A Wandering Mind

More often than I’d like, I get e-mails from various folks late in the evening (the record is about 11pm) somewhere along the line of: “This is really urgent and needs to be done EOD today.” Now, I have to assume that either one of two things is going on here:

1. Their End Of Day is different than mine. Not in the time zone sense (though I do occasionally deal with folks offshore), but just in the sense of they work hours beyond the normal workday.
2. They’re being clever and trying to be the first mail in my inbox the next morning.

Now in the case of #1, obviously they’re not readers of my blog. Otherwise, they’d see my prior post where I was pretty clear about my policy with regards to working after hours: high value and emergency work only. That’s not to say there have not been some cases where the work met one or both of those criteria; just merely that most of the time it doesn’t.

In the case of #2, for one I’d laugh because with the sheer volume of e-mail I get, no matter where you end up it’s most likely not at the top of anything. That, and even if you do somehow manage to be the first thing I read in the morning, that in no way affects where in the queue of actions you’ll end up. Guess they’re not subscribers to the GTD style of organization, huh?

So you might remember a previous post where I lamented my lack of a “Someday” list. Well, since then, things seem to have swung around to the opposite extreme. I’ve now got a healthy selection of projects-in-waiting, both for work and personal. Partly it’s been because I’ve been better at cleansing my action and project lists on a weekly basis; anything that has laid static for more than a few weeks gets archived and tagged “Someday”. But I’d say with confidence that the growth is largely attributable to a shear lack of time.

Ever since the birth of my son Taylor, things at home have been, well, busy to say the least. It’s been a struggle just to keep up with the day to day work, such as keeping the house clean, the laundry done, and the trash empty. With such little time and energy left over for personal projects, strict adherence to priorities and ruthless cutting of scope has been the rule of thumb. So much for things like learning Perl (though I’m sneaking this in at the gym on the treadmill), building a new Snort server, or even non-geeky work like painting the exterior windows on the house.

Work, while slightly less crazy, has been quite a whirlwind as well. After some purging of wartime troop levels, the remaining force has been tasked with a “lights on” mantra. That’s all fine and good, except you’d be ludicrous to call what we do “keeping the lights on”. Software still needs to be updated, security maintained, systems administered. Yes, some of the excess fluff has been removed: no more long troubleshooting of user issues (is it replicated on a clean system? If not, guess what, you get to re-image your computer) or extra out-of-scope work. But still, there is no shortage of necessary tasks to be had. Combine that with taking on a new product and expanding my role to include some levels of data-guru, and you’ve got a packed agenda.

On the one hand, it is more than a little frustrating to see the mounting list of “not yets” and “maybe somedays”. But at least I can be secure that everything is safely tucked away, waiting for the day when changing diapers isn’t an hourly occurence, or treading water at work less the norm.

When I do my weekly review, I’ve made it a habit to mark items as “priority 2″ in Remember The Milk that I’d like to get done in the next week.  This puts a nice blue mark next to them in my lists, so they stand out from the crowd.  In the beginning, it gave me a sense of direction going into the week.

Here’s the problem: I don’t see any reasonable correlation between the assigned “priority” of an item, and whether or not it get’s done in a timely manner.  Priorities shift so rapidly in my life that items never stay in the same category for very long.  This morning’s “priority one” could become this afternoon’s “maybe tomorrow” in the blink of an eye if a fire pops up.  As a result, what I see is things marked as “high priority” piling up, which makes me feel like I’m getting buried even more.  It’s a vicious cycle to be sure.

Perhaps that’s why according to the “true” principles of GTD, priority is really something that gets decided on a moment-by-moment basis.  When faced with a block of time, and no clear indication of how to spend it, GTD suggests examining the following criteria:

1. Context (where are you and what do you have access to)
2. Time Available (5 minutes, 30 minutes, 2 hours)
3. Energy Available (high, medium, low)
4. Priority (dictated or decided, see my previous post)

Think of the following situation: you have fifteen minutes in between meetings, and are exhausted after a long night up with the spouse talking about some things in your personal life.  You’re sitting outside the conference room of your next meeting, but have your laptop with you.  You can choose between a)starting to work on diagnosing a rather nasty technical issue, b) paying a bill or two online, both of which are due in a week, or b)responding to three e-mails (one of which was marked urgent by the sender) which have been sitting since this morning, and are simple one-and-done questions.   Which is the more productive choice?  I won’t answer the question; you decide based on the list above.

So how does this relate to my original question?  Well, in my case, re-reading about how GTD teaches us to best use these fleeting moments helped me to realize that my use of the “priority” function in my system was causing more confusion than it was clarifying and ordering my actions.  From now on, here is what I intend to do at my weekly reviews:

1. Ensure that all my lists are current.  All my open loops are recorded, and all projects are present and accounted for.
2. Any item which has a specific and (relatively) inflexible date by which it must be completed is assigned a due date.  For example, I have to get my taxes mailed before May 15th, or else ol’ Uncle Sam will come knocking.
3. Any next action that is currently on my next actions list, and has been there for more than three weeks without moving, will be moved to the “someday” list (more on this in an upcoming post).

In addition, at least three times per day, I’m going to stop, and evaluate how I’m spending my time, based on the above four criteria.  Going even further, I am going to write this down, and post it to my Twitter feed for all to see.  I’ll use this shorthand for ease of posting: “c:” for context, “t:” for time available (high, medium, low), “e:” for energy (high, medium, low), and “p:” for priority (high, medium, low).

As my readers, I ask that you hold me accountable for this statement!

In my work I’m constantly bombarded with reports of problems.  Given that a high percentage of these come in with an urgent tag attached, I decided some time ago that I needed to come up with a systematic approach to determining their true priority.  After all, I’m only one man, and if I treated everyone’s problems as raging fires, I’d never get anything done.  What I’ve come up with is the following three-pronged approach:

Clarify the scope

In my experience (and I’m sure that I’m not alone), problems tend to be described by end users in global terms: “the system is down”, “we cannot login”, etc. But in reality, the problem may be much smaller. I once had a user e-mail me directly (another no-no) stating “System X is down, I cannot login. Please fix immediately.” When I called the user and asked about whether others in his group were experiencing the same problem, he replied “Yeah, I think so. I didn’t ask.” When prodded to ask further, it was discovered that the problem was limited only to this one user, making it a far lower priority than the original message would have indicated.

What is the impact?

Ok, so you’ve established that there’s a problem, and you know it’s affecting an entire department. But what does the existence of the problem mean for business? Are operations at standstill? Are people being forced to sit at their computers and twiddle their thumbs? Or, on the other end of the spectrum, are people’s widgets not looking as pretty as they should be? I’ve found it helpful to evaluate technology problems in the context of how the functionality of a system is affected. There’s a huge difference between losing a minor feature of a program versus losing the core business requirements.

Is there a workaround?

In today’s world, technology is often about the automation of manual processes. If the automation fails, users can often revert to the (albeit slower, more painful) older methods of completing their work. If the problem has no workaround, however, you obviously have a bigger issue to contend with. Keep in mind though, workarounds are only as good as the user’s ability to carry them out. If your automated trading system goes down at 3:50PM, and no one remembers how to enter trades on the old green screen terminals, you might as well not have those terminals in the first place.