It Rains In Triplicate

So at the end of one week of some great experiment, I’ve posted every evening on twitter (http://twitter.com/slandsman) my task status and progress, of the format:

Seth’s daily activity status is 155 active projects, 20 tasks completed today, 18 tasks added today, and 1336 incomplete tasks.

which is generated by a nifty omnifocus applescript I spent a few hours on over the new years weekend.

So, what have I figured out:

1. I’m adding more tasks than I’m closing for the most part. That isn’t a bad thing, necessarily, as a task should be in omnifocus, not my head. I’ve added ~23 tasks this week.
2. I have a lot of “active” projects. It may be worthwhile to prune them
3. My usage pattern, I think, is reflected in the stats (see below)
4. There are more items that are worth tracking than just above (see below)

Usage Patterns:

I have a couple of key usage patterns that should end up being reflected in the data over the next few weeks:

1. In general, every product I produce goes through a two phase commit before it disappears from my todo list. When a product is completed, I run a script that completes the item and creates a new item that is a “Waiting For” task. The idea is that until it receives feedback or acceptance by the customer, I still need to track it. The result is that the majority of items I close result in one item opened.
2. Every saturday or sunday, I do my prep for the week ritual, which involves, among other things:
   • Empty my work (and eventually personal) inboxes, replying and acting on what I’ve deferred and put into omnifocus any items that need to be further deferred (results in a spike of new items)
   • Go through my starred google reader items from the previous week and delete, act, or defer (into omnifocus) every item from that week
3. Every monday, I meet with my team leads and go through action items (probably results in closing a few “waiting” or “agenda” items
4. Every tuesday, I meet with my customer and go through action items (probably results in closing a few “waiting” or “agenda” items but results in opening new ones)

So, my best guesses for what my task list will look like:

• Weekend: large increase in new tasks, closing of a number of house / chore based tasks. Also a lot of close and add patterns as I check off weekly repeating items
• Monday: mostly closing of tasks
• Tuesday: mostly adding of tasks, but a lot of closing
• Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday should be a mix

Data to Track:

So right now I am tracking:

• Active projects
• Tasks completed on today’s date
• Tasks added on today’s date
• Tasks that are not closed and part of an active project

Other items worth tracking:

• Waiting tasks created to track how many two-phase commit items I have, vs new work to accomplish
• Start of day status, including how many tasks are due today, how many are flagged for today, how many items are flagged for the whole week
• Weekly roll ups (including graphing the data)
• How many projects were touched (i.e., had an item added or completed, to figure out how many are really active)

Final thoughts:

• My task list is increasing, not decreasing. On 1 Jan I had 1306 incomplete tasks, and last night I had 1329. This week was, in my opinion, a productive week.
• I have a lot of untouched tasks and projects that I do not want to get rid of, but I know I will not worth through soon. i.e., I have a to-read project with at least 50 books on it.
• I would guess the majority of my tasks are about the same size and scope, in that I won’t have many days where I’ll close out four times as many tasks as another day

More later. I also want to close up and post my scripts, including my workflow script and these analytics scripts.