Re: Manual Ordering and Dynamic Priority

[Tim Cross]

Rudolf Adamkovič <salutis@me.com> writes:

> Tim Cross <theophilusx@gmail.com> writes:
>
>> - Life is about getting things done, not planning to get things
>>   done. Overly complex management of your tasks is very likely to
>>   result in more time spent managing the tasks than actually doing
>>   the tasks.
>
> Let me share a slightly different experience.
>
> I used to minimize the time I spent on planning, wanting to start
> "actually doing the tasks".  Looking back, it often led to pointless
> work and wasted time.  So, I changed my ways!
>
> These days, I do not mind spending half a day, or more, on planning my
> learning week at school.  I also do not mind "more time spent managing
> the tasks than actually doing the tasks" because I noticed that it
> might, unexpectedly, change the entire equation.  For example, at work,
> I noticed that careful planning, which includes design, can save ten
> times the time it takes, though one never knows for sure beforehand.
>
> For another example, I spent two days designing my Org Agenda.  I first
> made some drawings on paper, thinking carefully about what I want from
> it, and then configured Emacs to compute it that way.  It might sound
> crazy, for I could have spent those two days "actually doing the tasks",
> but I thank myself every day for doing it!
>

The difference here is in what we define as planning. For example, I
would not consider 2 days spend designing how my agenda would work as
task planning - that is design work.

What I'm referring to is having a task management process where you
spend large amounts of time just managing the item 'metadata' - not
actually working on the item at all, but just tracking its state,
progress, priority, etc. 

Planning as a task in itself is very important. I live by the 6Ps
(Piss-poor planning prevents poor performance). However, that planning
effort needs to be focused on moving things forward. Too often, I see
people make the same error with org mode. They develop a complex all
singing and dancing workflow for recording, tracking and managing their
tasks. Before they realise it, they become a slave to the process and
spend lots of time updating task state information, changing priorities
and schedules, making notes which never get read again and tracking
everything at a micro level. AS an extreme example, I saw someone once
who had in their list of tasks "Get out of bed" - honestly, what is
having that task really adding except noise and wasted time. Do you
really need a task telling you to get out of bed? I've seen other
examples where people find they are overwhelmed with the number of tasks
in their task list, but when you look at what they have listed you see
crazy micro level planning e.g.

8:00 - Walk to bus stop
8:15 - Ride bus to Kent st. 
8:45 - Walk from Kent ST. buss stop to office
9:00 - Turn on office computer
9:00 - 11:30 - Do office work
...

Unless you have some sort of memory issue or learning condition,
planning at this level is largely pointless. This may seem extreme, but
I see people do very similar fine grained task logging in projects as
well.

Planning, like effort estimating, is a skill and needs practice. All I
am trying to convey is a warning against being overly ambitious or
having overly high expectations regarding org mode and how/when it can
be beneficial. While you can probably capture everything in your life in
plain text org files, doing so may not actually help make your life
easier. I believe you need to be judicious in what you map out as tasks
and in what data you capture. Too much and there is a danger it all
becomes white noise and you become a slave to the process. Our brains
are amazing things which can handle a lot of complexity easily and at a
fast rate - the interface is still faster and more powerful than org and
we should use it to its maximum and apply org to augment it rather than
replace it. Problem is, someone sees org mode for the first time and
their blown away and suddenly can see how they can generate a
comprehensive, concise and well mapped out process for everything they
do. The pendulum swings to far the other way and suddenly, they now have
an additional time consuming maintenance task which is now using time
previously spent actually getting the job done.

The other danger is of course that we become too dependent on the
technology. We can see this happening now with information like phone
numbers. Even only 20 years ago, most people would memorise and be able
to recall many phone numbers. Recent surveys indicate most people don't
even know the phone number of their spouse! Consider that for a second -
if you lost your mobile phone, how many of the phone numbers of people
close to you can you recall?