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Bandwidth & Focus

Use this template to align your team on focus items and capability to assist each other during the week

Why this template?

This template was born of a few observations when running weekly kickoff meetings with my amazing teams:

Focus items != Priorities. The word “priority” entered the English Language in the 1400s, meaning “the one thing.” In the 1900s, we pluralized the term in the United States. My preference is to chat with my team about their focus items, and understand that relative priority may shift day-to-day.

Helping shouldn’t cause burnout. We’re a conscientious bunch! However, we observed a trend where weeks might start out seeming manageable; but, as new business challenges or opportunities for impact emerged, we quickly maxed out our bandwidth or surrendered boundaries on our time in the spirit of helping each other. While that spirit is great, in practice it’s a recipe for burnout if unchecked.

So, we start our week in smaller groups with a variation on Coda’s famous “Pulse” Ritual that looks like this:

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Framing to the team

When introducing this concept to the team, I framed it thus:

This template is not a tool to evaluate your industriousness nor impact. Rather, it’s a way for us to understand who might have margin to help out this week, and who is operating at capacity and might not be able to tackle new projects that arise. We’ll also use this to support and strategize on our focus items to ensure we have the greatest collective success as a team.

My goal is that you’re somewhere between 80-90% bandwidth committed every week since our team has so many long-term goals, but should have margin to accommodate shifting needs of your talents during the week.

120% weeks should be few and far between, but if they are recurring, let’s talk about load balancing.

If you get a rare 45% week and no one on the team needs help, enjoy the opportunity to step out of work a bit early and recharge 🙂

The goods

Use the button and table below (you can copy/paste it into a new doc) to kick off your team meetings or stand-ups. If you don’t change the Date Added filter, it will automatically filter out the previous week’s inputs.

Ready to get your copy? 👉

Copy doc

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Add your focus items

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Date Added:

July 30 - August 13, 2024

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Weekly Focus