I'd Rather Be Writing » time management

Finding Space to Breathe: Managing Overwhelming End-of-Project Tasks

Tom Johnson — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 15:07:09 +0000

I’m nearing the release of a project that I’ve been working on for about a year. All those deadlines that seemed to be many months in the distance are suddenly weeks away. As the project manager was reviewing the rollout schedule with me, he paused to admit that he was a little overwhelmed with everything going on. There’s simply a lot to do with a product rollout — user acceptance testing, quality assurance regression testing, change management release dates and coordination, bug triage decisions, user training, announcement emails, migration and mapping decisions, post-release support, hot fixes, and other communications.

I honestly don’t know how I’ll finish everything either. At some point, it will probably get done.

House Project Management

Being buried in tasks reminds me of advice I once heard: If you’re overwhelmed/discouraged/depressed, completing specific tasks can help you feel better. Having a list with items you can cross off helps you feel like you’re making progress.

Lately I decided to apply a bit of project triage to all the broken things around my house. I started taking notes on everything that needed to be fixed, from broken headphones to ink pen on walls to trim missing from cabinets, and so on. I have about 50 items on my list, and I’ve arranged them in P1, P2, and P3 style in a Google spreadsheet.

When I complete a task, rather than deleting it, I change its status to X and strike the font. I like to see how many tasks I’ve actually completed because seeing the list of accomplishments brightens the room a smidge.

Tonight I was working on a task–changing a burned out headlight bulb in Jane’s van–when I managed to hit my head into the corner of the hood. As the blood started to drip down my forehead, my daughter shouted for Mommy to come quickly.

It turns out it was only a little cut. Despite the blood, my spirits were high because I actually completed the task. My point here is that having a list of items that you can push through feels good. Knocking an item off the list indicates progress.

Surveying Advice

Advice on getting a handle on life’s heavy cartload is not scant. Every self-help, time management, and productivity book has something to say on the topic.

Alyssa Gregory explains that cleaning your desk can help reduce the feeling of being overwhelmed. She says “clutter is distracting and can derail your attention.” And “it’s hard to decipher what is important when everything is a mess.”

Catherine Pratt says to examine whether you really have to do everything that comes at you:

You feel like tasks are things that you “have to” do. You’re now committed and you may feel like you don’t have any choice in the matter. You must do these all these things that you’re now reacting to. Very quickly you can begin to feel overwhelmed because there just seems to be so much coming at you.

Pratt’s advice is interesting in light of a technical writer’s responsibility. Do we sometimes feel compelled to document too much, describing every single scenario, every function, every little widget and drop-down box? Do we really need the videos and online help and printed manuals and quick reference guide and release notes and context-sensitive help and live training?

eHow’s biggest advice on reducing the sense of overwhelm is to prioritize your tasks:

Learn how to prioritize. Recognize that all tasks are not created equal; meaning, there are some tasks that are WAY more important to accomplish than other tasks. Learn to recognize which tasks are of high value versus low value tasks.

I do often postpone those help topics that are cryptic and confusing. But coming back to my earlier point about lists, sometimes crossing off the easy tasks gives you momentum to tackle the harder ones.

Another self-help writer says that “breaking down a big task into smaller tasks that you are able to complete is how you get the big task done.”

The chunking method focuses on completing little tasks consistently over time to produce the larger result.

The advice for reducing the feeling of being overwhelmed is endless: Delegate tasks. Learn to say no. Focus on one thing at a time. Simplify your life. Reduce your obligations. Meditate. Clear your inbox. Do what matters to you. Outsource. Hire a virtual assistant. The advice goes on and on and on.

Jaded on Time Management Techniques

I’m a little jaded on time management techniques, to be honest. I’m not saying they don’t work; they just seem like bandaids on a larger problem. I’ve been through the workshops, bought the time management software, and for a short time felt jazzed on some new tip or trick to manage everything. But after two weeks, all the advice runs together into the same note. And then fades.

In looking over my life, I do see patterns of achievement: I finish what compels me from the inside. If I believe in something, I do it. I find a way to get it done. I wake up early, stay up late, turn off the TV, ignore people around me, or do whatever it takes, because I believe in doing it.

For example, writing personal essays is something I believe in. I’m persuaded about the value of the activity. Sometimes people ask me how I have the time to write. It’s not about the time — it’s about the desire. Similarly, getting out from a ton of overwhelming tasks, whether at work, home, or another environment isn’t about learning to prioritize, meditate, or chunk tasks. It’s about aligning with the right cause to feel that it’s important enough to do.

