The blog

There are some things that we believe we need to do but which sel­dom get urgent enough for us to pri­or­i­tize them above all oth­er tasks. It can be tasks such as cor­rect­ing some­thing that is just slight­ly off but in an irri­tat­ing way. Or it can be cre­at­ing some­thing that would make a task eas­i­er to do, but which is not essen­tial to the com­ple­tion of the task.

On the one hand these tasks can be impor­tant for us to suc­cess­ful­ly reach our goals in the long-run, but on the oth­er hand there are oth­er tasks we con­sid­er more impor­tant and which def­i­nite­ly need to get done first. So, we don’t do them — but still wish they would get done.

Play­ful notes
I recent­ly worked with an orga­ni­za­tion that had cre­at­ed a ​”Go Fish”-corner. They had past­ed a bunch of Post-Its in the right, bot­tom cor­ner of a white­board hung on a wall in the mid­dle of the office.

When any­one has a task that would be ​”nice to get done” but which you do not see your­self get­ting to any­time soon, you can write it on a note and paste it in the des­ig­nat­ed cor­ner. The one who needs to do some­thing com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent for a while to clear their head after hav­ing focused intense­ly on a com­pli­cat­ed task for the last cou­ple of hours, can sim­ply pick a note from the ​”Go Fish”-corner and have the plea­sure of work­ing with some­thing dif­fer­ent for an hour that will help some­one else in the office as well. Ta-da! What needs to get done, gets done.

Do this
If you and your col­leagues could use a ​”Go Fish”-corner for unpri­or­i­tized tasks and per­haps even think it is a fun take on the theme of del­e­gat­ing, then choose a cor­ner you reserve for this pur­pose. Wouldn’t it be nice to have it some­where where you all often pass by, and locat­ed in a room that is nev­er closed so that the cor­ner is avail­able to every­body at all times? It is also a good idea to keep this place close to where you often come to think of things that would be per­fect can­di­dates for the board. Should it be close to the cof­fee machine? Where you have all your ​”white­board-meet­ings”? Where you meet often for oth­er reasons?

Delim­it the area you will reserve for your Go Fish-game of del­e­ga­tion, and mark it out some­how so that there is no mis­tak­ing what kind of cor­ner it is (and what it is used for).

If you after a while real­ize that it has become more of a waste-dump­ing-cor­ner than a pool of tasks intend­ed to increase your inspi­ra­tion and pro­duc­tiv­i­ty, allow your­self to sift through the tasks past­ed there and remove the most appar­ent trash.

Some­thing new we hadn’t expected
If you cre­ate a cor­ner for this office-ver­sion of Go Fish, a whole lot of use­ful tasks will get done which oth­er­wise might have been left at the bot­tom of to-do-lists indef­i­nite­ly (or at least for quite a while). If you should ever feel bored or unin­spired, you too will get the oppor­tu­ni­ty to do things you oth­er­wise wouldn’t have thanks to this play­ful method of delegating.

What’s your way?
Have you found some oth­er cre­ative and fun way to get tasks that tend to be left at the bot­tom of the pile done in your company?