I've been using the MYN system [1] for the last couple of years for work-related todos. One aspect of it is what you could call a "priority stack". That is, it behaves like a stack, except when you reprioritize items by pulling them towards the top of the stack (upon daily/weekly/monthly review). Items that turn out to be not important/urgent will tend to sink towards the bottom of the stack, and the further down the stack, the less frequently you review them. The algorithm is based on the insight that (a) you can't possibly get everything done that you capture as a todo item, and (b) you don't know beforehand which items are the ones that you can (or will have to) discard. The staggered review process however automatically sorts them out.
Like GTD, MYN is a commercial product, however the book is affordable and the main chapters are well worth reading, even if you don't use Outlook or Toodledo (the two main tools used to present MYN).
Transforming a team from stack to queue is one of the major improvements I aim for on any team I join, although I hadn't really conceptualized this process in those terms before this article.
The second is limiting who has access to enqueue work and the third is forcing alignment on the set of people who prioritize the queue. Once that is done I police any attempts to interrupt work-in-progress outside of established processes (e.g. emergency/urgent response).
His descriptions of the activities of a CEO-level organization leader really ring true to me. "1:1 meetings with staff, work anniversaries, performance reviews, prospective sales conversations, partner checkpoints, hiring calls, board meetings, investor update calls, and so on." It makes me wonder how well I would do in the role of a CEO.
"Email is interesting, because most people wish email were a queue, and many people try to turn email into a queue using a number of tools and practices, but, in its standard implementation, email behaves much more like a stack. (Some people joke that “email is your to-do list, but made by other people.”)"
I rely heavily on the "snooze" feature for email. I try to keep my inbox completely clear, and if something comes in that I can't deal with immediately, I snooze it for when I have time or it becomes relevant. I basically see emails as tasks, and they are completed (archived) when I've both performed the required action (maybe just read it, or sometimes also do something else) and responded if necessary. They can also act as reminders, such as maybe I have a meeting in a month, so I'll snooze it until a week before the meeting. This way I never miss any emails and respond in a timely manner to urgent ones. Snooze acts pretty much as a (sorted) queue.
"I remember learning the definition of a stack in college and being a little surprised at “LIFO” behavior. [...] Practically speaking, this seems like a “frenetic” or “unfair” way to do work [...] That’s when you tend to learn that stacks aren’t usually used to track “work-in-progress”."
This tends to happen as a student learning abstractions - you judge them by how they apply to a concrete situation that you cooked up in your head instead of the ones they are actually applied to. One can, if they're not paying attention, accumulate this way loads of weird feelings towards impersonal abstractions.
As with most things in Jira it's possible to do this, and largely a question of how it is configured. They have a Kanban template. You can usually define all your item workflows, status, and write custom hooks in state transitions. Nothing that couldn't be implemented with a little effort.
Everything about popular task planning & tracking systems like Jira lead me to think that any aid they give the people actually doing the work is accidental and beside the point.
I would say work is a PQ of Queues - but overall sounds about right. As someone with a 25hrs/week meeting load, lists and lists of lists are pretty much my go to for keeping sanity!
You can view oldest first by choosing "Show more messages" from the hamburger above the message list and then clicking the "1-50 of ..." and choosing "Oldest". Unfortunately it's not apparently able to be made default.
"I thought these guys (google et al) were smarter than this." -- Google user Roxane McLean
True, but that gives a bottoms up workflow, and if you clear a page, it goes back to the top and you have to navigate down again... at least it used to. Annoyed me enough to go find a different client.
Being able to sort oldest first means being able to just work on message #1 in the list until the list is gone. Way less cognitive dissonance.
- it looks like a massive ad for the presented tools (look at all the "?utm_source=amontalenti" in all the links)
- if you receive 100s of mail/day, you are doing something wrong. Many of them are spam or automated notifications. The first step is to unsubscribe to some of them
- having 50 rules and google app script is a maintenance hell, it can break or be deprecated at anytime
- if you use gmail, gmail's filters and native update/main/priority/spam boxes does 80% of the job
- by treating everything as a computer queue, you are trying to behave like a computer, but you are not one
- it seems the author spend more time at creating kanban cards and to-do lists than actually doing the work
- the point of todo list and kanban is to eventually delegate the work or share it with coworkers. Any private form of organization of your work makes it unobservable, unshareable and unreviewable to your teammates
- if you are an executive/founder, your role is to lead and delegate work. if you have a manager, you role is to simply listen to the priorities given by the manager. If you are an independent worker, you will probably focus on one client at a time
This seems unreasonably harsh, especially accusing the Author of spending time creating to do lists instead of doing work. If you read the rest of Andrew's blog and look at his github profile, you'll hopefully get a different impression of him.
To say anyone who gets 100s of emails a day is doing something wrong is likewise misguided. This is very normal for anyone in an executive role.
Like GTD, MYN is a commercial product, however the book is affordable and the main chapters are well worth reading, even if you don't use Outlook or Toodledo (the two main tools used to present MYN).
[1] https://www.michaellinenberger.com/AboutMYN.html