity what that hour needs to look like, what the return on invested time should create, what done looks like. And when leaders feel this, most of the time, they go looking for the same thing. More time, a better system, a tighter calendar. I have watched hundreds of leaders do this, but the problem is not that you do not have the time. In fact, you already took the first step. The problem is that there is yet one more step, and, uh, almost nobody takes it. Stephen Covey called this out years ago, and he called it beginning with the end in mind, deciding what done looks like before you ever start. I call it outcome blocking, not time blocking, outcome blocking. It sits on top of the discipline that you already have. And it is what turns blocked time into real return. I have spent years working with leaders on this. How to build an ideal week, how to organize a calendar around what actually matters, instead of of around whoever asked for the time last. And I want to be very clear about something before I go one step further. Time blocking works. I believe in it completely. It is the floor of capability. And everything I'm about to say sits on top of it. And none of it works without it. I also want to be honest that I am not describing somebody else here. I have done this myself more times than I care to admit. I have protected an hour of time, worked the entire hour, and walked out of it with nothing that I could name. And so here is the ceiling and this is the part that I want you to sit with. A time block reserves the hour. That's all it does. It does not decide what has to be true when the hour is over. So you defend the time perfectly, and the work still fills every minute of it, because there's nothing inside that block holding it accountable to a result. And whether it is 30 minutes or a full afternoon, it does not really matter. What matters is that you took 60 seconds at the front of the time to decide what done looks like at the end of the period. Because this is not a conversation about time management. This is a conversation about return on invested time. There is a reason that this happens to highly disciplined people. Almost all of us have heard that work expands to fill the time available for its completion. It gets printed on posters. It gets quoted in every productivity book written in the last 50 years. Heck, I use this all the time with clients and with leaders. Anyone who's ever worked for me knows I'm going to say this. There was a British naval historian named Cyril Northcote Parkinson, and he wrote that in an essay in 1955. And what almost nobody knows is, ah, that that was his throwaway line. He called it a commonplace observation, putting it in his opening sentence, and then spent the rest of the essay on something else entirely. He was writing about organizations. His argument was that bureaucracies grow whether or not there is any more work to do, because an official who feels overworked asks for two subordinates instead of one peer. Since a peer becomes a rival, then those subordinates need supervising. They generate approvals and coordination and reports. And now everyone is making work for each other. The work is not arriving from the outside. The place is manufacturing it internally. And his numbers were real. Between 1914 and 1928, the British Navy lost about two thirds of its ships and about a third of its people. And over that same stretch, the administrative staff grew roughly 6% a year. Every year, fewer ships, fewer sailors, more administrators. So when the work fills your block, that's not a character flaw, that's closer to gravity. And it has been operating on your calendar the entire time. And what I mean by this is we set aside time and we fill the time. If we set aside the time and then define the work we want to do, what done looks like we can actually compress the time. And that means that the fix is not more discipline. You already have the discipline. You proved that the moment that you put the block on your calendar and defended it against everyone who wants a piece of you. The behavior that got you Here was learning to protect your time. The behavior that gets you there is learning to define what that time has to produce. And I learned that from a man named George. Some of you have heard me talk about George before. He was the guy that called me out when I was distracted by my apple watch during his one on one. And he called me on my own bs. He knew that I was falling short of the person I wanted to be. Now, you can listen more about that in that situation in episode 27, but let's get back to the point here. Because George had a role on our leadership team that was entirely his. His job in every meeting that we sat in was to make sure that we articulated what the goal was. And I could hear him saying this out loud as I sit here today, and it's been 10 years since I was in a room with him on this topic. He would say, hey, guys, before we go any further, what's our goal when we get done? What must have been accomplished. And he was brilliant at it. If the goal was not clearly stated at the beginning of the meeting, it was his responsibility to ask the the question, not a suggestion. His responsibility. He would say, what is the goal here? And at the end of our time together, what must have happened for this time to have been a worthwhile investment and use of everyone's time? And he asked this so that we stayed on point, not to slow us down, to aim us. And from that point on, in every room that I've been responsible for, I have made sure that someone has this dialed in, that we have a person whose job this is someone who is responsible for calling it out. What are we trying to achieve? What must be true