Against Project-Smoothing, In Praise of Mission Creep

[nyuanshin]

When you have a project to accomplish, it seems commonsensical to smooth it out into medium-sized chunks at regular intervals -- an hour today, an hour tomorrow, etc. Obvious and SO VERY WRONG. The problem is that this neglects the transition costs associated with a switch from one state to another, which are more considerable than you typically

Comments

[csn]

Yep. I typically do A.

[selfishgene]

I think the wrong strategy is a result of the perverse educational system and careless management theories. Most people would do the right thing if they were not trained into habits useful for teachers/supervisors but bad for productivity.

[nyuanshin]

The general problem here is trying to force individual productivity to fit into other people's schedules -- something to which it becomes more notoriously resistant the further away you get from something a dumb machine could do.

[airstrip]

I agree with this. My co-workers, who are largely unproductive, balk at my insistence that we do everything right now because it would be better to divide it into smaller tasks. I know, secretly to myself, that this will happen anyway because of bureaucratic roadblocks but then it becomes a fight that must be won and I get to go home with the "I fought Washington and won, again, bitches" feeling.

[nyuanshin]

Hehe.

I think poor chunking strategies are another contributor to procrastination: we do a quick (perhaps even subliminal) calculation about the costs of state-switching relative to how much we expect to accomplish, and correctly decide it's not worth it. (Needless to say the worthwhileness of the task itself also makes a big difference here -- something a lot of bureaucratic work has going against it.)

[airstrip]

Oh, bureaucracy is designed for procrastination because it essentially operates by work-chunking. It's a giant machine with each person being a part... a high specific, deeply specialized part that authorizes this and only this.

[_luaineach]

My strategies changed more to the ones you recommend when I quit smoking. I realized, when tracking my cigarettes pre-quit that I was almost entirely a "transition stage" smoker; all the times I smoked in a regular day (i'm not talking out at the bar or whatever) were when I switched in between tasks or states or gears or whatever. When I quit smoking I had a real hard time with transition stages -- they were giant blocks of aimless low energy undirected time in which I just stared. I really noticed their drag at that point. :)

[nyuanshin]

Yeah, that transitional feeling of being off kilter, where you can't quite do anything right (yet) is a pain . . . there's a certain low-level nervousness I get with it as well. Not fun -- I instinctively avoid it.

[queueball]

One of the crazy-cool things about GTD (and whatever scientific, Eastern, and other influences Allen undoubtedly cribbed from) is the next-action and critical-context-dependent action orientation, breaking projects down into what he calls "widget cranking" behavior, the type (B), five-lines-of-code type. Not everything is amenable to this; if you have to write 10,000 lines of code, at some point you just have to write 10,000 lines of code. But it helps with the sorts of projects where the usual missing ingredient is a little thought and confidence tying small component actions together.

[nyuanshin]

See, that's the aspect of GTD I have mixed feelings about. The worry at the back of my brain is that the more highly optimized your ability to crank through tasks, the less likely you are to stop and consider whether or not they're really worth doing.

[queueball]

I think GTD really needs to be tailored by the person using it, and it isn't right for everybody. But one of its strengths is that it doesn't overreach and can't be reduced to a magical premise that aims to solve all problems. Aside from the widget-cranking action, he emphasizes that the whole thing can't work without frequent reviews, including both weekly reviews to track what's going on in each project and the runway-through-50,000-foot metaphor. The latter is where you're supposed to stop and ask "Should I be doing these things?" as often as you think you should. It says something(s) that GTD is as popular as it is, because it's mostly a pastiche of common sense with a few organizational tips thrown in. Which might be precisely its advantage over other models; I haven't shopped around in the productivity market enough to know.