Enhancing Accountability With Trello To Achieve Your Goals
So You Have New Year's “Intentions”
We have been talking a lot about V2MOM: a framework originally created by Founder and CEO of Salesforce, Marc Benioff that helps businesses plan out their goals, strategies, and approaches for seeing their achievements through. V2MOM stands for: Vision, Values, Methods, Obstacles, Measures and in a nutshell the concepts boils down connecting goals for the year to actionable items that can be tracked.
If you are like many of the small business that eGuide partners with, a new year always starts with the best intentions (or in the case of this year, may start with one intention to just be better than 2020), and as the year progresses those intentions seem to get buried under operations, new shiny projects, and other influences that quickly cloud what you originally set out to accomplish.
How do you take what may now be those new shiny objectives and goals for the year, and keep them from getting tarnished?
We Are Procrastinators & So Are You
Let’s be real, we are all procrastinators in some aspect of our life. Don’t tell me you have never delayed taking out the trash, or waited to clean up the dishes from dinner til the next morning. You may procrastinate in sending out that email, or scheduling that hard talk with your boss/employee. Why are humans hardwired to procrastinate? According to Seth Godin and Neuroscience it comes back to taking the path of least resistance. To procrastinate is human. To be self aware enough to keep procrastination from turning into missed deadlines and objectives is divine.
We talk a lot about Trello at eGuide. I mean, A LOT. You can often find our owner going off on a tangent about how you can use Trello to help with any kind of project from a dog walking schedule, a wedding planning business, to managing a 50 person team for a Fortune 500 company.
Trello is a project management platform that in a few words is like giving sticky notes steroids and putting them on a virtual white board that can be accessed from anywhere in the world (with internet of course).
As with any piece of technology, the system is only as smart as the people using it, and that is where that pesky procrastination can also sneak up and take your plans for the year, crumple them up, and throw them right back in your face.
How to Automate Accountability
With Trello at the core of the solution, how can you automate some of that accountability?
Start With A Plan
If you use the Trello V2MOM board and follow the prompts all the way through you will be left with a plan that has tangible and trackable “measures” that, if completed, will result in your “vision” for the year.
Set the Cadence
What measures did you set for yourself? Are they weekly, monthly, or quarterly goals? If there isn’t a metric attached to your measures, you should dig a little bit deeper. Using the functionality in the Trello Card, set a due date for each card. You can always adjust it later!
Link your Primary Calendar
It’s one thing to have a hand-written reminder. It’s another to get an app notification. But if you are like us, having blocks of time on your calendar is one of the best ways to ensure something gets done. Since you have your due dates set, you should link your trello board directly to your calendar!
If Collaborating With Teammates “Watch The Board”
Teamwork makes the dream work. If you are sharing some of your measures with teammates, be sure to “watch” the Trello board. Receiving a notification that a teammate has made a change or update to the board may be just the reminder you need to do your part as well.
Integrate Measures into Meetings
Does your team do a weekly standup? Quarterly reviews? Town-hall meetings? These are great places to ensure that your deliverables are being met. Make it an agenda item that links directly to the V2MOM trello board.
Refine Your Deliverables
What you tell yourself you may be able to accomplish in a week, vs what you actually can get done can sometimes be two very different things. There is nothing wrong with modifying your “measure”. Maybe it was a lofty goal to think that you were going to post two blogs every week. Changing the measure to one post a month and surprising yourself by posting two is a great support your goals through positive reinforcement. One blog post a month is better than abandoning the project all together and going into 2022 with one post from January, 2021.
Use Butler To Automate Due Dates
Did you know that Trello has a built in automation tool called Butler? Using Butler you can create rules that will automatically reset due dates or perform card functions following an action (like marking the due date complete). Based on your “measures” cadence, you can easily set the reminder for the following week/month/quarter just by checking the due date as complete. Here are some more cool things you can do with Butler.
What You Put in is What You Will Get Out
Ultimately, it’s up to you to do the work, but it’s also up to you to know where your shortcomings may fall. We encourage you to plan through your procrastination. It may take all of the tools and tricks we listed above to get to a December of this year and be able to look back and say “We did it!”, but it’s not a question of “if” you can do it. It’s a matter of doing making the path as easy on yourself as possible.
If you miss a measure for a month, don’t give up! Refine the deliverable and try another accountability strategy to get the next month to work. Give yourself a little flexibility, but avoid the mind-set of “we tried, we failed, it didn’t work”. Even if you don’t achieve every goal by the end of the year, getting an inch closer to your vision is better than nothing at all.
Go forth and conquer! We believe in you!
