‘1-pager’s create focus and action. Earlier in my career, I had a couple managers that each gave a piece of related advice that changed how I approached work and when combined propelled me. Today, I love using 1-pagers to keep things moving with a lot of intention.
A 1-pager can be used for strategy to implementation. It can be used to showcase the key points of a decision or even to gather information that is exhaustive yet focused. The idea is to be clear at the start on what is most important before doing the work, making the decision or communicating to the team. I have a number of go-to 1-pagers. Others, for newer or different work, are in progress. I still approach the work each time by asking myself either: ‘what is important to making a decision (that would be shown on a 1-pager to explain the decision)?’ or ‘what information is important for making a decision (that I need to focus my research/collection/etc on)?’ I ask the question THEN I make the 1-pager skeleton THEN I start the work. I’ve loved introducing this approach to clients and I’m excited to share a few here on this site. AND I’m looking forward to sharing those currently being tested in the future!
Complexity makes decisions messy, overwhelming, going in circles and take longer than they need to. When we have moments of clarity, it is because in a moment we got clear on the few most important details to our decision. Finding, creating and getting in the habit of using 1-pagers builds the mental muscle of getting to the most important faster. 1-pagers get out of our ‘overthinking-in-our-head’ time and move to the ‘doing’ time faster and for more of the time.