Task typology

[drdoug]

I have read many productivity books and been to several training sessions. I'm not convinced they've made a massive difference to how much or what I get done, but they are diverting. Better than real work.

Anyway, I've realised I've accreted an eclectic set of ways of classifying tasks, or ways of conceptualising them. Some of these I have snappy names for, but not all. The classic two-axis urgent/important one is pretty helpful, as is the principle that you really need to focus on the Important But Not Urgent ones (you'll get the Important and Urgent ones done anyway). But that's not amusing as a concept. Some of my other ones are:

• Elephant task: Something so big you can't do it in one session, or even several sessions. The only way to eat an elephant (or a monster aubergine if you prefer) is to eat a large chunk every day, or at least most days. Better to keep a long way away from it, so it looks manageably small.
  
• Wasp task: A task I am unreasonably scared of, out of proportion to how bad it will actually be. A scary task is just a scary task, but a wasp task is that particular sort of task that is much more scary when you're not looking directly at it. (I have an irrational fear of wasps.)
  
• Elephant-Wasp: This is your worst nightmare of a task. Big *and* unreasonably scary. At least with an ordinary wasp task you can, if you screw your courage to the sticking place for a moment, splat it out of the way and be done with it. This monster is going to terrify you for weeks.
  
• Gravel: This is all the little jobs that have to be fitted in somewhere. Emails, followups, paperwork. The metaphor here is that you have a box (your available time), and if you fill it with gravel first, you won't get many big rocks in there. But if you put the big rocks in first, you can squeeze the gravel in round the sides.
  
• See this rabbit? See this hat?: I'm going to have to do something quite spectacular in order to deliver this one, but I can do it. The idea is that it's the patter for a magician about to pull a rabbit out of a hat.
  
• Automating it: Making a tool to do a task repeatedly is very satisfying. So satisfying that I often spend more time making such a tool than simply doing the task directly would have taken. (This one could do with a better name.)
  
• Get other people moving/parallelising: Setting other people doing things. Even if the task I'm setting them isn't as important as my main task, it's better to set them off first because then they can be doing it at the same time as I'm doing mine. I also like to remember the theory of comparative advantage here: even if I can do a task better and faster than someone else, we'll still get more done collectively if we specialise. But this is getting in to the theory of delegating which is not what I'm on about here. (This one could do with a better name too.)
  
• Shiny task: Something that shines out to you as a really exciting, fun task to do, that you instantly want to get hold of and start on ... but may well be a bit of a waste of time, or at least not as important or urgent as many other things.
  
• Yak shaving: "what you are doing when you're doing some stupid, fiddly little task that bears no obvious relationship to what you're supposed to be working on, but yet a chain of twelve causal relations links what you're doing to the original meta-task" (See here for description and origin story: http://programmers.stackexchange.com/questions/34775/correct-definition-of-the-term-yak-shaving)
  
• I have no name for this one at all, but it's a concept that lights up in my brain vividly: That particular sort of job that will gain you great benefit for relatively little effort. Often crops up after the vast majority of the work has been done but a critical final step hasn't, and that will make all the difference. Often doesn't have a deadline on it. Like, for instance, sending the invoice to a client after you've delivered a big project, or finally submitting an application that you've spent ages drafting. But it's easy to procrastinate or defer. In fact this is a classic "important but not urgent" sort of task.
  

Edit: Remembered another couple overnight.

• Heartsink task: A task, often a recurring one, that makes your heart sink. By analogy to the GP's term "heartsink patient", typically a frequent flyer with a laundry list of complaints.
  
• Three-pipe problem: I have no idea what to do about this and will have to think about it, probably at length. From Sherlock Holmes.
  

There's also the Mark Twain-inspired idea that you should do the thing you least want to do first thing in the morning, after the dubious quote "Eat a live frog first thing in the morning and nothing worse will happen to you the rest of the day.". This has never quite worked for me. (Metaphorically - I've not tried it literally and don't plan to.) I've also heard it as "If it's your job to eat a frog, it's best to do it first thing in the morning.", but I always think "If it's your job to eat a frog, you need a new job, as your top priority."

Do you lot have any favourite names for types of tasks? Or suggestions for better names for some of these?

This entry crossposted to http://doug.dreamwidth.org/284786.html, where there are
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