Archive for October 20th, 2008
Daily Task Completion
I sometimes need help getting things done. I don’t need a lot of help. Once I start, I’m fine. I just need help keeping my focus on whatever it is I’m doing until I finish it. Once I do that, then I need help with deciding what to do next. On and on and on.
I’ve read David Allen’s Getting Things Done and his system works, to a point. He says that you should call something a “project” if it contains more than two tasks. The individual tasks can then be added to a Next Actions list. At any given time, according to Allen, I could have 75-80 projects with God only knows how many Next Actions. These discrete actions, then, should be classified further and placed on lists according to context and labeled: @phone, @computer, @home, @waitinguntildaughtergetsoutofbathroom, etc.
I don’t know why, but I’ve never been able to get the context thing to work like how it’s billed.
I found myself counting the number of Next Actions completed to determine the success or failure of my day. A large number of Next Actions signaled a success, a low number failure. I was running at a breakneck pace for a long stretch of time. I was completing actions like there was no tomorrow. Average task completions per day–a key metric–were at an all-time high. But I was padding the list with relatively insignificant Next Actions. Meanwhile, important projects languished from inattention.
