Organisational procrastination

What happens when you organise tasks?

First a look at our own personal time when process is rather natural:

You receive mails, calls and you have ideas on the bus in the morning. For most of us such ad-hoc tasks end up in lists or inboxes - then postponement commences.

OK, even the worst of us do some tasks straight off the bat, but things that requires some work or involves a unpleasant phone call have a tendency to be postponed - procrastination, a very human trait. It messes up with our work, it messes up for others and it gives us bad conscience - not good when the pending task list starts taking the shape of a snowdrift.

David Allen's Getting Things Done has a couple of basic principles - a) if doable in a short time, do it now, and b) bigger tasks (that in fact are projects) should be broken out into smaller tasks.

Simple really, do it now, do not postpone, get out of bed now. And bigger stuff, try to split it up into now-doable tasks, stuff you can do one at a time, but do it.

Interesting the "process" part though. I would suggest that everything is a process, a sequence of tasks. Even buying carrots on the way home is a part of a process that probably started out with some reading up on Sauce Bolognese recipes, followed later with cutting, cooking and dinner tasks.

In sum - tasks arrive, I can chose to do it now or procrastinate a bit or more - but results are measured by the simple fact of having been done or not. Like now or tonight.

Now to the wonderful world of organised work and how processes and tasks are governed:

GTD? Nope.

Meetings yes. Milestones yes. End date for a task is given, always end date oriented, start date is of little consequence. Results are measured by adherence to end date.

In sum - organised process tasks are defined by end date. No extra points for doing it now.

1. Natural flows - tasks defined by start time and do-it-now is good.
2. Organisational flows - tasks defined by end time and do-it-now is of little consequence.

In other words organised work as we know it has procrastination built in. Systemic procrastination.

Change that. Measure from start time and not some "promised" or decreed end time. Get a framework that can handle the process and dump the meetings and milestones and get the flow back for fun and profit.

Comments

[phil jones]

Ha ... so you been playing with Mind Traffic Control ( http://mindtrafficcontrol.appspot.com/ )then?