How often did you experience this: you were waiting on someone to finish a certain part of a project, either as a co-worker or because you asked someone from your team to do something. After waiting a while you checked in and asked if the task was done. They replied: “oh yeah I finished this two days ago, it is on Google Drive”.

So much valuable time is lost with situations like this, and they are so easy to solve. Two thoughts:

1. Your task or project is not done if you haven’t communicated it. It is part of the deal. If you’re doing anything, you can’t just do it and not tell anyone about it. Simple lesson which will make you stand out: make sure the people you work with know that you’re done.
2. Make communicating about a task part of the assignment. As a leader, you can help your team with this by how you’re phrasing the job to be done. Instead of asking “could you look into issue X?”, say “could you look into issue X and let me know what you find?” (and this assignment could be improved by agreeing on a specific time when it should be completed).

We communicate about so many things. Especially on Mondays, when lots of people have lots of meetings. Let’s focus on a high standard of communicating our status today, for ourselves and for the people we work with.