GibbonsR.net

I started a new Job at the first of the year, and it was about that time, my blog post stopped. I’ve just been to busy. Yeah I could write about random things going on, but that takes time. Some might say , oh it only takes 5, maybe 10, minutes to write a blog post. But that isn’t accurate, because I would of spent 5 minutes before, thinking about writing it, which would interfere with my current task. Then I would have to pick back up where I left off. which would be another 5 – 10 minutes. So for that 5 minute blog post, I could of potentially wasted nearly 30 minutes of my day.

This same philosophy can be applied to just about anything. Those few 5 minute task can kill hours of your day if you aren’t careful. These task are inevitable, but they need to be manage better, instead of just ignored. One of these task is time entry, sure it take 5 or 10 minutes at the end of the day to enter in your task. But there was the 10 minutes spent throughout the day jotting down notes. Then you’ve got to remember to stop what you are doing, and put them into a system. Sure you can do this at the end of the week, and it can save you a bit of time.

Grouping things together and knocking them out in a large chunk is , almost safe to say, always faster then breaking the same process into task completed at individual times. What is killer, is at work, it is easy to be in a few meetings in the morning, entering time from the day before, and then for those that try to keep a bog updated, or needs a fix from news sources on the internet. It is easy to kill an entire morning with out being productive what-so-ever.

My mornings consist of getting in and updating time, check up on latest and greats Tech related news feeds (and only tech, not even getting into regional, country, or global news) Goto a general 30 minutes office meeting, get out, get coffee, site down and go through a few e-mails, then hope into another project focused meeting, that last anywhere from 30 minutes to an hour. ( Even though it was scheduled as a 15 min quick update :/ see rant above ). Get out, get more coffee, get updated on e-mails again, put out one or two fires … and now strangely it is 11 o’clock and I am thinking about what I want for lunch. And I haven’t even put together a todo list for my laundry list of things to do for the day. I just have the list assigned to me from those meetings, which are just the most visible things to the powers-that-be.

I know, the problem here is not unique to just me, or hell even our company. Meetings can kill any and all productivity, and they can get out of control. Some managers feels they help because they have a sense of being on top of everything. But isn’t that was project / task management utilities are for. Isn’t that why they are use MS Project, our monthly-subscription to basecamp, and quickbase … Yes, three utilities to manage one project …. another rant for another day.

I know this is turning into a rant, I don’t want that. Just want to bring clarity to issues surrounding ’5 minute tasks’, while trying to get my blog moving again. As developers, technical resources, and the sort, we need to figure out what we can do to help our managers for this. While it isn’t our job to tell them what to do, we do, have to manage them in a sense. If not, these meetings and task get out of hand very quickly.