How Do You Manage Projects Vs. Detailed To Do's On Your Board System?

00:00:00.000 | [MUSIC]

00:00:04.240 | All right, let's do a question here from Gabriel.

00:00:06.240 | Gabriel asks,

00:00:08.720 | how do you manage projects versus detailed to-dos on your

00:00:14.680 | board system?

00:00:15.600 | And there's a useful elaboration here because this is an important,

00:00:20.320 | but subtle issue. So Gabriel says,

00:00:22.600 | I've been using a Trello type system to organize projects,

00:00:26.560 | which has been helpful to visualize their different statuses.

00:00:29.540 | Then it helps me to choose priorities for a given quarter. However,

00:00:32.000 | as I've been catching up on your podcast,

00:00:33.640 | I've also recognized the value of a Trello type treatment of your to-dos to give

00:00:38.240 | clarity to them.

00:00:39.080 | Do you have separate boards for these two tasks with different magnitudes or how

00:00:43.520 | do you keep track of the status of any project or store them for later focus for

00:00:47.660 | a given quarter? Yeah, it's a good question, Gabriel.

00:00:51.020 | So I use my Trello boards for tasks.

00:00:53.160 | I will occasionally have a column on a relevant Trello board for a project.

00:00:59.580 | So here is a project I'm working on. That's going to generate a lot of tasks.

00:01:03.940 | I will give it its own column so that the tasks relevant to that project are

00:01:09.140 | in that column. So that's, that's somewhat common.

00:01:11.980 | I don't do this for every project though. Some projects,

00:01:16.140 | I know they're ongoing because I have them in my quarterly plan.

00:01:20.860 | And when I build my weekly plan,

00:01:23.100 | I see that and just figure out when and how am I going to make progress on that

00:01:27.260 | project during the current week.

00:01:29.780 | So where this becomes relevant is there are certain projects that are not

00:01:34.100 | fruitfully divided into tasks.

00:01:36.260 | This is one of my points of minor respectful disagreement with David

00:01:42.100 | Allen. I think in David Allen system, everything goes down to cranking widgets.

00:01:45.780 | Everything goes down to a next action that you can just execute.

00:01:49.060 | And he has this mind like water dream where you're just mindlessly executing

00:01:52.620 | these very clearly specified 60 second tasks. And in the end,

00:01:55.640 | you look up and say, huh, there's like a really nice New Yorker piece in a new

00:01:59.500 | book. The problem is,

00:02:01.780 | this is not actually how a lot of type of particularly demanding cognitive work

00:02:06.340 | happens. You can't take a book and break it down into 60 second next actions.

00:02:10.860 | You can't take a hard article and break it down in the 60 second next actions.

00:02:14.020 | There's often a, a mini steps, let's say that's just

00:02:17.820 | ambiguously speaking,

00:02:20.460 | think really hard on this and see if you can make progress.

00:02:24.620 | Like how do I crack this article? I don't know.

00:02:26.640 | I need to think about it a lot and read stuff and just try to figure it out.

00:02:29.440 | How do I get this chapter written?

00:02:32.040 | It's going to take me just hours and hours of writing. I mean,

00:02:34.480 | do I put it in a task?

00:02:35.640 | I can't put write 10,000 words on a task because it can take five different

00:02:39.360 | sessions. Do I have like put session number one as a task? I guess,

00:02:42.800 | like break it down into different tasks for different writing sessions.

00:02:47.120 | I guess I could do that, but it doesn't seem congruent.

00:02:50.360 | It seems like not a good fit. And so for this type of demanding cognitive work,

00:02:53.420 | I've realized it's better to just have in your quarterly plan,

00:02:56.760 | I'm working on a book and in this quarter, I want to finish two chapters.

00:03:01.600 | And you see that when you're building your weekly plan,

00:03:04.460 | you're looking at your week ahead and said, okay,

00:03:05.960 | I'm going to really go for it this week.

00:03:07.880 | I'm going to really try to get a draft of this chapter done this week.

00:03:10.200 | So I'm going to go on my calendar right now,

00:03:11.800 | maybe and I'm going to take the first three hours of Monday, Tuesday,

00:03:14.840 | Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, I just cleared the decks, no meetings,

00:03:17.520 | go right to the writing shed and write. And, and it's whatever, 10 hours,

00:03:22.820 | 15 hours worth of writing. Let's just see if that works.

00:03:25.360 | And if I can make progress on it, there's no real task intermediary here.

00:03:30.240 | It's me seeing, I have this hard project,

00:03:32.640 | knowing there's something hard to need to do looking at my week,

00:03:35.560 | reconfiguring my week. So I can do that type of have time for that type of hard

00:03:39.260 | thing.

00:03:40.100 | So this is why I do not have a one-to-one correspondence between my projects and

00:03:45.440 | columns on my Trello board. Some very tasky oriented projects. Yes, absolutely.

00:03:51.120 | You know, if we're doing admissions for grad students,

00:03:54.380 | I'm the director of graduate studies. Yeah.

00:03:56.100 | There's 15 things that have to happen.

00:03:58.700 | I need a place to keep track of all the information for each of these things.

00:04:01.660 | And I got to keep track of who's working on what,

00:04:03.740 | and I'm going to have a whole list of tasks.

00:04:05.260 | I'm also going to have another column that is waiting to hear back from,

00:04:07.980 | so I can keep track of,

00:04:09.740 | I'm waiting to hear back from the registrar's office about this and a whole

00:04:12.540 | column for the meetings I have every week with the graduate coordinator.

00:04:15.960 | So I can keep track of here's the five things I need to talk about the next

00:04:18.400 | meeting. It's perfect for that.

00:04:19.820 | My task board has very little to do with my books.

00:04:22.460 | It has very little to do sometimes with working on articles as very little to do

00:04:25.700 | with trying to solve a math proof.

00:04:27.140 | I go straight from my quarterly plan right to my weekly plan.

00:04:31.020 | And that influences my daily plan. No task board is involved.

00:04:34.620 | The final piece of your question, Gabriel's,

00:04:36.660 | how do you keep track of potential projects?

00:04:39.040 | I don't know that I really do that much. Like to me, that's not the hard thing.

00:04:43.420 | It's usually pretty clear. You know, you're doing a quarterly plan. Like what's,

00:04:47.460 | what's the, what am I working on for the next three or four months?

00:04:50.320 | I don't really need a list of things that I could be working on. I mean,

00:04:53.920 | at this level, at the David Allen, 30,000 foot level,

00:04:56.480 | you know what you're all about. You pretty much intuitively can figure out.

00:05:00.920 | I think I need to do a book proposal. I'm making progress on a book.

00:05:05.560 | I'm working on this academic new field or something like this.

00:05:08.520 | I don't need a list of potential projects.

00:05:10.320 | Not when I'm at the scale of what do I want to do this fall?

00:05:14.240 | This is more about reflecting on my career in general,

00:05:17.020 | my vision for my career, where I am, what's been going well,

00:05:19.420 | what's been going bad. I'm not going to have any trouble saying,

00:05:21.180 | here's the big rocks I'm going to try to put into the schedule.

00:05:23.420 | So I don't keep track of list of projects. One day,

00:05:26.120 | maybe projects at the scale of really big swing things.

00:05:29.100 | You're going to come up with good ideas. That's not the hard part.

00:05:33.020 | The hard part is when you actually have to start executing.

00:05:35.680 | [inaudible].

00:05:41.680 | [MUSIC]

How Do You Manage Projects Vs. Detailed To Do's On Your Board System?

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