Whether that’s possible with all technical documentation, I’m not sure. But having a sense of investment and pride in what you’re creating helps push you away from all distractions, from the invitations to play ping pong or to check your email. If you believe in what you’re doing and are fully invested in it, you won’t be chit-chatting all day with your colleagues, or getting lost on the web, or organizing the pens in your desk, or staring at the mountains out the window. If you believe in what you’re doing, you’ll put on headphones to block out the world around you and get lost in the work.

Now the problem returns to a theme I consistently seem to write about on my blog: it’s hard to feel driven internally by the technical writing career. I wrote about this with Aligning Yourself with a Higher Cause, Unstoppability, and Is Technical Writing Boring?

The problem is that technical writing jobs are not inspiring enough on their own to turn people into believers of the cause in the degree necessary to finish all overwhelming tasks. When it’s 5 p.m., I turn off the computer and go home. No one stays until 10 pm at night writing instructions because he or she is just so driven internally and fascinated by the technical writing job that he or she wants/needs/has to stay despite all other commitments, requirements, and obligations. Technical writing isn’t so engrossing that you find yourself up at 2 a.m. thinking about solutions and innovative new techniques and experiments you want to try.

Sure, that might happen sometimes. Sometimes I stay late, sometimes I wake up thinking about a technical writing problem, and sometimes I get engrossed in online help and wikis. But not to the degree that would be necessary to make me fly above all these tasks that never get finished. Not to the degree that I would rise at 5 a.m., go to the computer, and start organizing and editing my online help.

In the end, when I have a ton of tasks to do and no room to breathe, I do end up prioritizing those tasks I believe in more — screencasts, quick reference guides, context-sensitive help. I put off that 150 page PDF manual until the last couple of weeks.

Given the inability to tap into a higher cause, the lower-level time management and efficiency tasks are a welcome gimmick. I have my lists with tasks I’m crossing off. I’m clearing off my desk. I’m evaluating whether I need every single help deliverable. I might even start using that old Franklin Covey software I uninstalled years ago.

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Lying in a Hammock, or, Having a Single Goal without a Purpose

Tom Johnson — Fri, 31 Jul 2009 14:24:11 +0000

Every week our team has a team meeting. In our manager’s office, we sit around a table and talk about our projects, our concerns, and whatever else we want to talk about. Recently, during one of my colleague’s turns, he talked about his goals. Apparently he’d made some goals about video tutorials, and I can’t remember exactly what they were, just that he was reporting on them, his progress, what he needed to do to achieve some of the substeps of his goals.

Listening to him made smile, because here he was, evaluating the progress on his goals in a detailed manner, as if talking about a project he knew intimately and worked on every day, whereas I couldn’t remember any of my goals, not one.

In every company I’ve worked for, goal setting has been an annual event, a couple of months before the annual merit increase. It’s an activity that I procrastinate, like most other employees do, until the afternoon it’s due, and then I come up with a list of reasonable sounding goals that fit into a nice grid, with a few milestones and steps, separated quarterly.

I endure the business speak about the goals being “SMART,” which people always emphasize with smugness, and then I save and send the document to my manager. And since I’m not required to do much with the goals until the next year, they soon evaporate into the air. Which is why I listened to my colleague in awe. How did he remember his goals? Has he been carefully tracking his progress toward achieving them? Has he already achieved some goals on his list? Why do I not have any idea what my goals are?

As I drove home after work, I thought about the goals I should have. I do have some general goals in my mind, but they are nothing extraordinary. Read more, exercise more, budget more prudently, help out around the house, and so on. But one goal I have keeps coming back to me with more importance than the others: write a page a day. It seems like such as simple goal, one that wouldn’t take much time. It doesn’t seem particularly important compared to the other goals on my list. But when I listen to myself, this is the only true goal I have.

I have no real purpose behind the goal. Sometimes I think by writing every day, I’m honing my writing skills for some future assignment, the details of which I’ll learn later. At that point, everything will be clear: the late nights, the endless editing, the typing and typing and typing. Or perhaps I’m building up a brand and a readership base, so that I may be a key player in some future twist of events.

But really, writing may turn out to be only a maniacal obsession, one without purpose. The purpose of writing may only be … writing. In that case, the activity itself is the goal, which means I’m living in the moment, rather than postponing fulfillment for some distant achievement.

