You will be able to agree the purpose, deadline and definition of done for a task in a short conversation.
You work in the customer service team of a telco, at an office in Ang Mo Kio, and your manager stops by your desk on Monday. "Can you put together something on our customer complaints for Thursday?" You spend three days building a twelve-slide deck with charts, trends by month and a breakdown by product. On Thursday morning your manager looks at it and says, "Oh, I just needed the top three complaints for a line in the director's update." Three days of work, and most of it won't be used.
Nobody did anything wrong here, exactly. The manager gave a quick brief, and you filled the gaps with your best guess. The problem is that a short conversation on Monday would have saved both of you the week.
Before you start any piece of work that will take more than an hour or so, confirm four things.
The purpose: why does this piece of work exist, and what will happen as a result of it?
The audience: who will read or use it? Your manager, their director, a client, a regulator, the whole team?
The deadline: when exactly is it needed, and is that a hard deadline or a preference? "Thursday" might mean Thursday 9am or Thursday 6pm, and the difference matters.
What done looks like: what form should it take, and how will you both know it's finished? A table, a one-page note, a deck, a figure in an email? Rough or polished? A first draft for comments, or the final version?
Most mismatches between what a manager wanted and what they got come from one of these four, and most of the time it's the last one. The person giving the task has a picture in their head of the finished thing, and they often don't realise you can't see it.
Of the four, purpose is the one that tells you the most. Once you know what the work will be used for, you can usually work out the rest yourself, including how detailed and polished it needs to be.
"Something on customer complaints" for a line in a director's update is three bullet points and an hour's work. For a board presentation, it's a properly checked deck. For a team discussion, it's a rough list with numbers. Same topic, completely different jobs.
A natural way to ask is: "What will you use this for?" or "Who's it going to?" If that feels too blunt with a senior person, try "So I pitch it at the right level, is this for your own reference or going further up?" Most managers answer gladly, and many will add details they didn't think to mention.
A nurse asked by a ward manager to "look into the hand hygiene audit results" faces the same choice. A quick summary for the morning huddle and a written report for the hospital's infection control committee are very different pieces of work, and only the purpose tells her which one to produce.
New work rarely arrives into an empty week. If you're already busy, accepting another task without discussing priority usually means something else slips, and your manager may not find out until it's late.
When you're given something new, ask about priority: "I'm working on the vendor report for Friday. Should this come before it, or after?" Or, "To do this by Thursday, I'd need to push the data clean-up to next week. Is that ok?"
You are still taking the work on. What you add is the information your manager needs to make the trade-off, and the trade-off is theirs to make. Many managers don't keep track of everything on each person's plate, and they're usually glad to be reminded before something gets dropped.
In some workplaces, saying anything other than "yes, can" to a senior feels uncomfortable. Asking about priority is a way of saying yes while making the cost visible, and it protects you when something has to slip.
The last step takes half a minute and catches most misunderstandings. Before you start, play the brief back in one or two sentences.
"So, to check: you need the top three complaint types from last quarter, with a number for each, in a few lines I can email you by Thursday noon, for the director's update. I'll keep the vendor report on track for Friday."
If your understanding is right, your manager says "yes, exactly", and you start with confidence. If it's wrong, they correct it now, when correcting costs nothing, instead of on Thursday, when it costs three days.
Playing back also works well in writing. If the brief came in a meeting or a hurried conversation, a short message afterwards does the same job and gives you a record, like the call recap in lesson 2.4.
The four things to confirm, the question about purpose, the priority check and the play-back fit comfortably into a few questions you can keep on a card or in your phone. Turning them into your own short checklist, ready for the next time work lands on your desk, is the activity below.
Write a five-question checklist for clarifying new tasks and use it the next time your manager gives you work.
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