Tasks

Task Times, The Planning Fallacy, and a Magical 20%

Merlin — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 12:00:21 -0400

Via The Guardian, via Chairman Gruber, comes this post from the new-to-me blog, Overcoming Bias. It discusses the research behind a common cognitive bias known as The Planning Fallacy, which is a repeatable, documented error in thinking that apparently explains why we all tend to "underestimate task-completion times."

It's summed up nicely by Gödel, Escher, Bach author Douglas Hofstadter's Law regarding the time it takes to do anything:

It always takes longer than you expect, even when you take Hofstadter's Law into account.

Sounds familiar. From the Overcoming Bias post:

People tend to generate their predictions by thinking about the particular, unique features of the task at hand, and constructing a scenario for how they intend to complete the task - which is just what we usually think of as planning.

[...]

But experiment has shown that the more detailed subjects' visualization, the more optimistic (and less accurate) they become.

Cf: The Optimism Bias.

In my days as a project manager (and in another life as a freelance designer), I got into a habit that has served me well to this day: get the best estimate of both job requirements and time-to-completion that you can find. Then add 20%. Then, when nobody is looking, add another 20%. Then pray.

Although it's no inoculation against the (apparently immutable nature of) Hofstadter's Law -- and you'll still end up short most of the time -- it can help you do one thing much better: manage expectations. Because you're a project manager, not a magician. Magicians get cooler hats.

I think planning a project is ultimately a little like throwing a donut at the moon. You can never actually hit the target, plus you'll be lucky if you aren't hit in the face on the way down.

”Task Times, The Planning Fallacy, and a Magical 20%” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 13, 2008. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Task List: Handy student app for tracking assignments

Merlin — Tue, 02 Jan 2007 05:58:41 -0500

Funkware - Task List

Task List is a promising looking new app for students who want to track the tasks associated with homework and other assignments.

As a former dysfunctional student, I like the way you can filter work by class, gauge progress on assigments, set priorities, and then track the results, such as the grade you received, etc. It also has support for "Classcasts," syncs with .Mac, and seems to work nicely with iCal.

As with many tricked-out task apps, there's plenty of room for bogging down in the sort of fiddly meta-work that's more fun than, say, actually reading Bleak House, but this app is far from the worst attractive nuisance I've seen in that regard. Based on my 20 minutes of running through it yesterday, it looks like a useful application for managing the rat's nest of tasks standing between you and your sheepskin.

Task List is the simple way to manage your homework. After all, it's bad enough that you have to do homework in the first place - why should keeping track of it be difficult too? Task List 5 builds on the many features of Task List 4, and offers you even more ways to keep track of what you need to do. Even better, it makes it easy to actually do something about your homework, with features such as multiple file attachments for each task, a built-in tabbed notes editor, and convenient reference information and links, just like your composition notebook. Best of all, Task List 5's new interface makes it easy to view your information in as simple or complex a manner as you wish.

What are you organized Mac students out there using to keep it all together?

”Task List: Handy student app for tracking assignments” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on January 02, 2007. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

GTD: Project Verbs vs. Next-Action Verbs

Merlin — Tue, 14 Nov 2006 07:29:40 -0500

In implementing Getting Things Done, you're wise to understand that words are powerful things. And the king of words in GTD, as in life, is the verb.

How you articulate an activity or how you choose to frame a project within the context of your larger life and work will say a lot about how successful you can be in turning all your "stuff" into atomic actions that will work in support of valuable outcomes. This starts with simple things like beginning next actions with a physical verb, but there's actually a lot more subtlety (and potential confusion) to it.

In fact, one of the hang-ups that many people encounter in planning their work in GTD is that, no matter how hard they try, they can never seem to get the distinction between single-action verbs and the larger "look-into" style projects that may require sub-actions. This comes up a lot, and it can lead to frustration and untold friction.

Well, if you've ever shared this affliction of not knowing your verbs from a hole in the ground, I have some rare and unexpected GTD gold.

Buried in the companion booklet for the Getting Things Done FAST! CD set (currently out of print) is one of the more useful bits of GTD instruction I've seen outside the book. It's a list of "Project Verbs" versus "Next-Action Verbs" and, man, is it ever useful.

These materials (which I'd never seen anywhere else before) provide a powerful codebook for translating your own language and thinking into planning that is do-able and valuable. Put simply, there are verbs that suggest a single physical next action, and there are verbs that suggest a desired outcome with more than one step. And these tables can help you see and understand that distinction immediately.

Project verbs

Finalize	Resolve	Handle
Look into	Submit	Maximize
Organize	Design	Complete
Ensure	Roll out	Update
Install	Implement	Set-up

Next-action verbs

Call	Organize	Review
Buy	Fill out	Find
Purge	Look into (Web)	Gather
Print	Take	Waiting for
Load	Draft	Email

Get the distinction? Most all of those big verbs can and should be uncorked to reveal that they contain nothing but dozens of smaller verbs. And those little fellas are your physical next actions. That's your work.