In most business contexts, the goals and purposes behind every activity, especially copywriting, are clear: you want your customers to take action, usually to buy your product or service. In fact, just this week I listened to a podcast by Jason Van Orden on this topic. In the Community Building Blueprint, Van Orden traces the steps for achieving action in reverse order. To get customers to act (which is your goal), you need influence. To have influence, you need trust. To earn trust, you need a relationship. To form a relationship, you need repeated engagements. (Jason defines engagements as “regular interactions that deepen the mental, emotional, and physical investment that the market has in your brand.” Please try to refrain from throwing up from the business speak.) Before you can engage, you need the customer’s permission. And before you get the permission, you need to get their attention.

I’m not sure why he stopped at attention, because I was really getting curious to see how far back he could trace it.

Putting that logic in sequentially forward order, Jason says that after engaging in meaningful social media, building relationships, and gaining trust, you can then leverage your influence to encourage your followers to use your service, buy your product, or hire you as a consultant.

You can listen to the videocast, watching Jason draw this upon a whiteboard like a university instructor here. I admit that although I poke fun of his business speak — the calls to action, branding, the “relationships and trust” — I can’t discount the accuracy of his model. It should no doubt describe my clearly formed plan to reach my goals, right, especially as it relates to my writing and this blog?

In thinking about action and influence, I pondered what I could possibly influence people about, or get them to act upon, and why, so that I could justify the time I spend writing posts and recording podcasts, but I came up blank. Although I write posts encouraging people to embrace online media over print, or to become link journalists on Writer River, or to check out podcasts, ultimately I don’t care if you “accept the call to act.”

To put it more bluntly, if my blog has influence, I have no agenda. There’s nothing I want you to buy. There’s nothing I want you to believe. There’s nothing I want you to do. I don’t care if you listen to me or reject me. If you subscribe, unsubscribe, or keep on clicking somewhere else, that’s okay. I’m not worried about “my brand.” Whatever course of action you take, I still go to work in the morning and come home in the evening. Certainly blogging might be leveraged for influence and action, but it’s not my goal.

My goal is simply to write a page a day. I’m not always good at it. I may not always publish the page. It may be total crap. But most of the time I do it. And I don’t try to look too far into the future for purpose.

The problem with goals is that, whatever the goal, it puts you into a future state of mind. You’re always working toward some end state of achievement that forces you to live in the future. When you’re always looking forward, you become blind to the present.

But many activities don’t need goals and purpose — such as riding a bike. I have a cruiser, which I bought for comfort. When I go on a ride, I’m not training for a future triathlon. I’m not trying to become healthier. I’m just riding the bike for the fun of it. I’m listening to my iPod. I’m weaving through the striped road divider. I’m looking at the river or grass beside me, occasionally stopping to explore new areas.

I have the same mindset playing basketball. I’m not playing to hopefully make a team somewhere. I’m not training to dunk the basketball. I’m just playing for the fun of it, because I like the feel of the ball in my hands, the sense of elation when I shoot a perfect three pointer, or drive past a defender to the basket. When the game is over, I go home, and I don’t remember the score.

And when it comes to my relationship with Jane, I also don’t have clearly defined goals, with a plan for influence, built upon trust, gained by repeated engagements, for which I first attempt to secure her attention. Anything that calculated is phony.

Learning to live in the present, I once read, is actually a major factor in happiness and life satisfaction. I think many of us have forgotten this. Our culture is too goal-driven. We force ourselves into postponed enjoyment of life. We trick ourselves into thinking that happiness comes only after we achieve our goals.

Although I do make goals (mostly to prevent laziness and degeneration), sometimes I just want to live in the present. To remove the long-term purpose and instead enjoy the moment. To enjoy doing something for purely personal enjoyment of doing that thing, without worrying about anything more.

When you live in the moment, completing the activity itself is the success. And because writing is so multifaceted in effect — the effect both on me and others — having an open purpose doesn’t limit the results. I’m not narrow-mindedly searching for a specific achievement to happen. Instead, I’m open to unconsidered possibilities, if any of those possibilities decide to unravel. And if not, I’m happy just to type and type and type.

It feels right to conclude with “Lying in a Hammock,” by James Wright. It is my favorite poem.

Over my head, I see the bronze butterfly
Asleep on the black trunk,
Blowing like a leaf in green shadow.
Down the ravine behind the empty house,
The cowbells follow one another
Into the distances of the afternoon.
To my right,
In a field of sunlight between two pines,
The droppings of last year’s horses
Blaze up into golden stones.
I lean back, as the evening darkens and comes on.
A chicken hawk floats over, looking for home.
I have wasted my life.