Threads of Work

Created: Jun 18, 2020Published: Mar 28, 2023Last modified: Apr 05, 2023
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When it's time to be productive, and I'm juggling multiple projects, what I want is to easily choose which thread to pull on. Which project can I move the needle on?

This question has no answer without more information. So what is next? list all the todos per project? Maybe projects have epics? Maybe the todos are prioritized, and blockers are called out, and I can just pick a project and go down the list.

In Yodo, for a time I had an epic domain object, and todos only existed within epics. Until that didn't make sense, and I supported project-level todos too. At some point I decided epics weren't worth it - all I really needed was a tag to connect the related todos. This has freed thinking quite a bit - by now I'm not really using projects to group todos anymore either - projects have falled to the same just-a-tag solution, which now allows for todos to belong to multiple projects at once.

Now, what are "threads of work"? To me, it's a roughly ordered list of todos. These todos should advance the same feature, provide fixes to the same problem, or result in related research into a specific area. They might result in a first draft of a comic, or lead to the publishing of a blog post or git repository. Perhaps they are tied to a deadline or goal, or for whatever reason, they just belong in the same thread.

One thing I'm realizing in writing this is that my desire to choose which thread to pull on is roughly that I want to choose which goal to make progress on. But I need to be careful - I want the unit of thread to be a todo, and hopefully they are simple to work with and express.

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I've been playing Void Bastards lately, and one thing I'm thinking is that the UI or visual for these threads might be expressible as a talent tree, or the way the Void Bastards' Workbench is used.

Each set of upgrades is connected to related items as a line and dot. Maybe Yodo 's todos can be expressed this way? Maybe whole threads can be prioritized against each other, or selected from any morning?

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2020-06-27 14:39

Perhaps these are just goals?


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One thing I've noticed in my career is that I'm a much better decision maker in the morning.

When rested, I bring the energy, I solve the problem. I used to say I worked exactly twice as fast in the morning as the afternoon. Maybe it is due to being tired from working that morning, or it's a post-lunch crash.

Either way, I know for sure: by the time I get home that night, I don't stand a chance. No room for anything. Personal projects, side-hustle, alternate career as a writer be damned.

It was easier when I was fresh out of college, but by now it's too hard to not just veg on the couch until bedtime.

The difficult part about the limited use of that morning brain is that your side-hustle probably needs it more than your day-to-day. You need your full brain to make big-picture decisions, to push a whole project a step forward. In my experience, most day-to-days are pre-defined at the previous planning meeting, and now is time to execute that plan.

One method that worked for me in the past was finding odd times during the day

to put the when-I-get-home plan together. If I landed at home with an outline

for a blog post, I could finish it pretty easily. The hard part is already done,

and my tired brain has plenty of room for well-defined glue tasks. Well-planned

work is easy - just follow the plan. (And hopefully, plans can be automated as

well.)

All of this is building to make the case for a TODO list that tells you what to do, given the circumstances. I want to be able to opt-in to a task that fits my current mental state.

It should know that it's Wednesday at 2 pm, and that I'll be more productive doing a series of small tasks by 5 than continuing on the long-running task I'm burning out on.

It should know that given the up-coming week, I should take time to run Monday

and Tuesday morning because I have a scheduled Happy Hour on Tuesday night and a

day full of meetings on Wednesday, and my goal is 4 runs per week. (This one is

a reach, but you could at least imagine it auto-including a running day or not

based on whether you're slipping on a habit.)

On Thursday at 8, it should let me opt-in to a 20 min task that will benefit my novel and re-energize me a bit. It should provide me with all the relevant context for doing that task, and then kick me out when the pomodoro is up.

Key to this is Yodo somehow pulling this information from you. You need to tell it a task is a 20 minute one, or it needs to otherwise find a way to know that. Hopefully, that will all happen at planning/review time.

One thought that is recurring lately is about Threads of Work.

Decision-making fatigue is real! Hopefully soon, Yodo will be making suggestions for you.