Too Much To Do

Too much to do is the opposite of NotEnoughTime. When you have too much to do, you can begin to deal with the problem. You can prioritize. You can reduce the size of tasks. You can delegate. When you don't have enough time, you're stuck.

I learned this lesson from BruceAnderson. I was planning the second PLoP and I didn't have enough time to put in all the activities I needed to schedule. He said, "What would you do if you had all the time in the world?" What a relief! I wasn't stressed anymore. I had all the time in the world. So, of course, the first thing I put on the schedule was the afternoon nap, er personal reflection exercise. Then I worked around that. Everything that needed to be there fell into place. Some activities disappeared, but they weren't all that important anyway.

Try it. The next time you say or hear "I/we don't have enough time" followed by a bad decision, turn it around. Ask, out loud, "What if we had enough time, we just had too much to do. What would we do first?" It works for me. --KentBeck

variation-on-theme: in WritingItAndMaintainingIt I describe how realizing that I have have an infinite number of things to do simplifies my life - I realize there are an infinite number I won't do, so I get to choose which infinity that is, choose the small finite set I will do! --AlistairCockburn

It strikes me that TooMuchToDo is only the opposite of NotEnoughTime in the sense that "Heads" is the opposite of "Tails". They're just two ways of looking at the same coin. Stretching that analogy beyond the breaking point, I wonder what the edge of the coin would correspond to... (The EdgeOfChaos?)

In my previous job, I found I always had TooMuchToDo. My solution was to concentrate on the fun things in order to maintain my sanity. Eventually a job with less to do presented itself to me, and I eagerly accepted. --ChrisGarrod

The edge would correspond to "Just enough to do in just enough time".

That sounds a little stressful. How about, Just enough to do that you can do it with just enough time left over ? That's what I imagine the perfect FortyHourWeek to be - realizing just before lunch on Friday that all the tests run for all the stories for that week and that, if the fancy took you, you could just take off early in the afternoon and take a walk in the park.

The edge could be this decision between setting priorities and worrying about your usage of time etc. It is possible to set the coin on its side by thinking too much about what should be done and then it will be a much longer way through it.

CategoryTimeManagement