Use Trello as the good old day planner

In the old days of my first attempts to plan my work ahead instead of simply following the stream of life I used a paper-based personal day planner - a thing that everyone had at some point. It is a great tool that has almost everything that one needs to plan their days. But it's also another large and heavy thing, which you have to carry with you. Also, because it's pen and paper it becomes a mess for example when you have to adjust your plan because something went wrong, and it is limited in space. Thus, with time I switched to Trello as my organizer and followed the Getting Things Done methodology in it. It works great, but I always missed the ability to plan the following day accurately and to follow that plan closely, which I could do with the paper thing. Recently I discovered a way to fix that and it boosted my productivity tremendously.

My Trello board for daily activities is constituted of several lists, such as Incoming, Wait, Office - Do and Wilderness - Do. The latter two are action lists - they consist of the things that I am going to do at the office and elsewhere. During the day I go through the cards in these two lists, do them one by one, and archive each one when it's done.

When I first switched to this approach I lacked the ability to plan the next day - action lists could include lots of cards that would span several days and it didn't work well for planning. Sometimes I would make a kind of plan on a piece of paper, but in most cases I simply didn't do it. This made me miss the paper organizer. This problemm however, is easy to fix without leaving the comfort of Trello.

At first I simply added a card called "Day boundary" with a black label to my two action lists. I don't use black label for anything else so it is easy to spot this card among others. The meaning of it is simple: whatever is above it should be done today; what goes below will be done on any other day. This trick helped a lot: I could plan my day now. Whenever something changed I could easily adjust plans by moving things that do not fit the day anymore under that "Day boundary". The approach however was not perfect. Too frequently at the end of the day I would see a lot of cards above the black one, indicating that I failed to do all that I planned. While this can happen, seeing this every other day means I wasn't doing good job at planning.

I felt the longing for the paper organizer again. What I missed about it was the ability to see that between 13:00 and 14:00 I should be occuppied with one thing and also that if I don't finish it on time the things planned for later hours will drift by that much. This makes me more disciplined. Also, when laying out a plan in a paper organizer you have to fit its points into hour lines, which means you assess how long each one will take and whether they fit the day. In Trello I only had a list of things that I was going to complete over a very long period - one day - and it was very easy to make mistakes about how much I can put in.

So I made the next step and just added several more black cards to the action lists and labeled them with time: 9:00, 12:00, 15:00, 18:00, 21:00. It was enough to transform my Trello into as good an organizer as the paper planner. Now, every evening I fill the gaps between these black cards with action cards. Whatever falls between the 12:00 card and the 15:00 card is planned to be completed during that exact period of time. It also made my planning more realistic - I have to assess whether particular cards fit into a shorter period of 3 hours or not. To make that easier I made a custom of writing the amount of time allocated for every activity on its card (you can see the numbers in parenthesis).

During the day I still archive the action cards once I finish working on them. With the new organization this means that I can easily see how much I lag behind or how far I am ahead of plan. If it's 16:00 and I still have any non-black cards above the 15:00 one, then something went wrong. If all cards are below and there aren't too many of them between 15:00 and 18:00, I am likely good. It's 17:00 now, so you can see that I am falling behind a bit, but not too much. With these recent changes I returned to the state when what I planned for a day is actually done on that day. I may fail a little here or there, but generally it works well.

It doesn't matter much which tool you use to organize yourself as long as it makes you feel comfortable and allows to make a plan and see clearly how it is going while you're working through it. Trello's flexibility lets you achieve that easily and in a very visual form, so if you're not using anything specific right now it may be a good way to go.

If you have a different approach to preparing a plan for a day and working with it, please share it here! Maybe something about it makes you feel sick? If so, leave a comment and who knows - maybe we can find a solution together.

Take-aways from the Getting Things Done book by David Allen

Over the recent years I heard about the Getting Things Done methodology here and there, but only recently I finally read the book by David Allen and got closely acquainted with its idea. It turned out that I already employed some of the techniques that make up this famous self-organization system, but in most cases never acknowledged that there are bits of GTD among my tools. More importantly, the book taught me some new tricks and the proper way to combine and use the tools.

The most well-known bits of GTD are inbox and action lists. The inbox is used to record every bit of information that arrives to you for subsequent sorting. The action lists - to keep track of the actions that you need to take on duty, at home, when there is time to make a call, etc. I was already confidently using these by the time of reading the book, so this part didn't surprise me. The concept of projects, however, was more of a new thing to me. In Allen's terminology a project is anything that you're going to do and that will take more than one step to accomplish. This a bit unusual understanding of the term is combined with the idea that one must maintain a full list of their projects and review it regularly to decide on next actions. This implies that every week you take time and go through the entire list and for each project decide what you will do next to get the thing moving forward - and add these actions to your lists. This (quite obvious, to be honest) way to handle projects is my most valuable take-away from the GTD book, because when I am serious about weekly reviews it results in advancing a lot of things that I would normally forget about. Instead of making me drown in a chaos of numerous small projects, which I originally expected, this approach actually helps me follow all the projects that I deem important and makes sure that each of them is gradually moved to completion.

Another idea that resonated with me greatly was that one should have a reference info storage and have it in perfect order. And the order here is not just a matter of beauty, but a quality that allows one to put something in easily or to get whatever they need at a particular moment quickly. One manifestation of this idea is that reference information gets separated clearly from the next actions information. For me this played a huge role, because I'm the kind of a person who's obsessed with historical data, archives of all sorts and being able to remember what I was doing on a particular day three months ago. While this might be important in some cases, to achieve results one should see the current context and aim for future, using the past only as a reference. This transformed some of my routines a lot and helped to progress more efficiently both at my work and with other parts of my life.

