There are two critical issues with how we put together and use a typical to-do list, at least from my experience:
- To make it easier to start, and reduce overwhelm, you can break tasks down into bite-sized pieces. The problem is, you can only break tasks down so far until they’re almost nonsensical—at a certain point it makes zero sense to add a task for every individual for loop you need to write. Eventually you just have to make the task “write lift calculation script” and be done with it.
- Because there’s a limit to how fine of a resolution you can get on your tasks, each line on your list is going to have a different amount of time and effort needed. It’s pretty obvious that “draft high level test matrix” is going to be way more involved than “email doggy daycare to schedule nail trim for next week.” (The first took me two hours, the second two minutes.)
These two issues became painfully apparent to me this week, and especially on the Wednesday I spent five hours on one to-do list item.
How is it that I could check off six different five-minute tasks one day and it would seem on paper like I was more productive than a day I did only two, when those two required way more brainpower and dedicated effort?
So, I’m deciding to experiment a bit. I’m going to adapt a system from a project management tool called Jira, and allocate points to tasks based on both the time and the effort involved.
(And if you felt anguish just now at the mere mention of Jira, I apologize for my transgression.)
In Jira, tasks get assigned story points based on their level of effort required. These values are based on the Fibonacci sequence, so instead of being linear they go 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13.
This helps better differentiate between the tasks and also abstract them from specific time estimates—it’s pretty clear that a 5-point task is much more involved than a 1-point task, and an 8-pointer even more so.
I’m doing something similar with my own to-do list. Something that takes less than five minutes, like that doggy daycare email, gets 1 point. The test matrix task got 8 points, because though it wasn’t terribly time-intensive, it did require me to collect and synthesize ideas and comments from the past few months, which takes notable effort.
I’m thinking this will probably be more useful for planning purposes than anything else really: seeing the “load” of each task can help identify what is actually achievable in a given day and avoid overloading myself. I can do a bunch of 1 and 3-point tasks on meeting-heavy days, and save the 8 and 13-pointers for big stretches of deep work time.
I’m prepared for this to end up in the graveyard of all the different productivity systems I’ve tried. But I’ll at least give it a shot and see if it can help tame the chaos.
I’d be curious to hear if you have any unique systems you use to track and organize your workload, professional and/or personal. Or is there a “popular” system that has worked really well for you? It’s always fun hearing how different brains work.