Organize your work like the real scheduling experts! (Part I)

posted by Sean Deuby on September 04, 2007

I’ve been especially busy recently, juggling a number of disparate projects and trying to keep them all moving forward. My organizational system has evolved over the years into a priority-based set of lists. The medium has also varied over the years; until recently I used a deliberately anachronistic leather-bound notebook and fountain pen for my daily lists. In the last few months I’ve mostly put away the pen for the electron. Instead of coming up with a new system haphazardly, I realized I should look to a system that figured this out long ago: The Microsoft Windows operating system.

I’ve used PIMs (personal information managers) for years, most notably Ecco. Ecco was a terrific information manager because it featured the ability to perform outlining - the ability to quickly and easily organize one’s thoughts into a logical hierarchy. One you get used to the method, it’s a very powerful system. (It helps if you’re a logical thinker.) Ecco has gone to that great Recycle Bin in the sky, and after a hiatus of several years Microsoft OneNote has come forward to assume its outlining mantle.

The choice of tools doesn’t address how you actually work on the stuff you’ve written down, however. If you simply work by priority, you tend to make the most progress on the tasks that are both important and urgent, while getting less done on what’s important but not urgent. If you just focus on the former type, you’re always in firefighting mode; spending time on the latter type is where your most constructive work is and how you stay ahead of your due dates. Having a background in operating systems, it recently occurred to me: Why not try organizing my work the way the Windows dispatcher does?

Windows implements a priority-driven, preemptive scheduling system - the highest priority thread (think of it as a task we have to perform) always runs but can be pre-empted by a new, higher-priority thread. We knowledge workers have the same goals, after all; we need to get lots of different tasks done at the same time without crashing or otherwise breaking down. Windows, like us, juggles multiple processes (our projects), allotting them a certain amount of time to be worked on. Each process has one or more threads to execute (each project has one or more tasks to perform). If you have the project filed away, you have to get its folder out to work on (page it in from disk to memory); when you’re finished you set it aside or file it away (page it out to disk) until you’re ready to work on it again. My paging algorithm needs some work; I have a tendency to forget about my projects when they’re paged out to my filing cabinet.

Since beginning this post, I’ve read my fellow blogger Nathan Zeldes’ excellent paper on “Infomania: why we can’t ignore it any longer”, and (being an Intel knowledge worker) recognize all of the facets of Infomania, or attention deficit trait (ADT), or what I simply refer to as IT-induced ADD. My OS-inspired task scheduler takes many of the performance-degrading aspects of Infomania into account. In the sprit of not contributing to your information overload, I’ll wait until next week to describe the Windows-inspired organizing system I’ve put together.

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tagged: ADT, infoglut, infomania, organization, scheduling, windows