The Today Card is tactical by nature. But because it gets you to focus on things at a tactical level each day, it allows you to eventually be more strategic. The better you get at filling out the card, the better you’ll get at getting the stuff on it done. And vice versa.
In his books Turn The Ship Around and Leadership is Language, David Marquet distinguishes between 2 kinds of work: Red Work and Blue Work. Red Work is what we normally think of as work. It’s decidedly tactical. It’s the doing. It’s not blazing any trails or busting out of any boxes. It’s just taking the orders and executing them. Blue Work is more cerebral. It’s the thinking, strategy, and decision-making. Blue work is the work of deciding what work needs to be done, why, by whom, and when.
The thing about these two kinds of work is that:
- Which work is blue and which is red tends to be relative. It’s also different when you’re comparing your work to others, as opposed to comparing your own work to other work of yours.
- The two types of work are dependent on each other, such that an improvement or degradation in the quality or efficiency of one type of work results in a similar change in the other.
Filling out the card each day is blue work. The stuff you put on the card–while some of it may be strategizing and thinking through important things–it’s relatively red work. It’s red because thinking about whether or not to do that work, whether to do it now, and how important it is (the score) was the blue work. After that blue work of deciding what goes on the card, it’s all about getting those things done today.
The better you get at deciding what goes on the card, the better you’ll get at actually getting those things done. The more time and thought you put into filling out the card, the more you’ll trust that those items are worth doing and can be done.
The better you get at getting the things done on the card, the more confident you’ll feel in putting stuff on it. The benefits flow both ways.
So get better at strategy by doing the tactics well. Get more important stuff done in the long-term by focusing on today. Pull out your card and get some stuff on it.