when we walk out of this room? Now, let me tell you how I think about this today. And this is not a theory thing for me. This is a practice I still have to work on. I catch myself walking into rooms without having asked that question. I catch myself protecting an hour without deciding what the hour owes me. That pull towards just getting started, to leaning in, make a decision and go, that's an old poll and it's a strong one. And I honestly don't think it ever goes away. The difference is now I notice it. It's almost an allergic reaction. When I'm sitting down, I go, whoa, wait a minute, what am I trying to achieve? What George was doing has a name and it's not the one that most people would guess. I, uh, told you at the top that Covey called this beginning with the end in mind. He put that into the World in 1989. It was Habit 2 from his 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, which if you haven't read, is an absolute life changer. But look at where he applied it. He applied it to a life, a mission, your roles. He had people write personal mission statements, long horizons, big canvases. And it's genuinely, principally good work. I love it, I do it, I practice it, and I highly recommend it. And outcome blocking takes that exact same discipline that beginning with the end in mind and, and it drops it into the next 30 minute cycle. And that's the whole contribution. It's not the idea, uh, it's the scale of what we're doing, what must be done. 60 seconds spent at the beginning of any task, any meeting, any work session will give you a guaranteed return on that invested time. And it's a core question with a couple of components that you sharpen to make sure that, that that energy you're investing gives you the outcome that you want. Component number one is this question, what does done look like? And this is the one you're going to use the most often. This is the one where you say, what must be true for me to consider that this in its current state, this task, this time, this whatever it is, will check the box. What does done look like? If I'm sitting down to do my daily plan, I don't just sit down and journal. I sit down with the goal of walking away from that session. Whether it's 15 minutes, 10 or 5 doesn't really matter. With an understanding of what is the one most important thing I must accomplish today. Now I'll journal out five or six things and then I pick the one that moves the needle, the one that drives the change, the one that creates the most valuable that is it, that's done. It takes me just a minute. But I don't just show up and start writing. I do it with purpose. The scope is the discipline here. You're not defining a finish line for a project. You're not going in and rehashing or relitigating a bunch of prior decisions. You're defining what must be done at the end of this session, at the end of this time block. What I love about this is done is not when the time runs out. Done is what you named before you start. Some days it takes me five minutes to do my daily plan. Some days it may take me 30. I allocate 20 to 30 minutes every single day. Most days I take much less time than that. And when I finish, when that box is checked and I've articulated the one thing I move on the session is done. Component number two of this, what does done look like? Is asking the question, how does this link to our most important work? If you're doing it for yourself, how does this link to my most important work? This is the one I've been asking myself a lot over the last couple of years. And if I'm really honest, it can create a tremendous amount of discomfort. This is the qualitative question. This is the one that says, hey, I'm not just going to accept that I know what an execution output is. I'm going to make sure that I'm doing the right thing. Does this thing align, uh, with what it is I've said is most important? So before I start on something, how does this support the work that actually matters, my goals for the quarter, the two or three things that have to move forward? And here's why this question sharpens so much. It gives you permission to stop the work. If I cannot answer this question quickly and honestly, then either the work gets paused or I have to ask the harder version and am I actually working on the most important things or am I working on the things that showed up? Um, am I chasing the shiny object? The research here is not subtle. 35 years of goal setting work across more than 100 different types of tasks, and something north of 40,000 people keeps landing in the same place. Specific and difficult, articulated well, allows you to do your best. It beats just showing up consistently. It's one of the most replicated findings in all of leadership research. Here's what I want you to walk away with from this section. You have permission to quit the work. If you can't cleanly, clearly and quickly answer the question. How does this link to my most important work? How does this align with the thing I'm trying to accomplish? If you can't answer that quickly, you have permission to quit. This is the permission question. It's not a check the box question. Component number three, who owns articulating? Done. And this is the George question. This is the thing I want you to walk away with from this section. Outcome blocking is not just a solo effort. It's not just about how you show up for the time blocking that you've done on your calendar. It's not an individual exercise. It works just as well and just as powerfully in a team environment. This was the, uh, George question. And it's the one that almost no leader has assigned to anyone with any real specificity. So in a team setting, who names what Success looks like at the