Our VP Of Engineering asked us to think about this at work. We are all busy at work, but are we adding value to our customers with what we are doing now?
What is the next most important item on our backlog that add value to our customer immediately?
It’s a great way to prioritize relentlessly. I struggle with knowing how to prioritize in most of my career. I tend to work on a lot of projects all at once and taking a long time to deliver value.
If you send an email to me, it’s very likely (95% chance) I will reply
Here are my current tools to getting things done in 2018. I optimize for capturing 100% of my brain on paper or electronic. I do not optimize for having only a single place for a task or idea.
Things that are time sensitive or urgent
Longer term goals and important things like health, family, money, personal
Really long term and very important things
For Work projects that I collaborate with someone at work
For private notes from 1:1
For incoming emails that I need to take action on
For meetings and action items
Multi-tasking
Emails
Browser
I’m using one of his tips, which is to create a high priority email address for everyone important in your life and a 2nd email for everything else.
The neuroscientist that brought us bestsellers “This is Your Brain on Music” and “The World in Six Songs” has turned his attention to the problem of organization. Dr. Daniel Levitin’s new nonfiction book, “The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload,” combines scholarly research and interviews with people like Michael Bloomberg, George Shultz and Sting with practical tips on how to organize our homes, social lives, time and more.
Source: Ten Tips on Organizing Your Mind, from Dr. Daniel Levitin – Speakeasy – WSJ
1. Take breaks.
2. Set up different computer monitors for different activities.
3. Embrace a (modified) paper to-do list.
4. File correspondence in multiple ways.
5. Purge, when needed.
6. Designate time for short tasks and longer projects.
7. Don’t spend more time on a decision than it’s worth.
8. Sleep, and nap on the job.
9. Don’t over-organize.
10. Leave work at work.
I use Trello to keep track of my long term life goals. I setup ‘organizations’ for ‘health goals’, ‘work goals’, ‘money goals’, ‘family goals’.
Then setup boards for each goal.
I still use Remember The Milk for single task todo. Using Trello allows for multiple taks for each goal. I also look over all the goals to remind myself what my long term goals are to keeo me focused.
One change I am making is to copy what Marissa M. does with writing down a list of todo for the current day on paper.
Hallway conversation with 2 co-workers today went like this.
Tony: “Hey L., how come you were able to get your ticket resolved?”
L: “Oh I commute with G. and he did it for me”
G: “Happened to walk by, yeah, it was easy”
Tony: “But if someone else asked you G., what would happen?”
G: “It goes into my queue, because I trust L”
——
So, if your queue of things to do is too much work to do. How do you prioritize the queue?
I assume your queue is
1) Your Inbox
2) Your bug list
3) If you are using scrum, then your current sprint
4) You have some stuff in your brain
5) Favors you do for people you trust
6) Your goals that you set for yourself
7) Other todo list
I’m curious how do you figure out what to do next?
How much of your actual time are you spending on the following 4 bucket
1) Important non-urgent
2) Important urgent
3) Not important, but urgent
4) Not important, non-urgent
Do you have a way to determine which bucket your queue item falls into?
Tony Tam 