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Scheduling, planning and follow-through. Some questions
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Posted by Stephen Zeoli
May 21, 2014 at 07:44 PM
The thoughtful responses in this thread are Exhibit A for why I value this forum and its members so much.
Having said that, my response here probably isn’t going to add to that evidence much if at all. I have been a terrible time manager all my life. I have finally stopped even worrying about it. I just do what I have to do and that seems to work for the type of jobs I’ve had over the years.
One insight I’ve gained that may be of some value for some people who think like I do (I pity them), is that I’ve also stopped bothering to create task lists. That is because they are almost impossible for me to deal with as I get caught up with how reductionist to get. Every task or project can be sub-divided to absurd levels. Where the line is between meaningful and absurd can be kind of blurry to me. Instead of doing that, I now try to make a list of desired outcomes. As a simple example: If I want to bake a cake for my wife’s birthday, instead of making a list of ingredients, and other steps, I will just make note, “Cake for Amy’s birthday.” As long as I remember that, my brain can manage the rest. As a work-related example, I will just write, “Catalog mailed by end of March.” All the many steps that go into that project, I can manage in my head. Sometimes I make lists of steps if I need to think through the process. But I usually don’t bother creating a check list from that.
I guess the gist of what I’m saying is that I used to spend a lot of time and energy trying to manage my time. This turned out to be counter-productive, absorbing time and creating stress.
Steve Z.
Posted by Paul Korm
May 21, 2014 at 10:40 PM
I like Stephen Zeoli’s examples because they fit into a type of planning that I’ve been experimenting with - “if-then” planning—which “studies show” is more successful than standard project or task planning. (Of course, I have no idea what or where those studies are.) The form is simple: “If X happens, then I will do Y”.
Rephrasing his examples: “If it is my wife’s birthday, then I will bake a cake”. “If it is the end of March, then I will ship the catalog”.
I am finding that it is easier to connect an obligation or commitment to a trigger than it is just to remember the commitment.
Posted by Ken
May 22, 2014 at 01:50 AM
Stephen Zeoli wrote:
>Instead of doing
>that, I now try to make a list of desired outcomes. As a simple example:
>If I want to bake a cake for my wife’s birthday, instead of making a
>list of ingredients, and other steps, I will just make note, “Cake for
>Amy’s birthday.” As long as I remember that, my brain can manage the
>rest. As a work-related example, I will just write, “Catalog mailed by
>end of March.” All the many steps that go into that project, I can
>manage in my head. Sometimes I make lists of steps if I need to think
>through the process. But I usually don’t bother creating a check list
>from that.
>
>I guess the gist of what I’m saying is that I used to spend a lot of
>time and energy trying to manage my time. This turned out to be
>counter-productive, absorbing time and creating stress.
>
>Steve Z.
Steve,
I could have written an almost identical post for a number of years, and I think that much of what you said applies to many of us. Unfortunately, a bad combination of things has changed the landscape on me, and I am finding that this approach needs a bit of modification. The following is not necessarily a rebuttal, but rather an explanation of the changes and the need to change my MO (which was very similar to yours). First, my memory is feeling a bit taxed these days. Not in a cognitive or developmental sense, but just in the sheer amount of information that passes through my brain, and the ever increasing portion that requires some kind of future attention or action.
Using my work as a more detailed example, the project and program outcomes I manage are requiring more steps to accomplish, and the number of outcomes has also increased. I know that I can only do so much in a day, but if I do not write down all the newly spawning tasks that seem to multiply daily, it is quite easy for me to forget an important one that is critical and/or time sensitive. And, as my time is often crunched because of the constant time vampires which are very hard to control or minimize, I want to focus my remaining available time on the most appropriate tasks, which are unfortunately also multiplying at too rapid a rate. In short, the methods that you have described above, and which I have more or less implemented over the years, and still do to a certain degree, cannot handle this increase in. If I could remember everything in need of attention or needed to accomplish an outcome, things would be fine. But, that does not seem to be the case.
And the part that is truly frustrating to me, and I am sure many here can relate to, is that while I understand how many of these task managers work in theory, I find many of them hard to actually use on a daily basis. Few have really exceptional UI’s, so despite all of their search, sort and tagging capabilities, most have some serious limitation in how they present their data. As stated earlier, I am trying to see if I can get comfortable with Asana, but it has its challenges in how it presents metadata for things like subtasks.
Having said all that, there is a part of me that wonders how much further along I might be if I just worked and did not spend any time trying to organize/reorganize/prioritize.
—Ken
Posted by Dr Andus
May 22, 2014 at 10:14 AM
Ken wrote:
>And the part that is truly frustrating to me, and I am sure many here
>can relate to, is that while I understand how many of these task
>managers work in theory, I find many of them hard to actually use on a
>daily basis.
>Having said all that, there is a part of me that wonders how much
>further along I might be if I just worked and did not spend any time
>trying to organize/reorganize/prioritize.
I think part of the difficulty is that planning affects multiple overlapping temporal planes (and not many tools can handle that, if any). There is the long-term time scale of a project that can take several years (e.g. writing/planning a book). Then there are the smaller, intermediate phases (writing/planning the chapters), and then the actual writing, which continues to be a simultaneous planning, as one constantly needs to revise the plan, break it down into smaller parts, abandon or merge sections etc.
Here you can substitute planning with outlining. The two are synonymous to some extent. And outlining is also synonymous with project management to some extent, as outlining effectively consists of constructing a “work breakdown structure” (WBS), i.e. breaking down a larger task to smaller bits, until the tasks become actionable. Then if you add deadlines to the outline, it becomes a project plan (I realise there is more to PM, such as when you’re constructing a bridge or an airplane, I’m just concentrating on the basics here).
What I’m getting at is that even if one tries to ignore the long-term and medium-term planning horizon, it’s impossible to ignore it during the execution of the tasks because the tasks continuously need to be broken down and outlined and re-outlined, to be able to carry them out.
What really matters for the medium and long-term planning is whether the workload (and other material resource requirements) has been estimated realistically enough and whether there is some institutional mechanism that can make the deadlines sufficiently scary, so that they force you to abandon perfectionism and focus on delivering the essentials.
BTW, I like WorkFlowy partly due to an almost complete lack of structure. It’s just a blank canvas, and you can design your very own project management system by just labelling any item whatever you like. And if you don’t like it later, you can easily restructure it. Of course this also makes it more challenging to use, as you really need to design your own system (although an existing system of course can also be implemented). It’s a similar problem that people tend to have with ConnectedText. It’s so much of a blank canvas that it’s difficult to figure out initially what to use it for exactly. But such software can be a solution to the other extreme, when a software imposes its own single system on you (such as a Gantt chart or a Calendar view or indeed a hierarchical tree), and there is no other way to organise or visualise things.
Posted by MadaboutDana
May 22, 2014 at 01:45 PM
Sorry, Ken, my fault entirely. The precise name of the app is “To-do Lists”, and it is rather good. No sub-tasks, however (but when running multiple lists, I find they’re less important, somehow). I’m playing with Tree on MacOS at the moment - what a perfectly wonderful outliner it is! Vertical AND horizontal - heaven!