The other day I have been trapped in a very silly way. Let me tell you why and how it is relevant for the sake of this blog.

Currently, I am trying to change one of my bad habits: going to bed too late and be tired the day after. So, I took the resolution to go to bed at 11pm max every night before a working day for three weeks, hoping that the new habit will be embedded in me at the end of that period. Following the recommendations of Leo Babauta in The Power of Less, this the only bad habit that I am addressing at the moment in order to keep the focus. The others will come later.

Last Sunday, I was determined not to do an exception. At 10:45pm, I turned the TV off and made the last preparations in order to go to bed. 10:55pm, I was about to go to bed when suddenly… I saw that some laundry had to be hanged on the dryer. Nooooo…!

Dilemma: Ruin my efforts to endorse the new habit, or ruin the laundry by leaving it wet into the laundry bag until the day after?

I chose option 1, because I accepted the idea it was a minor break to my rule (11:15pm is kind of the same as 11pm, isn’t it?). But I learnt an important lesson: there is not such thing as a small task. And it is even truer when we work Agile. I already know this from the workplace, but it was not that obvious that it would also apply at home.

Very small tasks do exist: they take not more than 2-3 minutes. Those are the ones we have interest to do now because the logistics of dealing with them at a future time is more costly than actually executing them straight away – e.g. Reply thank you when somebody is sending you the file you need.

But 10-15’ tasks are very very sneaky. They don’t sound like much time, but actually they are. And when there are multiple ones awaiting in the to-do list, they can be a nightmare, worse, a day-killer. And if we consider and treat them in the same way as very small tasks, ie. execute them when they come without properly prioritising them with the rest of your workload, it is very likely they will negatively affect your productivity.

So, on Sunday, what happened? During the day, I considered that the laundry was a very small task. But laundry is deceitful as putting the clothes in the washing machine takes two minutes indeed, BUT the pain comes later when we have to hang them – this is an additional 15’. So even if I hadn’t planned to do one laundry during the day, I just did, because I had a couple of minutes available. However, I didn’t count for the hanging… Therefore, here I am, 11:15pm, putting underwear on a dryer, moaning that I screwed up my new resolution because of that stupid laundry.

But now it makes sense. And at work, I understand much better why all those small items in the backlog are sitting there, waiting to get done, even though they don’t take much time to do. Now I know why: they’re not the priority. And if they don’t take much time, they do take time. And at the end, even 15’ can make a difference… and not a small difference, but a big one!