Clear the windscreen

This is a phrase or concept I use often to help explain the importance of not letting unimportant things clutter up priorities.

It’s hard to drive when your windscreen is covered with things which are preventing you from seeing what is coming.

As a result it’s often the most important thing to do - i.e. your biggest bottleneck when it comes to management. Get your information sources clean so you can see problems as they emerge.

For example if you have a bug management system if feature requests which come up which are part of themes which are not a priority then it’s often better to create no ticket at all since it clutters up your windscreen. (See Thematic Goal ).

If you have a Build system with unit tests - make sure all those unit tests are passing so you notice when a new one breaks, and so on.