Well, hello there! 🧔‍♂️
Why does work sometimes pile up, and we don’t get to do the things we enjoy.
Hello, everyone! I haven’t posted in a while, and the reason was work! I would love to say that I was off on some beach drinking margaritas with my señorita, but that isn’t the case. I failed to follow my organizational principles, leading me to a pile of work on my to-do list.
My principles are the following:
- If you can do it in 20 mins, do it. If it takes longer, add it to your backlog.
- When writing down tasks, please keep them in a single place to always have them at hand.
- Don’t take more than what you can handle. You’ll end up dropping something. Learn to say no.
Twenty Minute Rule
I learned this one from David Allen’s book, “Getting Things Done.”
Usually, when I’m looking at my to-do list, I try to scope how much time it will take me to deliver something, from an email reply to a full-blown T-SQL script that will find the lost ark. When estimating tasks, I use the ±35% rule, where I add or subtract 35% of the estimated time, giving me a time range of how much I could take.
If it’s a small task, I end up doing it. Reply to an email, send a Slack message…
