Forgivable Sloppiness: The Art of Epoch-Driven Time Management

I didn't write a whole lot about time management in the book. This is because I believe it is a pretty mature field and I don't like reinventing the wheel.  But I do have ideas about how to make your time management behaviors more robust, so you can allow for a certain amount of forgivable sloppiness in how you operate. David Allen of GTD fame once remarked, only partly in jest, that the fastest way to increase your productivity is to lower your standards. Forgivable sloppiness is my term for what it means to safely lower your standards. The core idea is what I call epoch-driven time management: varying your behaviors based on the tempo of a project.  The idea can be generalized to your whole life, but let's start with a single project, a thread in your life. This diagram, the Double Freytag triangle, which I discussed at length in the book, is one systematic way to carve up the time-line of your project into epochs with consistent tempos. For the purposes of this post, all you need is your intuitive reading of the diagram. Think of the cheap trick and separation event as the psychological starting and ending points of a project (if you haven't read the book, the choice of terms will remain somewhat cryptic, I am afraid). The height of the graph at any given point is, roughly speaking, a measure of how crazy your life is at that point. Each phase of the diagram is an epoch: it has a consistent rhythm, energy level and emotional feel. Now that we have our terms defined (I am still working on an online glossary so I don't have to do this for every post), let's talk about forgivably sloppy time management. Off the Wagon, On the Wagon By their very nature, all time management behaviors are unstable. They require discipline and diligence to keep up, and it is easy to fall off the wagon. Sometimes this is costly, other times it doesn't seem to matter much. One reason I use GTD as my canonical example of a good time management system is that it is honest enough to acknowledge this instability, and smart enough that the behaviors it prescribes are easily reinstated: it is easy to get back on the wagon. Scrum, a common agile software development methodology, is also forgiving in this sense. That said, if you are obsessive-compulsive about getting back on the wagon each time you mess up, you will live in a state of serious stress. Robust time management is about knowing when you can let lapsed behaviors slide for a while, and when you have to be paranoid about correcting any deviation. You cannot afford to be equally paranoid about all your behaviors, all the time. Calendar out of date? Sometimes you'll need to immediately put in a late night getting it in order; at other times, you can let it slide for months. We need to talk about hard and easy behaviors before we can get to sloppiness. Hard Behaviors, Easy Behaviors There are times when certain behaviors come very easily, and stay stable. At other times, sticking to those behaviors seems nearly impossible. You keep falling off the wagon. Easy behaviors are those that are easy when they are most needed, hard when they are not. Hard behaviors are those that are hard when you need them the most, easy when you can do without them. I suspect there may be some universals here, but for now I'll be conservative and suggest that hard/easy depends on your personality. For me, things break down as follows (I've only provided a small sample of the dozen or so behaviors I practice, with varying degrees of success): Easy

1. Waterfall planning or creating a backlog of tasks as in agile software
2. Picking a goal for a single work session and accomplishing it
3. Staying on a regular schedule of creative work (like writing or programming)
4. Figuring out the right next action for a project (GTD)
5. Switching levels/horizons of abstraction in thinking about a project
6. Managing meetings

Hard

1.  Calendar management
2. Weekly reviews (GTD) without another person
3. Making a to-do list covering an entire day and successfully finishing that day
4. Staying on a regular schedule for routine/administrative work (like book-keeping)
5. The GTD 2-minute rule (if it's going to take less than 2 minutes, just do it now)
6. Delegation

You might want to classify your own behaviors before reading further. Managing by Epoch Now we are ready to describe epoch-based time management. Each epoch requires certain behaviors, and is forgiving about sloppiness with respect to other behaviors. Whether an epoch is hard or easy for you depends on whether it is full of hard or easy behaviors. Since everybody has a personal style (what I call an enactment style in the book) that governs how they get things done, there will again be a lot of individual variation in which behaviors you need to be paranoid about, and which ones forgive sloppiness. But I think there's a lot more universality here, simply because of the nature of projects and work. So unlike the hard/easy behaviors distinction, I believe there is less individual variation here. Exploration

• You can be sloppy about: calendar management, next-action identification, weekly reviews, planning
• You have to be paranoid about: switching levels/horizons, staying on a regular schedule for creative work, keeping notes

Sense-making

• You can be sloppy about: staying on a regular schedule for creative work, next-action identification
• You have to be paranoid about: calendar management, next-action identification, agile planning

The Valley

• You can be sloppy about: calendar management, the two-minute rule
• You have to be paranoid about: weekly reviews, calendar management, staying on a regular schedule for creative work

The Heavy Lift

• You can be sloppy about: switching levels/horizons, weekly reviews, calendar management
• You have to be paranoid about: the two-minute rule, waterfall planning, scheduling routine/administrative work

The Retrospective

• You can be sloppy about: calendar management, next-action identification, weekly reviews, planning
• You have to be paranoid about: scheduling routine/administrative work, switching levels/horizons

A quick note for agile ideologues: you may be surprised waterfall planning is even on the list (in the paranoid part of the heavy lift). In my experience, waterfall planning has a crucial role to play, but the right time to do waterfall planning for information work (Gantt charts and all) is towards the end of a project, when uncertainties have been squeezed out, the creative exploration is done and many relatively isolated components are nearly done, thanks to the valley phase. The heavy-lift phase is often about integration: dependencies, causal links and couplings become important. Complex projects don't get done in the sequential order of dependencies. Generally, components are finished to the extent that they can be without running into dependencies, and a lot of weaving-together is accomplished during the heavy lift, as the whole thing starts to come together. During this phase, agile models often start to fall apart, because they are better suited to knocking off largely unrelated items on a long laundry list. I'll write more about this phenomenon another day. In theory, you could map out all your behaviors by epoch and subjective easiness/hardness on a spreadsheet, but for the exercise to be useful, you need at least a few significant projects under your belt so you have good historical data about your own behaviors. This whole line of thinking started for me when I first got to the point where I had this critical mass of data. Though I didn't use this framework at the time, I did do some pretty heavy analysis of my own work. From Project State to Life State While we have many ongoing projects in our lives at any given time, there is typically a foundational project that governs our emotional state, which is why you can apply this diagram to your whole life state.  College is an example of such a foundational project. Everything else in your life during those four years tends to be driven by the tempo of the main project, college (whether you pursue an earnestly studious or Van Wilder path through the experience). The television show, The Big C, is a great exploration of another foundational project: dealing with a serious health issue (cancer in this case). So quite often, you can generalize everything I've said to your whole life: the epochs tend to be roughly synchronized. You get a bit of a fractal structure as you roll up all your ongoing projects and background routines into "life" but applied somewhat sloppily (heh heh) epoch-driven time management still works. Where the approach breaks down badly is when you are in a schizophrenic phase of your life. For example, your work may be in the middle of a heavy lift, but your marriage may be in a sense-making phase. Such schizophrenic phases can be incredibly stressful. We generally end up compartmentalizing our lives and fleeing one area and seeking refuge in another, based on what we are better equipped to deal with. I haven't thought this through, and have no immediate ideas about how to deal with such life arrhythmic phases, but I am working on it. My suspicion is that there are no easy answers. Such phases are what make life hard. Synchronicity is a simplifying condition. Thanks to Tristan Harris, Xianhang Zhang and a few others for an interesting email conversation that helped me surface some some subconscious ideas that have been simmering for a while.