I really wish I'd had these tables taped over my desk three years ago when I started doing GTD, because -- geeky as it sounds -- they're a kind of rosetta stone for ensuring that you correctly translate your stuff into either tasks or containers for tasks. So useful.

Getting that taxonomy and structure correct during the planning stage will do much to improve your life when it comes time for doing.

”GTD: Project Verbs vs. Next-Action Verbs” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on November 14, 2006. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

43F Podcast: Goin' on a Media Diet

Merlin — Mon, 31 Oct 2005 12:18:27 -0500

Goin’ on a Media Diet (mp3)

43folders.com - Two simple things you can do this week to reclaim your attention and start enjoying the I/O in your life again.

More at Odeo.com...

The podcast includes two diet tips for the week:

The Media Date - set aside a few contiguous hours to consume just one piece or type of media -- by itself. Read a book, watch a movie, or listen to your favorite record. Defy background noise by just focusing on that one thing for a while.
The Mindful Phonecall - Take 30 minutes to sit in a chair and talk to someone you love on the phone. No shopping, web surfing, or walking around allowed. Just you and them.

Any good media diet tips of your own to share? How do you limit your I/O?

”43F Podcast: Goin' on a Media Diet” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on October 31, 2005. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

Building a Smarter To-Do List, Part I

Merlin — Mon, 12 Sep 2005 05:48:44 -0400

Since new folks visit 43F each day, I thought it might be valuable to return to one of our most popular evergreen topics to review some "best practices" for keeping a good to-do list. While a lot of this might be old hat to some of you, it's a good chance to review the habits and patterns behind one of the most powerful tools in the shed. Part 2 appears tomorrow (Update: now available). (N.B.: links to previous posts related to these topics are provided inline)

Why bother?

In my own experience wrangling life's entropic challenges, some of my best gains have come from maintaining a smart, actionable, and updated accounting of all the things I've committed myself to doing. While the quality of that list may vary from day to day, it's the best place to train my focus whenever things are starting to feel out of control. In fact, the health of my to-do list usually mirrors the health of my productivity (as well as the barometric pressure of my stress). On the good days, my to-do list has a living quality that helps guide my decisions and steers me through unexpected changes in priority or velocity. And on the crummy days, it becomes the likely suspect when I need to quickly reassess the state of the union and make changes.

While you can argue for the flavor and approach to task management that best suits your style (and your personal suck), it's hard to disparage the benefits that come from getting task commitments out of your brain and into a consistent location. One list scribbled on one busy day is not necessarily the answer (although it can be a lifesaver). Try thinking of your to-do list as an evolving plan for responsibly focusing your effort and attention in the near future.

Anatomy of a To-do

The primary idea of a to-do is that it's a task that can and should be done--a point that might seem obvious until you start uncovering how many of the items on your to-do list may not belong there (or, conversely, how many uncaptured items do). The best and most useful to-dos share common qualities:

it's a physical action
it can be accomplished at a sitting
it supports valuable progress toward a recognized goal
it's something for which you are the most appropriate person for the job

Glancing at your own to-do list, do you see any potential troublemakers? Notice any items that make you squeamish? Any mystery meat tasks that seem "un-doable" as is? Don't sweat it. We're going to have you shaped up in no time.

Break it Down to the “Next Action”

In Getting Things Done , David Allen introduced his notion of the “next action,” which he defines as “the next physical, visible activity that needs to be engaged in, in order to move the current reality toward completion.”

For example, a classic old-school to-do might be something like “Plan Tom's Surprise Going-Away Party,” “Clean out the Garage,” or “Get the Car Fixed.” But, as Allen cannily notes, these are each really small projects since they require more than one activity in order to be considered complete. Learning to honor that distinction between a task and its parent project may, in fact, be the most important step you can take toward improving the quality and “do-ability” of the work on your list.

So, in our example of beginning to organize for Tom's big party, we first want to learn when exactly he'll be leaving town. But to obtain that information, we'll first need to call his housemate, Sue, for details. But before we can call Sue, we'll have to remember where we jotted down her new work number last week. (Project managers call these kind of linked tasks “dependencies,” but you knew that.)

Suddenly our focus has narrowed from the ginormous and ultimately un-doable “Plan Party” to the entirely manageable “Find Sue's work number.” While this is far from the only task we'll have to complete for our party planning, it's clearly the next thing we'll need to do before proceeding. This is the bona fide “next action,” so it's earned a place on our to-do list.

By always breaking projects of any size into their true constituent next actions--and it's definitely okay to have several at once per project--we're making it fast and easy to always know what should be happening next.

Let's Get Physical

Articulating your to-dos in terms of physical activity--even when they require only modest amounts of actual exertion--has a variety of benefits.

Most importantly, it ensures that you've thought through your task to a point where you can envision how it will need to be undertaken and what it will actually feel like once you're doing it. This means you can easily visualize the activity, the kinds of tools you'll need, and perhaps even the setting where the work should take place; It's not just a bunch of words you've written on a page.

