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Who sets your agenda?

Written by: Seth Godin

Article Overview: In the States, today is one of those weird pre-holiday days.

Who sets your agenda?

In the States, today is one of those weird pre-holiday days.

Many people aren't working. Some are half working. For most people, their work agenda for today was set by the calendar or their boss.

Weekends are stressful for a lot of people who love their work, because the agenda gets reset, reset by family, not by an internal to-do list or a boss.

And at work, where does your list come from? Do you answer emails by date received, by urgency, by sender? Who decides that? Which blogs do you read, which tasks do you do?

It's fascinating to watch someone who has made a shift from a big company to solo work, or the other way around. The biggest challenge, by far, is one of agenda. What do I do now? What do I do next?

What tends to get done is what's urgent, not important--you've heard that before.

I think, though, that with the new tools and new leverage available to us, the decisions get even more important. Should NBC invest money in free online YouTube content or another show for the 9 pm Thursday slot? That's an agenda question first and foremost. Should you go on another sales call or improve the materials you've got so the next call will go better? Back to agenda.

Because we do it every day, we tend to take it for granted. We assume our agenda is exactly the right one, and we tweak it, we don't overhaul it.

What if, on Wednesday, you overhauled it?

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Article Tags: boss, decisions, holiday days, leverage, money, nbc, new tools, urgency, work agenda



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