Getting Your Arms Around the Chaos
Do you have a list of all of the projects you have going right now?
I have recently found myself asking that question to clients. For some, it was in response to statements that they have too much on their plates. For others, it was after they expressed difficulty getting their bosses to understand why they couldn’t respond to every request immediately. Without a reliable view of all of the current activity, it was harder for those leaders to track progress, prioritize the most important activities, and manage new requests from others.
The first step in creating a project inventory is to write each of your current projects—i.e., anything that’s been taking your time and attention—on an index card. Writing down all of your projects is similar to the “capture” step of David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD) framework, if you’re familiar. Just taking that step, which enables you to see everything in one place, can generate an eye-opening “oh crap” reaction. Try it—you’ll see.
Having a foundational list of projects enables you to better manage the chaos, but it’s just step one. I usually push clients on how they might substantially reduce the number of items on the list so they can eliminate the chaos. Tactically, I suggest they line up the project cards vertically on a table and sort them based on importance.
For anything on the bottom of the list, it’s useful to ask, “Do I even need to do this?” The nuance is that almost everything you’ve allowed on your plate has some value to it, and it can be easy to keep them going if the perceived effort is low. What that analysis misses, however, is that all of these lower-priority projects levy an overhead tax. As Cal Newport describes in his book Slow Productivity:
“[W]hen you agree to a new commitment, be it a minor task or a large project, it brings with it a certain amount of ongoing administrative overhead: back-and-forth email threads needed to gather information, for example, or meetings scheduled to synchronize with your collaborators. [...] As your to-do list grows, so does the total amount of overhead tax you’re paying. Because the number of hours in the day is fixed, these administrative chores will take more and more time away from your core work, slowing down the rate at which these objectives are accomplished.”
It’s not that the low-priority projects take a lot of time—it’s that they make our higher-priority projects worse! (The overhead tax applies just as much to our personal projects as our professional ones.)
As the final step in wrestling with the project list, I ask clients to assess the time and effort they or their team puts into each project. Where they are not investing enough time, they move the project cards to the left. Where they are overinvesting, they move the cards to the right. At the end of that step, their project list looks like the image below.
The point of that exercise is to see that, unless you’re going to sleep less, boosting your time and energy investment in one project requires identifying specifically where you’re going to spend less.
While the project inventory is a helpful exercise for identifying one-time opportunities to re-prioritize work, it is most powerful as a tool for managing your team’s work on an ongoing basis, especially if you make it accessible to everyone on the team.
As David Allen and Edward Lamont write in Team: “A significant accelerator for team collaboration in a meeting is the visual identification of work. When everyone can see what all the participants are doing—or not doing—without having to ask, then vast amounts of otherwise necessary communication fall away, along with endless yawn-inducing ‘update’ meetings. The entire team knowing who is doing what via an up-to-date team Project list means that redundancies can be identified and eliminated before they waste valuable team time and energy.”
Leadership Wisdom
“[I]t’s easy to mistake ‘do fewer things’ as a request to ‘accomplish fewer things.’ But this understanding gets things exactly backward. Whether your task list is overflowing or sparse, you’re still working more or less the same number of hours each week. The size of your list affects only how usefully these hours produce results. It’s here that we find the primary argument for why doing fewer things is as important for modern knowledge workers as it was for Jane Austen. It’s not just because overload is exhausting and unsustainable and a miserable way to exist—though it certainly is—but because doing fewer things makes us better at our jobs; not only psychologically, but also economically and creatively.”
— Cal Newport, in Slow Productivity