Parking Lot Task Lists
I love building task lists. They keep my personal and professional lives organized and help limit my anxiety. I have Trello boards, Notion Lists, neon-colored sticky notes, and a sleek, black glass dry erase board fastened to my living room wall. On my bedroom door, a giant poster board of personal, quarterly OKRs greets me each morning.
And near the top of all these lists? Consolidating the number of task tools!
As the idea of an extended quarantine became very real, I looked to my lists as if they were a food pantry — was I stocked up on enough meaningful items to sustain me through this lockdown?
If you are wondering where I am going with this and thinking, “Was the writing (literally) on the wall? Did all the tasks create this perfect confluence of ideas to bootstrap AllClear into existence?” Well, no, it did not.
Everyone in Product Development has their own term for it, but in our circle, we call unplanned and interruptive work as a project that comes in “sideways.” Sideways work has been known to kill a roadmap or two. Nothing in my storied list-creating career prepared me for the sideways idea Joe Essenfeld presented to me and Boris Kozak on March 20th that has become AllClear.
I have scoped hundreds of projects of all sizes as a product manager. Within a couple of hours of iterating on this particular idea, I had come to terms with the fact that 90% of my precious personal-life lists were going into the “parking lot” (a place where items go to take extended timeouts). This was BIG and the project demanded a time commitment to match. We also knew it required a specialized, diverse team. Within four days, we had recruited 10+ team members from our networks spanning engineering, devops, design, product management, data science, and marketing. Almost instantly, each member bought into the mission. Outside of family, friends, and our day jobs, AllClear became THE priority.
Today, we have over 30 volunteers. Fresh faces bring a totally new dimension and energy to a nucleus that has already bonded over years spent in the trenches. Yet even for a veteran team,the pace of development has been challenging. All Hands meetings at 8 p.m. Zoom design sessions until 1 a.m. Slack updates at 3 a.m. Throw in quarantine life, and this is our new normal.It is a bit daunting to think our work only just started. Those late-night Zoom sessions alternate between group therapy and work. But the therapy truly helps. It drives home the point that we are ALL in this together. It keeps us focused on our mission and powering meaningful outcomes for our users. It also comes with a whole new set of task lists — our collective pantries are now well-stocked. So, while the majority of my personal-life lists grow more stale by the day sitting in the back row of the “parking lot,” I have zero anxiety about it. I’ll have to consolidate those task tools some other day.
Back to building…
