Jim Collins, acclaimed author of Build to Last and other well-received books, wrote an interesting blog post about 10 years ago on the importance of creating a Stop Doing list.

Mr. Collins emphasized the importance of deciding not to continue doing something any longer as key to successful prioritization:

A great piece of art is composed not just of what is in the final piece, but equally important, what is not. It is the discipline to discard what does not fit — to cut out what might have already cost days or even years of effort — that distinguishes the truly exceptional artist and marks the ideal piece of work, be it a symphony, a novel, a painting, a company or, most important of all, a life.

He cited the example of Darwin Smith of Kimberly-Clark making the critical decision to sell off the company’s paper-mills, which provided the bulk of the company’s revenues and had been in existence for 100 years (!), in order to focus on the new consumer business of paper towels.

This article has inspired us to create a new task board template called “Weekly Prioritization”: it lets you organize your work in a different way from the traditional “To Do / In Progress / Done” taxonomy of Kanban, by using columns organized as:

• Must Do: in here, put everything that absolutely must get done that week.
• Should Do: everything that you would really like to get done, once you get all the “must do’s” done.
• Could Do: stuff you could do, if you had any time left
• Stop Doing: this is the really critical column — identify everything that you should stop doing!

Let us know how useful this proves to you! (Hat tip to Eitan Nguyen for the suggestion…)

And, as usual, we will continue building new process templates to help our disparate users with their projects.