[spiffytech]

I always found these task management systems unrelatable because they assume you have a bunch of tasks you can schedule and order at your discretion, that you can freely ignore most tasks for days at a time, that you can actually predict your priorities up to a week in advance, and that if your workload and your timeboxing conflict then your workload will be the one that budges.

That doesn't match any situation I've found myself in as a technology professional (or as a student before that). It doesn't look like most other job roles I've witnessed either. Which leaves me wondering why I see these systems pop up again and again? They must work for somebody, but from my (limited) perspective they don't seem a good fit for most people.

[hliyan]

This is probably due to differences in the schedules of "makers" vs. "managers" [1]. If you're a one-man operation (which I believe the author is), this approach is easy. If you're an individual contributor within a team, it's a bit harder. If you're a team lead or a manager, it's even harder. I'm an engineering manager and if I try to timebox a certain type of task into a specific day of the week, my teams are likely to get blocked until that day arrives.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/makersschedule.html

[colechristensen]

Really? I find this rather surprising, because I would say about 80% of all of the work i’ve ever done didn’t have a hard deadline in the near future. People sure liked to try to invent emergencies, but they weren’t actually urgent.

[spiffytech]

The environments I work in presume or dictate my task ordering and priorities according to the needs of my team and the broader business, with no concern for the restrictions imposed my my personal task management syntem. My boss/team expect me to work on The Things We Agreed on, in The Order We Agreed On, and I'm expected to start as soon as I wrap up my WIP from our last round of planning.

Sometimes I get deadlines, and sometimes it's more that the team expressed confidence we could do certain tasks in a certain amount of time each, and then someone went and made a GANTT chart planning our whole next quarter, even though everyone knows it'll get changed up in a couple weeks, because the business needs to make related plans. Then the schedule is treated a plan and not a prediction, and people get frowny when you don't hit target dates because they're also being held to not-really-plans they based on your schedule.

There are plenty of legitimate (and illegitimate) reasons the business would want to hold you to a date pulled out of thin air, but for this discussion the important point is that the entire system is predicated against rogue individuals making unilateral plans to prioritize or delay work for opaque, arbitrary reasons without the involvement of the stakeholders who presumably were the impetus for those tasks. I.e., "theme days", 1-3-5, etc. don't seem workable in the environments I've worked in.

[colechristensen]

Well usually those kinds of things would be not just how you worked but discussions had with the team about how work got done. More or less all of the environments I have been in how work was done was an open discussion with the team and management, not just something dictated to us.

[spiffytech]

I suppose I'm not speaking clearly here. Generally yes, my tasks come from a combination of my team pushing priorities up from below (ideas for improvements, paying down tech debt) and the business pushing requirements down from above (strategic/financial objectives, promises to customers). Prioritization and assignment is usually a group discussion with everyone relevant.

The fact that priorities and schedules are decided with input and consensus from lots of people who aren't me is the crux of my point. The article is about personal task management. It, like any number of similar articles I've read, offers a system that presumes I can pick and choose what I work on today based on metrics of my own choosing, instead of being bound by a decision made with other people. The article expects I'm in an environment where nobody cares if I push tasks back 2, 3, 4+ days for reasons that have nothing to do with the project or team or business, but because of arbitrary restrictions on when I allow myself to do certain things. Unless I can make a business case that "theme days" or similar systems benefit the business, the business just sees needless, disruptive delays it didn't authorize.

[1123581321]

Is all your work same-day deadline? If not, you can at least plan some part of your day for your longer-term work. Start somewhere.

Even if all your work is same-day, look at whether it can be sorted in some way.

If it can’t be sorted, box in some time to work on how to stop the firefighting. :)

[BeetleB]

> I find this rather surprising, because I would say about 80% of all of the work i’ve ever done didn’t have a hard deadline in the near future.

Factually, this is correct. In practice, it often is better to play along with the fantasy that the deadline is real.

I once got half-fired from a job because the deadlines were not, in reality, hard. All kinds of things went wrong in the project - from our team's side, from the (internal) customer's side, and from the company's side (outside of both our control). The project was very late. Sometimes I was fairly open about the deadlines not being hard. We all knew that even if I got the work done by the time they wanted it, no one was ready to consume our output for over a week after our releasing it - at various stages in the project - so we were "ahead" by many weeks.

By the end of the project, it was clear my manager didn't want me on the team. I got a terrible review that year where I was accused of causing delays. I challenged that notion, and we both agreed that had I done everything by the claimed deadlines, there would not have been any observable difference. The product would not have come out any quicker. Our delays were miniscule compared to the problems on the customer's side.

They still refused to change the verbiage on my review. Internally, the department does keep arbitrary metrics, and they want the numbers to be good even if there is no actual observable benefit.

Not all jobs are like that, but many are.

The one lesson I learned from that job and the one that followed: You can have similar jobs with the same pay, but the further you are from the customer, the more flexible everyone around you becomes. In the crappy job, we were quite far down in the manufacturing flow, and had little power to negotiate timelines. In the second job (same company), we were higher up in the flow, and more of this pressure was on people downstream from us.

[ehnto]

Oh definitely, I've never met a deadline that didn't inevitably evaporate, but for management they're still very real up until that moment. It's comical, but also you come to realise that the deadline isn't for you anyway. It's for everyone around you so they can plan their tasks. When the deadline is once again pushed due to reasons outside of your control, just rest assured that everyone saw it coming and the blame probably isn't on you.