Tracking Long Term Objectives

Maintaining consistency with innovation in your company can be one of the most difficult habits to develop. It's just hard to focus on long-term 'important/not urgent' activities when you are constantly barraged with the 'urgent' activities of day to day business.

There is a specific feature built in to KMX that can be used to provide assistance in this regard and make sure that strategic objectives don't take a back seat.

I use this functionality to make sure I don't let long term objectives fall through the cracks in the following way:

1. I have created a set of activities that identify long term objectives for business development.
2. These activities can be assigned to me, or to anyone else in the company that needs to be working on them. Either way I assign myself as a 'watcher'. What this does is bring the activity onto my dashboard under the 'My Watched Activity' section. This section is arranged so that the newest items, or items that are updated, are floated to the top of the list. Thus, the last item on the list is the activity that has not had any action for the longest time.
3. At periodic intervals I concentrate on working from my watched activity list, starting at the bottom and working up.
4. For each item on the list that identifies a long term objective for business development I do some action to move it forward. By adding a comment or time entry to the activity it bumps up to the start of my watched activity list. The comments allow me to pick up where I left off the next time I get a chance to work on the activity.

The best part of this functionality is that tasks associated with long term objectives are within the same framework as the day to day work activities so I don't have to maintain a completely separate system for tracking each type of task.