start, and just as important, who arbitrates it at the end to make sure that we got there. So if George said, hey, what's our goal? George was the guy at the end of the meeting that says, we set this out. This was our expectation, and we did it or we didn't, and he called it out. Today, I help leadership teams install this. When I'm working with a team and I see an execution gap, I swim upstream and I look for the clarity gap. And this is very often where it's hiding. In fact, uh, just a few weeks ago, I was with the leadership team, and they were talking about drift and about where the time in their meetings was actually going. We went around the room and got clear on the roles. And one of those roles was for someone to. To call out the goal. What's our goal here? Weeks later, I was sitting in on one of their management meetings and just listening. And the CEO did it unprompted. It wasn't her specific role. Nobody reminded anybody. It just came out naturally right at the top. And what was so cool is it focused all of the conversation. It went from hey, this is the problem, or this is the thing, and I want to talk about this, to hey, guys, what's the goal? What is the real problem we're trying to solve when we do this conversation, when we lean into this, what are we trying to do what is done look like? And, man, it zeroed everybody in. It was awesome to watch. That's the moment I care about. It's no longer a tactic we're deploying. It's a behavior, it's a discipline. It's just the way things are done around here. Somebody in the room must own the question. And if it's nobody, it needs to be you. The definition of done becomes the bullseye. It becomes the target. In our scorecard work, that's exactly what we call it. And the reason is simple. You cannot hit a target that nobody has drawn out, that nobody has articulated, that nobody has put out there. Instead, we're just going to spend a lot of effort. Define the target, define what done looks like. Block out the outcome you want. Most leaders don't need more advice. They simply need clarity. That's what the Vision to Victory scorecard is all about. It's free, it's fast, and it gives you a clear picture of where you are and what's next. Start now@clarityalignmentexecution.com let's make sure that your next step forward is the right one. Let's go Back to that 1955 essay for a second. Work expands to fill the time available. That law always had a limit built into it, and the limit was you. It was actual time. However far the work expanded, it could only expand to the edge of a person's workday or the number of hours they were awake and working on it. That ceiling was always there, holding the whole thing in place, whether you knew it or or not. Today, AI has taken that ceiling off. There is no limit anymore. Work does not expand to fill available time anymore. It expands to fill the capacity available, and capacity is now effectively unlimited. There is an old corollary of that same law from the computing world that says it better than I can. Data expands to fill the space available for storage. Nobody has ever bought a big hard drive and kept it empty. And this isn't just a prediction. Researchers spent eight months embedded inside a technology company watching 200 people work alongside AI. What they found is that people expanded their own work to fill the capacity it handed them. Broader scope, longer hours, more threads running at once. Nobody asked them to. There was no mandate from leadership. They did it themselves. What they're doing is diffusing the human effort. They're diffusing themselves to keep up with the machine. The work has expanded to fill available space. And A survey of 6,000 executives across four countries run jointly by four central bank research groups found that nine in 10 firms report no measurable productivity gain from any of it. Enormous investment, enormous output, no points on the board. So here is where this leaves you. Time. Blocking constrains time. And time is no longer what is constraining your output, which means constraining it constrains nothing at all. A defined outcome is the only constraint that you have left. So now let me make this really practical, because it's actually a lot smaller and a lot easier than it sounds. Here's the exercise. And you don't need to open up a blank notepad or a blank note page for this one. I just want you to look at your calendar for tomorrow and pick a window that you've, uh, decided in advance and you've articulated. You're going to spend some time. Let's just say, for example, you're going to spend 45 minutes reviewing the budget. Step one, make sure that is articulated in the time block maybe you just had set aside for financial review. Well, you know that you need to review the budget, relabel it, name the block, review the budget. Very specific, very intentional, very focused. Step two, ask yourself that question. What does done look like I'm going to review the budget? I intend to send an email with an approval to the cfo. Perfect. Now you know at the end of that time what you're going to do. Or I'm going to review the budget and ensure that these three sections meet my expectations. That's what you're going for. You want to get very specific that at the end of the session, what has been done. Step three, Write this where you can see it. Put it in the calendar. Invite. Put it on a sticky note, Put it on the top of the page that's in front of you before you start the work. It does not count if it stays in your head because the whole point is that it's there to keep you from drifting. It's there to argue with you when you start to focus on other things. Step four, Close the loop. When the block ends, look at what you wrote