Managing my personal workload

Like many engineers and makers I know and idolise, I like lists. I rely on lists to see the steps I need to take to realise my projects from nothing to completion, and also to feel a sense of progress during larger projects, where all I can see a pile of mess and no end in sight.

During my university days, my lists were in my head and my diary (yeap, physical filofax-eqsue diary) and were mostly there to keep on top of my coursework and deadlines. For my first few jobs I initially had to, and eventually just wanted to, keep a log book - a work-journal of sorts - which contained all the thoughts, and yes, lists, related to the project(s) I was working through.

I carried diaries and filofaxes into my home life, but it wasn't until somewhere around 2012 and 2013 that things got complicated enough to need an upgrade and so I started looking to go digital.

I've gone through a variety of list-making exercises both at home and at work, and for home I started using Trello somewhere around 2012 - 2013 instead of a physical diary. Initially I just used Trello to list stuff too big to just execute on, or projects or ideas I wanted to explore later.

List design in 2017

The last big review of my lists was in 2017 and my thinking was to organise and highlight around the things in my life that I hoped to make changes and improvements on. The net result was each axis represented by an individual list:

  1. Quality of life at home improvement - a variety of home improvements. Things like tidying rooms, upgrading desks, organising drawers, making new tools or storage for things.
  2. Health and wellbeing - things that that impact my physical and mental health, improvements I can make, things I've learned about myself.
  3. Quality time / experiences - experiences that will improve with age, a focus on friends.
  4. Personal Projects - the sorts of things that show up while I'm living that make me think "oh, I wonder if that's a thing that can be built?".
  5. Professional identity - projects, ideas, improvements related to me as a professional software engineer.

To manage actually getting things done, I had the usual extra columns to indicate progress:

  • In progress
  • Waiting / blocked
  • Done

Since 2017 there have been a couple of natural iterations of this, including the addition of "Administration" column, photos of my completed items to really help remind me of my successes, and pinning a date to the Done columns so I could reflect on things year by year.

But by and large, that's the last time I really thought about my list.

The 2020 list

With the impending career changes it was time to inspect and adapt, to see if I can move my life forward. A few things stood out to me as important, both positive and negative:

  • Keeping photos of the completion was very important to me; having those visual reminders of my achievements helped anchor the journey I'd taken.
  • I'm adding more to the lists than removing
  • Any effort on list reduction was found logically with the lists nearest the WIP/Done columns. So the first two columns got way more attention that Experiences, Projects and Professional.

Looking harder at why I was adding more than removing, I noticed that I felt "Done" put a blocker on any cards. I converted it into "Done (with)", just to be able to mark something as finished and consumed, even if I wasn't actually going to do the work.

I added Kanban limits and card counts to the lists understand quantitatively how much baggage I was carrying around in each column, to reflect on if it really mattered, and additionally, I've rearranged the columns and moved the quality time & wellbeing columns way out. I care about them, but haven't really been able to use them in this board.

Net result is I've got a few new columns, and a few older ones:

  • Home environment improvement - fixing the things in the house that need to be fixed. At some point in the past I had an Admin column to handle Dad's stuff. I've rolled the remnants of that into this column.
  • Personal projects - things that I wanna do and think about. For fun.
  • Career shit - actually at this point it all needs to be moved into shiori/imo, so it's just a list to be parsed and dumped out.
  • Changing the world - things that would be personal projects that might actually have some wider world changing impacts.
  • Privacy badgers - the privacy project items.
  • Quality time / experiences - some stuff that I wanna do. Probably.
  • Health and wellbeing - mostly a record of stuff about me, rather than activities or actions.

I'm hoping moving personal projects further up the list encourages me to do some more of that, while pushing some of the other pieces out a little allows them to breathe for a minute.

I guess we'll see.