I’m writing from a restaurant in the Mexico City airport, a plate of spicy fajitas in my belly. I’m tired yet satisfied from conducting three strategy workshops over three days in two countries.

Though I have delivered versions of my Outthinker Process program perhaps a few hundred times now, today something was different. I was working with a group of extremely bright and imaginative top executives at Kraft who somehow “got” the process in a way that others have not, and helped me appreciate the power of reaching “strategic clarity.”

You see, there are four types of initiatives you could be investing your energy in at any one time. If you get these right, you win. If you get them wrong, you spin your wheels and fall further and further behind.

To avoid the latter fate, make a list of all the initiatives you are currently executing or considering. For each initiative, ask yourself two questions: If I successfully executed this initiative, what impact would it have on my ability to achieve my goals? and, How easy is it to execute this initiative?

This will give you four types of ideas:

1. Wastes of time: hard-to-execute ideas that would have little impact on you achieving your goals anyway. Dump these now and invest the energy you save into more productive activities.