The Reward for Winning a Pie Eating Contest is Usually More Pie
Perhaps it’s time to refine your backlog
“
If you want something done, give it to a busy person,” they say. Busy people get things done because they are busy. But are they contributing value?
The Experiment
Lately, I’ve been guilty of using tasks to procrastinate.
A few months back, I wrote a piece about how the last 5% of personal growth can be the hardest.
You can fool yourself for a long time by doing things that purport to push your goals but do nothing but mark time.
“Behind all those onward and upward slogans is the lascivious voice of death urging you to make haste.” – Milan Kundera
For 40 years, I’ve been keeping a journal, and I could keep it for 40 more (if I were to live to 99.) But journaling will not change my life or resolve the remainder of the broken stuff.
This week I’m running an experiment, focusing on things I haven’t been getting done. I’ve turned my list of failures into my to-do list and am worrying less about things I’ve been getting done without trying.
I’ve made a couple of assumptions:
Stuff I am avoiding because it’s difficult might also be implicitly more rewarding, and
Because I’ve been avoiding it, there’s probably meaningful growth potential there.
Submitting poetry to lit mags and learning Finnish are two of the things I am not getting done, week after week, year after year. While writing journals and essays and reading books is so much of a habit it hardly needs to be on my list. I have written my journal and read at least 15 minutes a day for as long as I can remember.
So, let’s see what happens this week if I shift my focus to my failures.
The Result
There’s more to life than getting things done, both at home and in the workplace.
There’s something more important: And that something is value.
The “if you want to get something done, give it to a busy person” adage is counterintuitive but true. People who aren't busy get very little done. But to contribute value, the length of the list isn’t what counts. It's the priority of the items.
When a boss assigns work, you can argue it has automatic prioritization. But in our personal backlog, we can easily lose sight of priorities.
When I switched to Ticktick as my personal backlog manager some months ago, it reduced stress and improved my productivity at first. But as I added items, I developed a tendency to move things forward in time, putting off the pain of realizing I had assigned myself more to do than possible.
It's an abuse of timeboxing. And this past week’s focus on failures is my attempt a correction.
I’ve been adding things to my days without taking anything away. (In Agile terms, this might mean I had no respect for my own capacity.) Also, I was building a backlog of too many items with no priority at all.
A perfect time to utilize the Eisenhower Matrix!
James Clear has a nice summary of that method of dividing your full backlog into four distinct quadrants here: https://jamesclear.com/eisenhower-box
Urgent and important (tasks you will do immediately).
Important, but not urgent (tasks you will schedule to do later).
Urgent, but not important (tasks you will delegate to someone else).
Neither urgent nor important (tasks that you will eliminate).
https://www.eisenhower.me/eisenhower-matrix/
Reviewing my failures, some items (sadly) had urgency but had sat in the backlog until they were moot. Submissions to literary journals have deadlines. Many had expired so I was immediately able to discard them.
Some frequently-failed items had high value but low or no urgency, and they were also ones that got skipped.
Here are 3 of those:
Daily sit-ups and push-ups.
Making sure I reach 10,000 steps per day.
Studying Finnish for at least 15 minutes.
Saturday has arrived, and I am noting an improvement in the size of my backlog and my mood. I feel less world-weary. The things not done are weighing less on my mind because they are fewer.
In the coming weeks, in the spirit of subtracting from my backlog instead of adding to it, I’ve decided to stick with the bi-weekly Substack schedule I established during my holiday instead of returning to weekly updates. (I’m betting no one really noticed anyway except me.)
I leave you with some wisdom from a famous chef about the power of simplifying.
Chef Wylie Dufresne on the value of simplicity:
"Jean-Georges Vongerichten showed me the value in taking away, taking things off of a plate. He always talked about two, three, four elements on a plate. That's it. The more you put on the plate, the easier it is to hide. The more you take away, there's nowhere to hide—it has to be good."
Happy backlog refinement!