My to-do list has overflown from its digital home onto random post-its and legal pads around me. I’m down a staff member—or three. There’s an emergent project–or three–on my plate, and the cafeteria is out of coffee. The hyenas are circling. The hour grows late.
Sound familiar? The weeds are familiar territory for anyone who works… or likely just anyone present in today’s complex world. And when things are at their worst, it can be the hardest time to see the light – when there will be enough staff, when projects will flow as they should… a magical, mystical future when advanced planning and strategy prevent your work from being the predator and you the prey.
No amount of waiting around or letting things fall apart or hiding from your to-do list by completing small, low-impact tasks will make things better. The poster on our wall from Startup Vitamins says it all. First, you “Make it work then make it better.”

1. Triage: While time-consuming to take a look at your mile-long to-do lists in all their mediums, you must. You must look, recompile in one, and determine who you can save, who can wait, and who, sadly, will not make it. A grim metaphor? Certainly. But while a small thing, your office needs coffee, particularly if they’re even a percentage as frazzled as you.
2. Make moves: That big project with the looming deadline? Once the coffee’s brewing, bid adieu to the ambiguity of too many tasks and get to work. You know what you need to do. Do it. Done is the new perfect. Along the way, mistakes are going to happen. Processes are going to be flawed. You’re going to pay too much for shipping. You’re going to make that dreaded typo, or worse (I suppose… unless you’re me), be curt in an email when you shouldn’t (or if you have a stellar attitude, you won’t, but I’ll understand if you slip just this once). Know the mistakes. Understand what you’d change in a better, kinder world. Own up to your typos and attitude slips and most importantly, dropped balls.
3. Improve: Phew, this is the good part. There truly will come a day, a week, two weeks, a month from now when the dust has settled. You’ve saved the lives of many projects and done some pretty okay work. Set aside the to-do list for a day or week—heck, your to-do list is used to being perpetually behind anyways—and confront everything that went wrong. And make it better.
   • How far in advance of an event do you need order supplies and get your $%!t together? Put it on the calendar for the next few months now.
   • Determine the best person for every task. Just because you can do it, and maybe, truly, you do a shining job—does that mean it belongs on your plate? Or, is your heart not in it resulting in perpetual okay-ness? Make the right moves for you and your projects.
   • Need a process? Make one.
   • Have a process that doesn’t work? Please, for the love of all that’s good – throw it out. Make a new one. (And then make it better.)
   • Rinse, repeat.

While by now you’d think every task I’ve touched is better given my philosophy on this process, I’m hardly resting on my laurels. Processes have come and gone. Projects have been completed. A lot of okay work has been done in the bouts of the busies, as they always come crawling back in a challenging environment on a dynamic team. Among the okay, reside the great, the award-winning, the pride-worthy accomplishments of, “This is now better.” But work is never done. I am almost always needing to make it work. And then I make it better.
This week’s article is the final of four in the Wisdom On Our Walls series. Based on some of the pretty cool Startup Vitamins posters that hang on our sales floor, near our builder benches, and in our cafeteria, our REMAN U writers will be sharing what these quotes mean to them – and how these words can impact your business.

 It’s all well and good to get it done right the first time, but when The Rhythm of Reman’s to-do list runs a mile long, she’ll settle for done. Right and better come next.  How does your team triage to-dos? Comment below or connect with Andee directly.