Limiting Work To Capacity, Part 3

In the first two posts of this series, I talked about my desire to limit my work to my capacity and how I set about gathering the data to do it. That leaves the question of how I processed that data and what I did with it.

An important step was to define buckets for my measured chunks of time to drop into. Remember how I said that I was going to measure tasks that I did for some sort of reason? The obvious way to group them was by those reasons. It turned out that there were two broad categories that these reasons fell into. The first was projects, which were things like the podcast, reading The Civil War: A Narrative, working on the Origins Awards, and the like. These were easy to identify, because the tasks were clearly oriented toward the completion of a specific goal. There were other tasks, however, that didn’t fall into obvious projects but that I was still doing for a reason. This is where Roles came in handy.

I first encountered the idea of Roles in First Things First. They are, in a sense, the ways we define ourselves. For example, I see my major Roles right now as Husband, Software Professional, and Creative Artist.1 I do things that aren’t directed towards specific project goals but are aimed at helping me cultivate and be fulfilled in those parts of my life.2 Sure enough, almost all of the rest of the chunks of time I had recorded fell into the Role-defined categories.

Once I had categorized my chunks of time, the final step was to add up how much time I was spending in each category and average out per week. I discovered that for the first quarter of 2010, I had an average of 25 hours per week available for “intentional work.” About 15 hours a week was taken up by Role-based tasks, leaving 10 hours a week for projects. That meant that if I needed to spend at least half an hour a day on each project3, I could only have three at a time.4

So there it is. My capacity is three projects at a time, each of which gets about three hours a week. I’ve played with this enough to know that it is a real limit; if I try to do more, my mental well-being suffers and I get less done. Now that I know that, I can plan appropriately.

One of those plans, however, is going to impact this blog. Blogging is number three on my project priority list. Numbers one (personal fitness) and two (running the Origins Awards) need to expand beyond three hours a week, at least for the next month (or possibly two). That means I need to give up the three hours a week I’ve been using to write posts like this one. I’ll write when I can, but don’t be surprised if it’s a lot of fortune cookie quotes until July.

1 I say “right now” because this list has shrunk since I first started, as I’ve learned more about myself.

2 This is related to Rands’ Trickle List, but that’s a different post.

3 Half an hour a day, remember?

4 There are a several reasons to have no more than three active projects at a time, but this is the most telling.



Comments

[Andrew Smith]

I apply the same role-based thinking to my week, and even within those roles. With my role #3 (occupation) I break that down into the elements of the role so that while at work I have an idea of how to prioritise. It's worked for me for the last couple of years, so I'm going to stick with it. I hope you have even better success.