[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. :)