Hitting Rock Bottom in Personal Work Management
Some time ago, there was a point where I hit rock bottom. Workload got so high that single-focus work was just no longer possible. “Workload” here means the amount of WIP (work in progress) or things “going on in parallel” that simply cannot be said “no” to or delegated. I went through the thinking and solution described below. (At least I still had the time to reflect and come up with this.)
So, what to do in such a kind of situation?
There are a few techniques that can help but are a bit lacking in the specifics.
The “churn mode” from the Personal Kanban book suggests to simply line up all tasks, treat them as equally important, and just go from task to task, applying the concrete next possible step, before moving on to the next. This takes place in a round-robin fashion, until so many of the tasks have been completed that a more normal mode of operation can resume.
In the “1-3-5” method, originally, one chooses a single big, three medium-sized, and five small tasks to complete; this happens on a daily basis. A variation of the method I’m more familiar with, that also honours the existence of priority, is to pick, every day, one item that must be done, three that should be done, and five that can be done. Items in the should and can category can then be selected for promotion to the next higher category in case they didn’t get enough attention to be completed.
These two methods are nice enough, however, as hinted, they have some shortcomings:
Churn mode implies that everything is equally important and can be addressed by cyclically iterating. This doesn’t work when deadlines are involved, and when some things are really, really more important than others.
The 1-3-5 method assumes that there is really only one thing every day that must be done, which ignores the lamentable fact that several things do indeed, often enough, have to be completed by the same date.
Both methods have a slight neglect for the circumstance that there are calendars, with meetings in them, which often are about WIP as well. In other words, iterating in round-robin style doesn’t work when the order of meetings doesn’t match the order of tasks; and there are inevitably equally many must-do items as there are meetings about different work items in a day.
Here’s a way I’m dealing with that, which combines the two methods and adds a bit more. I’m using a Kanban board for visualisation, with an “in progress” column that is full of WIP. I now structure this column as follows:
There are five areas in the column, labelled “calendar”, “must do”, “should do”, “can do”, “others”, in this order.
On each day, I move everything that the calendar says needs attention today to the calendar area. Typically, I represent meetings here by the work items they are meant to advance. Another kind of work item is a scheduled item, which I’ll get to below.
The must do, should do, and can do areas I fill with 1, 3, and 5 items, respectively, as described above. These can’t be items already found the calendar area (no duplication please), but rather items I intend to do in the ample “working alone” focus time.
The others area has all the other WIP items.
Now, as soon as I have processed (but not yet finished) one item, I move it to the bottom (!) of the others area. That way, the least recently processed WIP items are at the top of that area, forming an annoying but nice round-robin backlog.
If there is a specific date on which I mean to continue processing a WIP item, I give it a due date, and move it to a dedicated column next to the in progress one named scheduled. These are the aforementioned scheduled items, which I will move back to the calendar area on the right day. There can be all kinds of reasons for scheduling an item: next meeting in a series, a deliver-by date I set for someone I need input from, or whatever.
First thing in the morning, I fill the areas of the in progress column as described above, and typically pull WIP items from the top of the others area, unless there are priorities that dictate otherwise. However, promoting WIP items from should and can to the next higher area helps with that rather well.
This Kanban board can be organised in a more horizontal way by using classes of service and swimlanes, of course. The tool in use limits the possibilities - I made this concept up using plain Trello.
All in all, this structure helped me get through that rough patch pretty well, not losing sight of anything. Afterwards, going back to the "normal" structure felt quite good. Now, should I find myself in a similar situation again, I have a tool ready.
Tags: work