Organizational capability is definitely a core competency for an architect, if not for any human being who wants to be remotely effective.
My colleagues and I opine frequently on the ever elusive goal of seamless task management. Our individual roads to chaos are littered with task management schemes and tools each proposing to do what the others have not been able to do – to tame the insanity and optimize efficiency. For the most part, the net result seems to be excessive amounts of precious time spent mastering approaches and converting from one to another. In the end, what I have found most effective is almost the first organization approach I ever employed and one I implemented, at that time, in a completely analog manner.
For nearly ten years beginning when I was in college, I ran a overnight summer camp. It was quite an organizational challenge – 100 staff, 12 groups, 300 campers, and roughly 420 weekly activities for 12 weeks. Add to that the expected number of hourly crisis and it was a handful. It took a few years to get my organizational stride, but in the end what really did the trick was 4 pieces of paper attached to a clipboard and a pencil.
The first piece of paper was a simple list of tasks for the current day or the next few days following. The list started the day in priority order, but I would add new ones to the bottom as they popped up and cross items off as they were completed. I would annotate with stars to indicate the really important ones. Any task that was not fated to be completed in the next few days, would end up on one of the other three sheets. Each was a monthly calendar (the camp only ran for 3 months), with blank boxes for each day. Any “future” task would get added to the day on which it needed to be completed.
The true secret to the method, however, was not the paper, pencil, or clipboard, but the daily review! At the end of each day I would rewrite the task list on a new piece of paper, adding the calendar items for the next few days and re-prioritizing the entire set of tasks for the next day. I have determined that the winning strategy for any task management strategy requires frequent review and reassessment of the tasks. A task does not stand alone, but needs to be assessed and prioritized within the context of the other tasks.
That’s it – I hope you were not expecting something magical. My current implementation of this is slightly more technical. I maintain my calendar within Microsoft Outlook, which I synchronize with my PalmOne Treo 700p. I keep my task list on a Wiki, because my whole team does and that was I can reallocate easily tasks across the team, but when working solo have used a simple electronic document. I attempt to do the nightly review and modify the document to prepare for the next day and find when I let that slip, my stress level slowly rises as I lose track of what is important.
I do have some specific pointers that help me, many of which I have extracted from the many task schemes that have not worked out for me (the bulk of the ideas came from David Allen’s Getting Things Done approach). Anyway, here is my regurgitating of the key things that work for me:
- Don’t keep tasks in your head. That just creates stress. Write it down and free your brain to think impressive thoughts.
- Not everything needs to be tracked as a task. Yes, I know. That contradicts what I just said. However, the more noise you put on your task list, the more the important ones get lost. Some things will happen without you needing to track them. For a contrived example – if you have a task to make 50 copies of a document, you don’t need to also have a task to print the document – that will “happen” when you go to make the copies and realize you need the original.
) Sounds obvious, but I find myself having to police my task list for these, which is why I mention it. - Only track near term tasks to detail. Still part of the “less is better” theory. A lot can change in a week, at the very least priorities are adjusted, at the most complete direction shifts can occur, so over-tracking the details of next weeks tasks is just creating additional work. Also, future milestones belong on the calendar, remember!
- Use a list of projects to help brainstorm tasks. In addition to my calendar, I use a list of current projects I am currently working and ask myself for each,”Is there anything I need to do in the next few days to move this project forward?”
- Review your tasks daily. I am not going to say it again. Otherwise you are just goofing around.
Once you get your tasks in order and have some free time, two sites that I have extracted some organizational gems from are 43 Folders and Lifehacker.
