It Rains In Triplicate

So, someday, I’ll post something that involves less navel gazing. However, that’s not today.

The week’s progress and graphs.

Graph 1 is my incomplete tasks:

Obviously, the Friday afternoon task sweep gave me a nice, low, new baseline going forward.

Graph 2 is my change in incomplete tasks:

The effect of the task sweep is also very clear.

So, some interesting numbers. With the task sweep, my incomplete list drops by about 5 per day, without it grows by 2 per day. I wonder if that trend will continue. I continue to average completing (not just deleting) 19 tasks per day on average, but the median dropped to 17. The result of the task sweep was only to complete 30 items, which is not an outlier, as shown on the next graph:

So, what’s next?

I started tracking a few more items at the start of the day, after I select my “today” items and after I empty my inbox, which I can graph next week. These are:

• Tasks marked for today
• Tasks marked for this week (including tasks marked for today, but not tasks that are due this week)
• Tasks marked for next week (but not tasks that are due next week)
• Overdue tasks

What do I want to figure out?

• am I over subscribed on a given day?
• am I over subscribed for this week?
• am I over subscribed for next week (i.e., am I deferring too much?)

Finally, there is an obvious problem that I have too many open projects that will see no change for months at a time. Some of these are vague buckets of “I should get to this someday”. Some metric of project change and using it to determine those projects that should be either revisited for actions or put on hold for the time being would be worthwhile.

Next on the block:

• Think about the accountability issue, and what I’m doing about it (some thoughts, further post)
• Add the project metrics
• Have the script create a CSV or drop data into numbers
• Figure out if I can pull the analytics above out of what I’m collecting