For most of my small-business leadership career I have operated like this. I’ll call it the “seek and destroy” strategy.

1. Mull over options for the next business project or goal, and choose one.
2. Focus my energy and activity single-mindedly on reaching that goal ASAP.
3. Work hard. Drill down. Reach it. Celebrate.
4. Once I feel almost caught up and my stress level is reasonably low, repeat from step 1.

This approach is simple and proactive, but it’s slow, and it doesn’t scale well as organizational size and delegation increase. I’m moving toward operating like this. I’ll call it the “goals timeline” strategy.

1. Mull over options for the next business project or goal, and choose several.
2. Focus my energy temporarily on planning for each goal. Delegate necessary activity to others.
3. Check status on multiple delegated projects, celebrate goals reached, and do more planning for the future, all in the same day.
4. Build and maintain this timeline of future goals, in various stages of planning or completion, even when current stresses are high.

I find this goals timeline strategy challenging in a way that the seek and destroy strategy was not. It requires emotional multitasking. For example, I might be very excited about a product development project I have just decided is a go, but delegate it to someone else, and having no actionable tasks on that project, need to set my excitement aside and take up something else.

That same day, I might need to spend time worrying about sales projections for 6 months from now, and use those anxious feelings as motivation to add some marketing goals to the timeline.

Still thinking over those challenging possibilities, it might be time to celebrate the completion of a previously-delegated project with the person responsible for it. At that moment I need to re-locate the excitement I had about that project a few months ago, when I first decided it had big potential and should be launched.

The challenge is juggling emotional states. The payoff is an organization that moves forward faster.