There is no such thing as a ‘small’ task

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!

Of notepad and actions log

Yesterday, I decided that I would change the way I was managing my workload at work. I was using wunderlist until now, an app designed to manage to-do lists a bit in the GTD mode. Wunderlist was not ideal because I was a bit overwhelmed by the endless amount of items I had to deal with. So I had decided to split those into multiple lists, but as a result I was constantly switching across multiple lists, which was not making things any better.

Also, I thouht there was a lot of wasted space on the screen (I work on a big screenwhen I am on site) as one entry takes almost its full length. Well, it was a bit heartbreaking to switch to another app as I liked Wunderlist’s interface, but I had to move to something more visual, something more kanban-like (more details to come soon), which allows to move stuff around in order to reflect progress, and not only to just tick the box as tasks were a simple pass or fail test.

I decided to go for Trello, a tool that I had already used over the past year wit my employer. Not the most glamourous interface, but it is flexible and does the job alright. Massive advantag as well, it is cloud based, therefore I can access and update from anywhere, with any device, providing that there is an Internet connection. As you most likely read my post around time management, you know that I have pretty much three hours of transport every day, therefore the latter is a critical advantage for me.

So I moved all my actions to Trello, and I realised one of them was « Follow-up on actions from planning session – see notepad ». Then I realised :

• When I have a meeting, I take a notepad
• I write the actions on the notepad
• After the meeting I key those actions on my (official) action log to actually record and prioritise the actions

HOW INEFFICIENT !!!

Then I asked myself : Why (the hell) don’t I write them straight away into my actions log at the time the action is mentioned ? That would save me time, plus I wouldn’t have to fight with my horrendous handwriting in order to understand what I wrote 24 hours earlier. And, even better, it will mean that my actions log will become the primary and golden source of the work I have to do, ready to just be prioritised and actioned.

As very often, we fail at using self-organisation tools because we don’t make them central and necessary enough in our environment, I believe I made an easy obvious, but still positive step in the right direction.

However, the mystery remains on one point : why wasn’t I doing that earlier ? I now know what was the blocker : I don’t like going to meetings with my laptop as this is a source of distraction. Usually, we need a good plan and a robust approach in order to remove such bad blocking thoughts. But surprisingly, overcoming it has been very easy for me : I realised that instead of going to meetings with my laptop, I was actually going with… my phone. In terms of distractions, this is even worse… hum…

That’s how I re-instated the use my laptop into my meetings. In terms of cultural revolution, pretty effective isn’t it ? Believe me, there are no such things as unbeatable bad habits when you are a management consultant. Well…