and answer one question. Did this happen? Yes or no? Not a performance review. It's just a gut check. Did I achieve what I set out to do? I began with the end in mind. Did this happen? That closing loop is what turns us from being a good intention into real muscle memory. Now, let me name the objection to this and I can share this because a leader I coach lived it. And I think a lot of you are probably carrying the same thing. I know that I am too. This person's name is Rodney. He's a multi unit operator and he is really, really good. He came and joined one of our office hour calls on a Friday morning and told me that he drifted away from time blocking because he got lazy. He just got busy. He was too busy moving, he was too busy making decisions and getting in the field. He was in the stores, he was with his people. And um, somewhere in that motion, he lost sight of how important it was to have time set aside. But here's the part that mattered more. He wasn't deciding what he needed to accomplish. And so my answer was that he needed to go back to time blocking. He needed to rebuild the container. But more importantly, he needed to upgrade it. His practice, he needed to take it one step further and add outcome blocking on top of it. Set aside the time, define what good looks like. Set aside the time, define what done is. Two hours in the store is not just two hours of presence. It's three conversations with specific people about specific things that reinforce what we stand for while we're here. Performance results, whatever it is, it's very intentional. So then we worked his issue right there live on the call. And I said, hey, when you go visit the store, it's on your calendar. What is it that must be true or done when you walk out for you to know it was successful? And he said, well, I'd like to talk about gross profit and I'd like to review the last week's sales. I said, perfect. That's what you're going to do. And you're going to show up with that intention and you're going to do that thing. And then he did it. And he got into three specific questions and he drove the process. He took that company goal, he articulated and he met with the people. He didn't show up for the meeting. He showed up to create an impact. That's what outcome blocking is. It's deciding what's the impact I'm going to make with this time. I want you to do this, take this effort, this 60 seconds. Ask yourself before you start, what am I going to accomplish with my time? What is it that will make everyone here know I was there? Why does my presence matter? Uh, as you think about practicing this, as you think about bringing this to life in your world, just start it. Just do it tomorrow. Do it on your very next meeting. Do it on your next appointment with yourself. Don't do it once a week in your, uh, weekly planning. Just start tomorrow. 60 second question. What does done look like? What is my goal? How will I know if I got there? That's it. Begin daily and repeat it. And do it over and over and over again. It's the first question you ask yourself before you start anything. It works. It creates a compound effect. And the beautiful thing is, the more you do it, the better you get at it. The sharper your outcomes become, the higher return on invested time you create. Here's what I want you to know as you walk away from our time together today. Time blocking absolutely works. Uh, it's the first step. Go back and listen to episode 39 where I walk through how to do this. And this is a practice I work with, all of the CEOs I work with. Time blocking works, but it's the first step. The next step is the more important one. Outcome blocking. What must be true or different based on this investment of time, how will I know I made it worthwhile? Outcome blocking is nothing more than done blocking. Define done. Define excellence. Then you simply get to go do it. Here's what I would ask of you. Run this 60 second practice for a week. Tell me what happened. Reach out, send me a note on LinkedIn or send me an email I'd love to hear because I know if you sharpen your intention at the beginning of any task, your productivity, your outputs, your effort and impact will increase. And you know what? When you do it for yourself, you're teaching others what done. Looks like you're beginning to install the discipline that George brought to our teams. What's our goal here? To find. Done. Begin with the end in mind. Hey, before you go. If this episode helped you see leadership differently, I have three personal requests. First and second. This is the most important one. Share this with one leader who needs it. Think of someone in your network who's frustrated with their team's execution or is trying to scale their own impact. Copy this episode link right now and text them, hey, I just listened to this episode and I think you'll get real value from it. That simple act of sharing that is servant leadership in action. Second, subscribe to Leadership Unlocked. Whether you're on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or your favorite podcast player, just hit subscribe or the follow button. That way you won't miss the next episode and it helps us reach more leaders like you. And third, if you're willing, this would be a huge help for us. Leave a five star rating and write a quick review. I know it takes 60 seconds of your time, but here's what it does. It helps other leaders discover the show. Every rating, every review. It's how we expand our impact together. So those three things. Share with a friend. Subscribe, leave a review. I'm deeply appreciative and that would give us so much help. Thanks for being part of the Leadership Unlocked community. Now, uh, go create some clarity for others.