Organizing your todos for better effectiveness

If I’ve learned anything during the pandemic it’s this; time is not my constraining resource. The lockdown has forcibly removed many of the demands on my time that I’ve conveniently used as an excuse. My 35-minute commute each way is gone. My evening social commitments have all evaporated. Time spent shuffling kids between extra curricular activities has now become a Zoom login. What am I doing with all of this extra time?

After a few work days that felt incredibly productive, I decided to deeply examine what made those days more effective than others. I didn’t necessarily accomplish more. I spent most of the time doing a rewrite of some deployment code. At the end of the day I had a bunch of functions and unit tests written, but I didn’t have anything impactful to share just yet. That’s when I realized it wasn’t the deliverable of a task that made me feel productive but the level of purpose with which I worked.

What was it about those days that made me feel so unproductive? The one thing they all had in common was a heavy sense of interruption. Sometimes the interruptions were driven by the meetings that seem to invade my calendar, spreading like a liquid to fill every available slice of time. Other times it was the demands of my parallel full time job as a parent/teacher/daycare provider, now that my kids are permanently trapped inside with me. The consistent theme was that when I only had 30 minutes of time, it seemed impractical to work on a task named “Rewrite the deployment pipeline”. My problem consisted of two major issues, the size of the work and how the work was presented to me.

We tend to think of tasks in terms of a deliverable. A large task gets unfairly summarized as a single item, when in fact, it’s many smaller items. I learned this quite some time ago but the issue still shows up in my task list from time to time. The first step was to make sure that my tasks were broken down into chunks that could be accomplished in a maximum of 30 to 60 minutes. Breaking down “Rewrite the deployment pipeline”, could be separated into tasks like:

• Write unit tests for the metadata retrieval function
• Write the metadata retrieval function
• Move common functions into a standard library
• Update references of the common functions to the new standard library

You get the idea. These are all small tasks that I should be able to tackle in a 60 minute period.

The more pressing issue that I would encounter however is presenting work based on the current work context that I’m in. If I’ve only got 15 minutes before my next meeting, it takes a lot of energy to start to get into a task that I know I can’t finish in that period. Because I didn’t have time to finish any of the items on my important list, I’d decide to play hero and go looking in Slack channels to see whose questions I could answer. But for some reason at the end of the week when I review my list of tasks, I’d still have all these small tasks that I hadn’t made any progress on.

This is where Omnifocus’s perspectives functionality saves me. Perspectives allow me to look at tasks that meet a specific criteria. I have a perspective I use called “Focus” that shows me which tasks I’ve flagged as important and which tasks are “due” soon. (In my system, due means that I’ve made an external commitment to a date or there is some other time based constraint on the task)

While this is great to make sure that I’m on top of things that I’ve made commitments to, it doesn’t do a great job of showing me what I can actually work on given the circumstances. There’s no indication of how much time a task will take. Having a separate category for phone calls is great when I’m in phone calling mode. But there’s different level of time commitments between “Call Mom and make sure she got the gift” and “Call your mortgage broker to discuss refinancing options”. I needed a way to also distinguish those tasks from each other.

Awhile ago I had started leveraging an additional context/tag of “Short Dashes” and “Full Focus”. This was just a quick hint of how much energy was required for the task. But by using those contexts/tags, I can create a new filter that highlighted short dash items that I could do between meetings. And now that Omnifocus supports multiple tags, I can also add a tag based on the tool that I need to complete the task. (e.g. Email, Phone, Computer, Research)

Now when I have a short amount of time, I can quickly flip to this perspective of work, which allows me to wrap up a lot of the smaller tasks that I need to do. This helps me to maximize those few minutes that I would normally waste checking Twitter because I didn’t have enough time to complete a larger task.

Another common scenario I’d run into was where my physical presence was tied up, but my mind was free. (Think of waiting for a doctor’s appointment to start. Back when we did those crazy things) I created a mobile perspective specifically for that purpose! It looks at all the tasks that I could complete on a mobile device.

These small changes have helped me to become more effective in those smaller slices of time. Now I know what I can make progress on regardless of my situation and begin to make some of that extra time I’ve got useful.

If you don’t have a to do management system, I’d highly recommend Omnifocus and reading the book Getting Things Done by David Allen.