Have you ever gotten to the end of the day or week and thought “Wow, I got nothing done today!” Or perhaps you’ve realized one day “Crap! I forgot to do that thing!” or my personal favorite “Crap, that thing I forgot and still don’t remember was due today!”. Well I have. And it’s a problem.
My journey began with the realization that I had a problem. Simply put, I was missing stuff. I kept so much of what I was doing in my head or spread across different means of capture that I quickly lost track of important stuff. Not just work stuff but personal stuff too. While I constantly wrestle with the work-life balance, I had developed a real problem of literally spinning. I was spending a lot of time, attention, and effort all the while forgetting important deadlines, missing my own meetings, and forgetting stuff. I hid for a long time behind a mask of extreme productivity of an utterly overburdened workload. I needed to get organized, I needed to just get better.
I made quite a few mistakes along the way. I went from having too many problems and no solution to the polar opposite of having too many solutions they became problems. I had literally created too much classification across to many tools to effectively get anything done. I spent so much time solving the problem that I had no time left to do stuff.
So without any solutions I was doomed, but focusing just on solutions I was still failing. As I learned to balance problems with solutions I began to notice a trend. Do just enough to solve the problem but not so much that the solution becomes the problem. Not a novel concept, I realize, but it struck me pretty hard when I came to the realization.
A new way.
What I do is difficult to describe and often very hard to predict. I wish I wrote a lot of code; but in truth my job is a lot more abstract. I create a lot of content; but mostly I engage with various stakeholders and provide overall team leadership. I needed a way to capture stuff, still get that stuff done but remain flexible.
Clayton's Process
As it happens, I began to refine my own little process. I didn’t want to spend a lot of time doing menial things, like managing a task list or email, but I didn’t want to forget or lose things either. One of the greatest influences on my new process was Scrum, and agile development methodology. But to fit an abstract job like mine into scrum required more than just a little forethought.
First I needed to evaluate the stuff I do. The result of this analysis was absurdly simple. I’m either completing an action or I’m required to be somewhere. So looking at these two areas I realized a fundamental balance: Sometimes where I need to be prevents me from doing other things. The simple little diagram of my process has to big buckets: Task List and Calendar. I’ll explain each and how they relate.
Task List
My task list is really the merger of three concepts: Tasks, Labels, and a Backlog. The backlog is the overall list of Stuff I need or want to accomplish. It’s a container. Tasks are really the important marker. A task is an accomplish-able action that results in some form of output. Labels, or tags, are a way of providing context to a Task. If you haven’t figured it out, nothing here is tool specific. In fact, nearly every task management tool allows you to have a backlog of things you need to get done and a way of labeling them. I’ll discuss this further when I talk about Tools of the Trade.
I learned very quickly that having a robust taxonomy only increased the amount of time I had to spend managing things. Instead I adopted a brief labeling system that enabled me to show or hide groupings of tasks. This simple tagging enabled me to easily view specific areas of interest, like a project at work or home, and isolate what I needed to do.
Now anyone who’s been involved with Scrum can tell you, the most important part of a backlog is managing the backlog. The same is true of my backlog. Generally speaking a Task enters the backlog either 1) As a direct task with all relevant information provided or 2) As an item in the Inbox. Items in the inbox are a lot like unread email messages. Being in the Inbox is an indicator for me to finalize the task prior to putting it in the backlog. I don’t typically use the inbox except when I’m in a hurry and capture a quick blurb of a task that I go back and fix later. he tool I chose for this actually had a concept I liked so much that I adopted it: Today. Today is the set of tasks I plan, or must, complete that day. Another lesson learned is that the larget the task list was, the less likely I’d be to want to look at it. However, having a separate View of tasks that were only due today really helped me overcome the psychological fear of my task list and even empowered me. I’ll get back to the empowering point later, for now think of the Today view as the Things I’m going to do today list. There’s something quite satisfying about starting the day with a list of things to do and striking each one off the list.
Labels or tags don’t actually help me do anything except manage my tasks. I use labels more in retrospection and prioritization than I do in my everyday activities. For instance, I may want to have a label for High priority items as a way to easily identify Tasks that need to be placed in the Today view. Adding context really helps me understand why I’m doing the task beyond what it is I’m supposed to do.
The Calendar
I won’t bore you with petty details of a Calendar. I put meetings, travel plans, leave, etc in my calendar. I do not put Tasks in my calendar! How I use my calendar is a bit more important. When I’m looking at the day ahead of me, picking the tasks that I need or want to get done that day, I have to be aware of the constraints I have. If I have six hours of meetings, I’m not going to really be able to accomplish much. If I know I need other people for something on my task list but I know there are meetings or travel scheduled, I probably cannot complete those tasks.
The Calendar and the Backlog play hand in hand. Sometimes I have to make hard choices about which tasks I’m going to be able to accomplish and sometimes I have to choose to miss a meeting because I have something more important to accomplish in that time.
The Results
I have been fairly pleased with the results of these exercises. I’ve become a lot more aware of what I need to do and I’m missing a lot less. I still struggle day to day with being as organized as I’d like to be. All in all however; I’ve started learning better habits and methods for dealing with my everyday activities.
