Fable: Your Tasks Are Easy to List - DBR 053

Do Busy Right - The Task and Attention Management Podcast

Fable: It's quick and easy to figure out what I should do, or I just know what I should do. It shouldn’t take much effort. Corollary: I’m wasting time managing my stuff when I need to do things. Spoiler alert, it's not that easy, and I’ll talk about the reasons. For now, if we have this mindset it leads to poor management: I'll just get to the office and whip out a piece of paper and I'll make my to do list. We don't give it enough thought and time. There are some specific things I want to say about how our brain works when we create this list. But, I've got a lot of potential clients who say: I don't need some big system to track what I need to do. It's just, I need to do it. There are some cases where the job is simple enough that you just go in and you just do the job. There are more routine kinds of jobs and less routine kinds of jobs. Simple is probably not your job (and it’s certainly not your life). Knowledge Work requires more management, not less

• Most knowledge work is Non-routine
• Therefore, Most knowledge work is less procedural
• This means that we have to think about what we’re doing
• Also, for whatever reasons (and there are many) our lives are more complex

Thinking “it’s quick and easy” leads to The ‘typical’ approach to managing our tasks

• Most people use a to-do list, carry stuff over from yesterday, eventually find it too much and start over.
• The to-do list cycle ends in starting over, again and again
• Eventually, we get tired of repeating (starting over) and some folks throw the whole thing over and just react We’re asking our brains the wrong question
• “It’s a waste of time and the wrong things get on the list
• What you need is a backlog. Attention Compass teaches you how to do that.

I said it’s hard – here are the mental challenges that set the "typical" approach up for failure

• You've gotta think hard to get your brain to serve up priorities
• Your brain tends to serve up results, not steps
• These tend to be big, chunky things that are easy to procrastinate
• We need to pre decide these things.
• We have to take time to think about the next step
• “I’ve got a new idea” about process doesn’t store well in the to-do list
• So, Haste makes waste, particularly in our task list

The fable of task management - PMI

• In our mind. We have this notion of how projects are managed. But most of us are working off of legend
• Key: notice resource constraints and predecessor tasks – takes thought and planning
• The legend is simple, the process is complex. We don't give the process the thought it needs. The result is an inaccurate plan
• It's so hard that most software development companies have scrapped it – viola, agile
• We do a rigorous, sophisticated, detailed plan with no slack
• The real idea of PMI - creating a control chart, requiring heavy monitoring, and paying for that monitoring
• Amateurs, when they approach this problem, don't understand it in that same way.
• PMI spends a ton of time/money PRE-DECIDING – as amateurs, we try to short-circuit that in the name of efficiency

Here’s where time efficiency has us…

• Haste makes waste, particularly in our task list
• you can't fumble the delivery - You gotta have the patience and the perseverance to complete a task before you move on to the next
• premature optimization.
• switching tasks too soon and too quickly.
• fast task switching also hurts your memory of completion
• Tech has made us faster, but it hasn't made us better.
• Hurry sickness and hustle culture
• Don’t get focused on trying to move too fast (in the short term)

How experience works - the specific ways in which those things are different are still unknown to you. (cake vs. bread) It's very difficult for us to know what we should do, and thus we SHOULD spend a lot of time "thinking about it" Haste makes waste

• efficiency and productivity are not exactly the same thing
• most of the time efficiency is based on experience with the process
• most of us pursue productivity with efficiency-based methods
• here, as much as anywhere, it’s important to consider attention vs. time

Where do I get the time for all of this

• First, it doesn’t take as long as you might think
• Second, you’re wasting a lot of time on interruption, multitasking, and distraction – we reduce these wastes
• Third, we get time by getting rid of the to-do list process
• Fourth, get habits in order so you can do the right things consistently