A team member the other day was looking around for people's insights into how to get things done. This quickly got other people involved in a conversation where everybody contributed quite interesting ideas.
I noticed that although we all have started at GTD or something similar, we all adapted it somehow, use different tools or created some hacks. That was enough motivation for me to share what I do nowadays.
Principles
There are a couple of things I do my way, and the first of them is to bake some principles in the way I approach the things I have to do. Since I am a software engineer, they are influenced by practices that I learned while trying to deliver high-quality software in incremental steps. My principles are.
Reduce Waste (from the Lean concept of Mura)
I used to have very long todo lists and put everything I wanted to do there. With time those get unmanageable. Then you organize them in projects, and those also get unmanageable. Then you organize your projects in areas… I solve that by making it harder for me to add more things that I can remove, for instance, by keeping track of a maximum list size per project, and by removing tasks when I plan every week.
Basically, every other principle on this list tries to follow this one. I like to think of this as if the goal is to get things done, most of the time, your lists are going down, freeing you to take over new projects.
Like the Greeks used to say.
tasks removed ≥ tasks added (90% of the time)
Strategy vs Tactic (from many places)
The Strategy is the big picture, the things you want to achieve that need some effort from time to time, and for a while. I tend to have my strategy for a 6 months window in the future. The Tactics are the now, the steps. Executable chunks you can see how much needs to be done to finish. I tend to have a list of the things I want to accomplish, tactically this week.
Since I organize my todo lists in projects, I tend to have a tactic list and a strategy list for each project. During planning (every week). I usually have a backlog, but I try to keep it to a minimum.
To reduce waste, I try to not even add to my list things not aligned with my strategy.
Have ideas, do not hold them (from GTD)
Getting Things Done (GTD) teaches that you should put everything on a system (list/calendar), and don’t think about it. It also says that if something is faster to do than couple minutes, than better just to it than note it down.
I like to work hard to combine this one with reducing waste, by only writing to my lists things I am committed to doing, and even then, when I do plan going forward, I throw away tasks that I feel have no chance happening.
Minimum Step (from the Lean Startup concept of MVP)
This principle is about getting smaller chunks of a task that you can actually finish. So for example, instead of adding “create a blog’ to my todo list I “add write a blog post about GTD” and “publish a blog post”. By the time I finished those two, maybe it will be time to add “write another blog post about Functional Programming”.
You can still have the bigger one as strategy, but you want the actionable, small ones on your tactics. I try to have less than 3 strategy items per project.
Pull, don't push (from Kanban)
The flow of things on my list tend to be a pull off things I already committed to doing and are aligned with my tactic. On a normal day, I would look for what I planned to do on a week, and pick some tasks to do on a day. If the day runs out, I can pull from my week; if then I am done with the week, I can pull the backlog.
Today ← Week ← Backlog
By the end of the week, I know how much I moved. If there are too many tasks not finished, I can have less planned for the next week, if there where too much pull from the backlog, I can increase my commitment.
Masters/Mentors (from Buddhism)
I learned over the years that for anything I want to achieve and do good, there is one person that followed this path and can teach me something. For example, if tend to try things first and then reflect deeper on how they work. A good friend is, on the other hand, a very good reader, he pays attention, understands the landscape and then acts. I need to get better at it, so he is the person I follow, so I can learn how he does it, and then create things I could to get close to that.
I have a list of every one of those things to achieve. When can argue that they could fit the framework of strategy/tactic and just be more to accomplish. I agree (it would reduce waste even). But I like to think on this Master mindset because it first, keeps me humble and second, those are usually areas where I seek continuous improvement in a longer horizon then the six months I use for tactics.
What about tools and hacks…
On this post, I argued the principles behind my way, but there is a lot more to talk about. Especially on how do I actually do it week by week? This will be for a future post, together with the tools I use, and some hacks I learned.
Please feel free to leave any feedback or to share your ideas about it.
PS: While I was writing this post, I discovered ZenKit and will also investigate that one further.
