(2021-06-14) Singer13 Beyond Todos

Ryan Singer: 13. Beyond to-dos. When work is turned into tickets, our brains shut off. In ticket-land, the work is a given, and it's just a matter of "doing it." This is true for any traditional to-do list software.

One of my pet projects has been turning the tools that super effective people do in their heads into patterns we might implement in software. Here are some examples I've been prototyping.

The first is affinitizing — which is like categorizing except you don't have any of the categories in advance. It's a way to chunk things up by likeness and let the categories emerge

I named one of them "Acceptance"

Looking inside the "Acceptance" group, one piece of work I had dumped was very fuzzy. So I reached for another tool: unpacking. This is the opposite of aggregating. It's digging inside of one thing to get more things out of it.

Zooming back out, all of those unpacked pieces went back into the Acceptance box:

I knew I wouldn't get everything done. Today was the last day I had budgeted time to finish the feature. So instead of "doing" everything, I added another alternative: "cutting." Some stuff just wasn't going to make it into release.

Another tool I often reach for is the interrelationship diagram. This is for sequencing: figuring out what to work on first, second, etc. ((2021-04-09) Singer1UnfoldingTheInterrelationshipDiagram)

arranged the items on the circle, and drew arrows to show which things are inputs to which other things.

Each of these tools can be used on the others.

This last picture was simple enough that my brain finally relaxed.