This week we talked about exposing unplanned work and prioritizing work.
The Perfect Crime: Unplanned Work
- Find a system of tracking every time you get interrupted. This could be putting a sticky note on the board for every task you complete that came from an interruption. You could also tag digital work items, or put visual indicators on sticky notes that were interrupted.
- Jameson said it would be useful to categorize the types of interruptions and how long you were interrupted. Once you know more about the types and durations, you can step down to an interruption counter.
- We brainstormed some ways of tracking this.
- Post on Slack, or use some kind of Slack bot that tracks these things. (Note: This doesn’t seem to exist, so there’s an opportunity!)
- The finer-grained the data, the more complex it will be to track and manage.
- Geoff wanted some kind of device/button near your desk that was green if you were on-task. When interrupted, you tap it to turn it read and it would log the start of interruption; tap again to stop being interrupted, which would log the completion.
- Houston’s idea was that you log interruptions with sticky notes, but the interruptor has to bring the sticky note.
- Finding the root cause of unplanned work is better than planning to do less work.
- Interruption busters
- A goalie designed to be interrupted (e.g., Scrum Master)
- Hold office hours where you can be interrupted
- Set your status as “do not disturb” (DND) during certain times
- Use the Pomodoro technique where you focus for 25 minutes, then are interruptable for the next 5 minutes.
- Regarding the interruption busters…
- The office hours and DND need to be company culture norms, or no one will respect them.
- Jameson and Geoff have had mixed results with the Pomodoro technique.
- Geoff also has seen a post that suggested using your email auto-responder when you need to be heads-down.
- The book mentioned a story about how HP in the 1960s had a coffee cart that came at 10:15, so the engineers had an “excuse” to interact. Once it was replaced by a more efficient self-serve coffeemaker, the interactivity went away. Jameson said this principle could be better for morale than cross-pollination.
Prioritize, Prioritize, Prioritize
- HiPPO: Highest Paid Person’s Opinion
- Some other approaches for prioritizing
- Cost of delay — quantify the cost of the work that gets delayed
- First in, first out
- Weighted shortest job first (relate cost of delay to job duration)
- The important part is to make the rules about how priorities are decided explicit so that others can make decisions similarly (i.e., delegate the decisions to others).
- We discussed a bit more about cost of delay, and how it’s related to urgency and value. This could be hard to compute for some things (e.g., potential lost revenue).
- The book should have included a link to the A3 template.