Another goal that one sets when implementing GTD is to build a reliable system of reminders and ensure that one remembers the right things at the right time. That's the famous wait list as well as the usage of the calendar and even the checklists (which I embraced as a great tool before diving into GTD). It turns out, however, that there is only one way to achieve this goal - that is to organize all the information on next actions and events properly and review it regularly. Regular routines seem to be the second pillar of GTD - together with ordering your life. These are applied virtually to everything - from the mission and principles to the projects and next actions lists - and I can confidently say that regular reviews of my current standing are so critical to efficiency, that I could get little use from the GTD system without this bit. On the other hand, having finally developed a habit of doing these reviews, I now see way more control over different parts of my life and a significant increase in ability to control progress towards multiple unrelated goals.

There are many other useful ideas, but David Allen certainly explains them better than I, so if you're interested you should read it. I was quite impressed - in particular, because it was easy to apply some of the suggested approaches and to see how these yield more control over my life. Another thing that makes the book a great read is that it is very practical and goes to the level of an engineering textbook into the details of organizing yourself. At the same time it doesn't offer a magic pill being pretty honest about the amount of time and effort that one has to invest into personal management to implement the suggested approaches. If you're OK with that and are interested in pursuing efficiency, I do recommend to read the book and to make that investment because it will pay off quite quickly. Have a nice reading!

Checklist as an Individual Efficiency Tool

Checklist is a tool that is widely used to facilitate completion of sophisticated tasks that involve many activities and actors. Software development teams benefit hugely from such things as release checklists (make sure that tests pass, release notes are ready, the build is uploaded somewhere, etc) and feature integration checklists (similarly, old tests pass, new integration tests are automated, documentation for the new functionality is written, the thing is accepted by QA, etc). The tools of this kind serve greatly to coordinate the actions performed by different persons or teams. At the same time, I believe that checklists also bear great power as an individual efficiency tool and that's where I didn't see them used much.

I first employeed a checklist for my own use when I tried to add some structure to my weekly task of analyzing team's performance and planning the next sprint. Even though I had a certain routine and even a quite stable form of the final result of this activity (a report and a list of Jira items for the next week), sometimes I forgot to check certain aspect of our performance and highlight it in the report or overlooked some items that needed action during the next week. Thus my key intent was to provide myself a list of things that I must do to consider both the report and the plan done. Additionally, I wanted to review the process of preparing the plans to exclude any obsolete steps. The results were great: once I put the new checklist into action it started saving me about an hour each week (half of it from mere thinking of "what else I forgot to include in the plan"). Additionally, after I defined this routine explicitly it became easier to think about it and spot other items, which don't bring much value or get ignored consistently - and to exclude or rework them, saving myself even more time and nerves.

There are several similar checklists in my toolbelt that facilitate other tasks and work great, but there is also a bit different thing that I consider my greatest finding - that's my daily checklist. The initial idea was to have a short list of things that I wanted to do daily and to go through it every evening before leaving the office. I quickly got used to the routine of tagging portions of job on the list as done at the end of the day and at some stage expanded it to ensure that I don't forget some other things - the benefits turned out to be tremendous.

First of all, making these routine checks helped me acquire the habits I wanted and somewhat refocus my work on the things I consider important. Additionally, since putting this checklist into action I had much less cases of forgetting to do certain things, because I get reminded of them before I go home. One change that I didn't expect is that this routine made me generally less nervous about the job: I don't have to rush into reviewing every new pull-request or responding an email from partner, because I know I will notice these things later: looking into both pull requests and mail inboxes is on the list, like other similar things. Thus the checklist makes me more efficient through decreasing the stress of urgency, serving as a reliable reminder and paving a short path to making myself more disciplined. In the end all this boils down to freeing my mind for more important tasks than just being afraid to skip something important.

Another powerful thing about this list of daily tasks is that it forces me to check some aspects of the team's current situation at the end of the day, which sometimes produces unexpected results. For example, I had several cases when this review allowed to spot urgent tasks and made me adjust plans. Furthermore, sometimes the nightly check made me notice a vague relation between a problem that we were dealing with during the day and a different problem that sit in our backlog waiting for us to find a way to address it. At least once such a discovery allowed our team to track down and fix a data corruption issue that bothered our partners a lot - and it could have evaded us again if I didn't perform the routine review of our status that evening.

To achieve these benefits one must have an efficient tool to implement the process. Ideally it should allow to manage checklists and to perform daily planning at the same place. Since the most common result of going through a checklist is adding something to the tomorrow to-do list and you want as little a gap between these two actions as possible. I use Trello agile boards for planning and to my great luck they support creating checklists inside cards and copying them freely (which also means that they can be included into the daily plan). If you didn't see the service yet, make sure to check it - that's a very handy tool! (Disclosure: even though I'd readily accept money, Trello doesn't pay me for this little advertisement.)

It's true that using checklists routinely - especially daily - may require some discipline and motivation. Thanks to the amazing 'To the Moon' talk by Russ Olsen, when going through my daily checklist I always feel acting like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin did before transmitting "Houston, Tranquility Base here, the Eagle has landed". It might seem childish, but it's fun to feel like you've just landed a moonship when you're simply leaving your office at the end of a long day - and that's a part of my motivation.