Measure Before You Plan

So I'm standing in the shower this morning1 when I catch myself falling into old trap. I had been reading about the Pomodoro Technique, and it seem like a good match for my current organizational/productivity habits2. I thought to myself: "Yeah, so instead of allocating a certain number of hours per week for projects like I do now, I could use Pomodoros. How should I split them up? Hmm. Well, if I had ten a week for personal projects then I could..."

And that's where the trap was. Old me would have assigned a certain number of Pomodoros to each of the things I'm working on, and then tried to find time to get them done.

New me knows better. I've been immersed in Lean Software Development and Agile practices for the last several months, and as I've started to internalize their principles, I've seen how they apply to everyday life, too. The applicable precepts here are:

1. You don't know what you can do until you measure what you are doing, and
2. You have to limit work to capacity.

It's so tempting to construct an ideal plan that will let you get everything you want done and then try to impose that plan on reality. That's exactly what the old me tried to do. What I've learned that I know will work better is to start using Pomodoros to start measuring what I'm doing now and not to start planning with them until I know how many in a week I have to work with. It's like the old carpenter's dictum of measuring twice and cutting once. You need to at least measure once. Otherwise, you might find your board isn't big enough.

Let the measuring begin.

1  See, I told you.

2 It's an odd mashup inspired by Getting Things Done, First Things First, and Trickle Lists.

Comments

[Ryan Graham]

This shift in thinking is also how people should be thinking about budgetting their money, as well as their time.