You have backlog full of ideas. You probably have some work that is half-done but always seems to get stuck. There's maybe a fresh incident that's emerging. And there's a key metric that looks like it is going South but you're not even able to make time to think about it.
Sound familiar?
So how to do you get your head up and decide where to focus your attention and your team's energy?
Get methodical.
Plot these things on the urgent v important axes—the Eisenhower matrix.
Then take each one in turn and try to capture the problem statement as a simple sentence. The shorter the better.
Pick the most important+urgent problem from your matrix and compare it against your company/team/personal strategy. Is this even something that you want to solve? If it doesn't align to your strategy — i.e. it doesn't “make the boat go faster” — then stop there and ignore it.
If it does feel like the right thing to do, then you need to somehow get a sense of the benefits of solving that problem and understand the scale of the issue.
Write a list of the important questions you want to solve BEFORE looking at your data. Then go looking for the answers. Rough figures are okay. Assumptions are okay to fill in the gaps. You're just trying to understand the order of magnitude of the problem. Remember data can only tell you what's happened in the past. You’re not looking for data on its own. You are looking for signals in the data that tell you if something in the real world is happening, or not happening.
If you've come this far, you are in a good place. You have a snappy problem statement, you have a sense of the scale of the problem, and that should point to what the benefits of solving that problem might be.
Refer back to your urgent vs important matrix but this time shuffle the order of importance based on the benefits you’ve sketched. And if you have any real-world deadlines or dates that you need to consider, shuffle the urgency based on those dates.
What is sitting on the top right? It’s your #1 priority, that’s what!