The Commitment Cube: Your Path to Increased Productivity and Improved Prioritization
Yesterday, I started to schedule meetings for February. The holiday season, with all the wonder, joy, and gratitude within it, has also an increased demand for time. More time with family, more time at school performances, more time organizing and decorating homes, more time preparing and scheduling events. Time feels like the scarcest and most sacred resource of this season, and maybe this generation.
Similarly in organizations, one of the biggest challenges I see that teams are trying to solve is to reclaim time. How much time do we have and what do we do with it? How are we prioritizing? What can we ‘eliminate’ that doesn’t provide us with enough value? Which meeting do we attend today? Which project do we respond to first?
In my experience, going at this challenge with the intention to ‘save time’ doesn’t lead to results. At least not to sustainable ones. Instead, when I dig deeper, I see a lack of clarity around commitments.
Commitment is a broad term, but it comes down to dedicating yourself to something, whether that's a job, a goal, a city, or a relationship. The earlier definitions of commitment provide an even deeper meaning – at the same time to ‘to entrust’ and ‘to let go’. To do that, by necessity, one must have enough clarity about what they are committing to and what they are releasing.
For me, commitment is also related to action – to do something or to not do something because of our dedication. So, I see a direct correlation between commitment and prioritization – responding in each moment to the questions: ‘What matters to me most?’ and ‘What can I do about it and how?’
I have seen that when a leader, a team, or an organization has sufficient clarity over their commitment to their purpose, commitment to each other, and commitment to learn, prioritization and time allocation is easier. Yet, I see so many people, teams, organizations, and even couples move through life without enough clarity about their commitments. Until a catalyst event.
With the risk of oversimplifying an intricate and complex process of creating shared purpose and aligning priorities, I am inviting you to consider the Commitment Cube below.
The Commitment Cube - Explained
I have designed it for individuals (leaders or team members) to use on any day, for any goal, project, task and learn enough to take at least 1 step forward in the right direction.
I have found that walking around the cube reveals enough to help someone:
Remember a larger purpose and see a bigger picture
Realize their strengths and their possible needs for help
Identify their knowledge gaps
Plan or re-plan effectively moment to moment
Walking around cube and responding to a set of questions is particularly helpful if you feel anxiety, or apprehension to even begin on a project, or a complicated task. The questions are simple yet have a powerful impact of slowing you down enough to realize the choices that you have and focus you in enough to be able to make a small, committed movement in the right direction.
Let me take you through it!
Connection
1. Why does this matter?
2. Who does it matter to?
These questions you can answer multiple times until you feel a relief inside your heart.
What you are doing here is seeking a deeper purpose and connection to that purpose. Why is this project or task important? Sometimes, we don’t know and that is data, so we capture it. The second question is about uncovering your stakeholders – who is this important to, including if you are part of that ‘who’. Ask again, who else? And who else?
Confidence
1. What do I know?
2. What do I not know?
You may struggle here if you are not willing to let yourself sit in the discomfort of not knowing. What do you know? What do you really know? The moment you say ‘I think’ – capture that as you have some uncertainty – so you may want to shape your next step to test out your knowledge. When you start to uncover what you don’t know, you are uncovering your most important insight – your threshold of knowledge. When you make assumptions about the things you know, that’s when you make quick-fix decisions that later turn out to have unintended consequences. Answering this part fully helps you at the fourth quadrant.
Capability
1. What strengths do I have that I can lean on?
2. Whose strengths do I need? What help do I need?
Here, you want to connect to a moment in time or a story that connects you to your most capable self. What are your strengths that you can count on here? The second question is about asking for help. You may not have all the strengths that are required, and that’s ok – who can you call on for support? Whose strengths have you not leveraged yet – someone in your team, your family, your community, or network?
Capacity
1. What do I need to do first and when?
2. What’s the smallest step I can take?
Finally, it’s time to plan what you can do, and when. It’s so interesting to me that when I get to this part of the cube in my coaching, people often forget the responses they gave a minute ago on the previous points – they commit to doing something completely different and unrelated. So, ask yourself – what do I need to do that’s related to the answers I gave above? Related to uncovering: Why does this matter? What don’t I know? What can I test out? What help do I need? Then, think even smaller – what’s the first part to that? You may find a common tendency of planning to do too much too soon. Remember that large leaps forward require complete clarity and full picture + more time. Instead, why don’t you break it down based on the time that you have available? It’s certainly better than doing nothing.
When you have gone around all the sides of the Commitment cube – you may feel an increased awareness and commitment to take a small step. The questions are crafted to increase the feeling of spaciousness, reduce the feeling of urgency and help you to focus. Yes, your obstacle is time – yet Einstein said it best: “If I had an hour to solve a problem, I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and five minutes thinking about solutions.” So, take those 5 minutes to walk around the Commitment Cube. And make sure you send me a note about your experience.