All in how you phrase it

Framing your work in the physical world is easiest when you imagine what's being done, and the best trick here is to simply phrase your task in a form like: “verb the noun with the object.” That means instead of reminding yourself with the mystery meat of “Year-end report,” you'd more accurately first “Download Q3 spreadsheet from work server.” And, instead of “Get with Anil,” you'd probably want to “Email Anil on Monday to schedule monthly disco funk party.” Get specific in whittling the task down to one activity that you can accomplish completely at a sitting. “A sitting” will vary for you, but I try to never plan a task that would take more than ten minutes (your level of busy-ness might command even smaller-sized tasks).

Consider, for example, how an oversized to-do like “Prepare the big presentation” might be improved upon by zeroing in on the physicality of a first step like “Draft four ideas for our presentation's theme.” Where the former task provides no purchase for a sensible ascent, the latter gives us a fat handle for getting started with something that already feels familiar: we know how to type, and we definitely know when we see four of something. So, this is a sensible chunk of work that can be done.

Get the verbs right

Notice how we're breaking these Big Nouns into little verbs? That's deliberate. With that original to-do for your presentation, you might theoretically just keep “preparing” your presentation until some arbitrary alarm bell goes off in your head, saying “Yeah, okay, that looks like a fully-prepared presentation, so you can stop.” But a better-defined chunk of activity suggests a task with clear edges; it has a beginning and an end. This enables you to keep putting one foot in front of the other, ensuring that you always know what to do next, instead of half-assing your way through a badly-defined pile of fuzzy nouns.

This physicality and functional piece-work act in concert to make the planning and execution of your tasks as stress-free and unintimidating as possible. Knowing that every item on your to-do list is a familiar task that can be accomplished before lunch can be wildly empowering. It's just up to you to ensure that all your work is segmented, shaped, and stacked into units that can fit through the windows that are available to you.

Your work is what you make it

The trick is that these jobs can be made easier long before they're undertaken by framing and naming them properly and in the right-sized units. As early as the capture and planning phases of this cycle, you hold the power and responsibility for defining your work. Failing to do that well and thoughtfully is a primary cause of hang-ups further down the line. In other words, your work often isn't difficult because you're necessarily all that busy, but because you hadn't taken the time to list it all out in a way that makes it clear and “do-able”. This is so important as you begin actually working on your tasks, when the last thing you want is to wonder whether you're doing the right thing at the right time.

As we’ll see tomorrow, to have any use beyond a handy brain dump, your to-do list has to stay current and reflect your realistic commitments in the world. Otherwise you’re studying documentation for a product that may not exist any more.

Read on for “Building a Smarter To-Do List, Part II” »

Technorati Tags: gtd, planning, productivity, todolists, work

”Building a Smarter To-Do List, Part I” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on September 12, 2005. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"

To-Done: Scheduling tasks

Merlin — Thu, 18 Aug 2005 08:09:07 -0400

How I learned to stop worrying and love my schedule

This is an intriguing idea. Peter converts his to-dos into scheduled blocks of work.

I now schedule EVERYTHING. As a result, very little gets missed. I’m still using next-actions, but I’ve added the step of mapping them out on upcoming weeks. This way, I can relax, knowing that I’m going to get them done.

If you’re reading this and thinking “so freakin’ what?” you’re probably not alone, but some of the GTD acolytes in the house might be hollering “Blasphemer!” since David Allen often suggests using your calendar only for “hard landscape” items, such as appointments with others, while leaving to-dos as “when you can” items that get knocked off as time, energy, and context allows.

But, the idea is really quite sound for someone like me (and most of the people I know). If you handle all your own work and scheduling (a/k/a “don’t have a ‘real’ job”), it’s entirely up to you to choose and do all the tasks on your theoretically unlimited lists. Giving yourself timed assignments like these seems like a potentially smart way to ensure that your stuff is getting done when you think it should.

Since you put the tasks in there, you’re certainly entitled to remove them as well, right? You’re just making some modest paper walls to give a shape to something that’s often frustratingly formless. Neat idea.

I continue to admire and enjoy how people are adapting the patterns of GTD without hewing slavishly to every syllable of the book.

This is a terrific example of how one pattern (“get it all down”) might seemingly contradict another (“calendar is hard landscape only”). Of course, they’re not really contradictory at all unless you choose to treat Allen’s suggestions as an operator’s manual or fundamentalist Productivity Bible. While that approach is useful for getting started with a system like GTD, it does seem valuable to let the ideas evolve and adapt into something that better comports with your own needs.

Edit 2005-08-18 09:35:25 - The referenced To-Done post was by Peter Flaschner not Keith Robinson. Sorry for the error (and thanks, Jay).

Technorati Tags: calendars, GTD, productivity, todos

”To-Done: Scheduling tasks” was written by Merlin Mann for 43Folders.com and was originally posted on August 18, 2005. Except as noted, it's ©2010 Merlin Mann and licensed for reuse under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0. "Why a footer?"