Kerry Buckley

As I come to the end of a week off work, with a list of things that need doing around the house that's little changed since the beginning of the week, it strikes me that it's about time us procrastinators had our own system. With that in mind, I present the following (with apologies to David Allen).

The Putting Things Off System

The main principles of Putting Things Off can be summarised in four steps:

Collect

Every time you come across something you need to do, put it into a 'bucket' (an e-mail folder, a drawer in an old filing cabinet you never look in, or perhaps an actual bucket). Once you get all the things you need to remember out of your head, it's easier to forget about them.

Once a bucket gets full, move it out of sight somewhere and start a new one. Don't make the mistake of looking in the buckets – it'll just be depressing.

Process

When faced with a list of things that need doing, just pick a few at random and try to get rid of them using one of the following strategies:

Two-minute rule

If something looks like it would only take a couple of minutes, you can do it any time, so forget it for now. Don't distract yourself by trying to do it straight away.

Delegate

Can you think of someone else to blame for the task not getting done? If so, you're in the clear. Don't remind them though, otherwise they might remove the obstacle, and with it your excuse for inaction.

Defer

Deferring things is just a more positive way of saying procrastination, so this is a good plan if no other excuse presents itself.

Organise

Organise all your tasks into projects, and allocate a 'next task' for each. That way you can ignore all but one item in each project, leaving far fewer things to think of reasons to avoid.

Organising by context can also be a helpful source of excuses. For example, a context might be 'things I can't do at home' or 'things I can't do if it's raining'.

Review

Review all your lists occasionally, to see whether you've ignored anything for so long that it's gone away. One useful technique is the well-known '43 folders' – if you split stuff up across that many places, it's far easier to forget about.

Do[n't]

Finally, all this hard work will be to no avail if you still end up doing things. If all else fails, remember the words of the Grange Hill cast, and just say no.

Technorati Tags: GTD

But other times we'd be programming away, and we'd say, "Now, wait a second, what are we working on here?" We'd just get stuck. And if we were stuck more than a minute, I'd stop and say, "Kent, what's the simplest thing that could possibly work?"
— Ward Cunningham

Not a command: "Do the simplest thing that could possibly work!", but a question: "What's the simplest thing that could possibly work?".

Once you think of something really simple that might work, think for a minute – is there an obvious reason why it definitely won't? If not, try it, and then you'll know. More importantly, if it didn't, you'll know exactly why not. Maybe it was functionally correct, but not fit for purpose – perhaps an algorithm was too slow, or an interface was too confusing or ugly to release to users. The point is, you've either got something you can build on, or you've got a concrete reason to abandon an idea, rather than a theoretical argument. If you're lucky, it'll turn out that the simplest thing did work, and the problem's solved.

Too often people seem to twist this into some kind of XP Prime Directive, claiming that a particular solution is over-engineered because it wasn't TSTTCPW. On the other side of the fence, big-picture architect types use it as a straw man to criticise agile methodologies, claiming that they ignore anything that isn't part of TSTTCPW, leading to simplistic and unscalable solutions.

As Einstein said, "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler."

Technorati Tags: XP, simplicity, Ward Cunningham