How to use a "Trickle List" to Help Manage Tasks

Sometimes it's good to not only have a way to manage your day to day tasks, but also a method to help manage your overall career strategy. A trickle list might be just the way for you. The below excerpt is from the O'Reilly Publication Being Geek.

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There's a gaping hole in the prior chapter, "The Taste of the Day." Yes, it's a handy task management system, but it's incomplete. It describes a process for constant scrubbing of a task list, as well as a handy place to keep distractions out of your way via the Parking Lot, but at the end of the day, what exactly is it helping you do?

Here are three tasks from my current list:

• Headcount Asks
  
  
• David Lunch
  
  
• Move Europe Trip

These are tasks for today. They are well-defined, measurable, tactical, and they need to be done today. While it's professionally terrific that I'm actively making sure nothing is falling through the cracks, these are still just tasks. What am I accomplishing when I complete them? I'm getting things done.

Is that what you want to do all day? Things? Stuff?

No.

You're a Sr. Development Engineer or an Engineering Manager or a Project Manager, and while things and stuff are part of the gig, if it's all you're doing, you're productive, but you're vigorously running in place. You're tactical, but not strategic. Tasks are an incomplete picture of what you do and what you need to do.

The curse of any effective task management system is that you get really good at capturing, prioritizing, and executing tasks. To the point that you start to believe that merely completing a task is helping your career. After a solid decade of rampant task management, I realized I needed to augment tasks with a system that would strategically guide and remind me that my job was not to do things, but to remember the interesting words in my title: manager, engineering, and products. That's what I do.

What I needed was a guiding force behind these tasks, a way to remind me that I was pushing toward a goal and defining and refining a strategy.

I call it a Trickle List, and it looks like this:



Trickle Creation

My first excursion into the word "trickle" was an idea called Trickle Theory. The argument was simple: you can do more than you think with small, consistent investments of your time.

To understand the Trickle List, you need to first look at the headers at the top of the list. These are the heart of the list, and how you define them is how you define what you want to do.

A good place to start is figuring out what your current job is. If you need a reminder, go scrub that task list again. The question I want to start the Trickle List with is: "What should your job be?"

OK, got it? You want to be a manager. Good, we can work with that. What simple, regular tasks are going to point you in a managerial direction? Do you need to network? Do you need to file more bugs? Write more specs? Strategically, I don't know who you work for, or where you're headed, or what your company values, but here's the good news with the Trickle List: you don't have to be perfect. In fact, imperfection is a great place to start.

Here's my current list:

• People — Have a random chat with someone in the hallway
  
  
• Write — Write something, anything
  
  
• V — Take a vitamin
  
  
• Biz — Learn a part of the business
  
  
• Book — Reading something in a book

"Rands, these are simply recurring tasks."

No. They're not. You're doing more than stuff and things with your trickles; you're designing moments of high potential. I'll explain.

Having a random hallway chat usually isn't going to be a career changer. Nine out of ten of those conversations are lightweight, but those are nine conversations I wouldn't have had otherwise. Plus, it's hallway visibility, and in a gig where 90% of the days are spent holed up in meetings, that's time well spent. And there's the 10th conversation where I learn something huge:

Wait, the project is HOW FAR behind?

Hold it, you're thinking about QUITTING?

By choosing to create a moment where I leave my structured day to have a random conversation, I'm creating informational opportunity, and while these moments may appear to have low initial return on time investment, you're playing a numbers game. You're counting on the fact that, over time, over many moments, you're creating unexpected potential.

The items on your Trickle List don't need to be huge. In fact, as we'll learn in a moment, the bigger they are, the less likely you'll do them. What they need to be is aligned with where you're headed. However small, they need to be a daily reminder that you're headed somewhere. The size and the impact of the trickles will come from repetition. Here's three months:



That's not just 90 vitamins I remember to take; it's 47 random hallway conversations that not only increased my hallway visibility, but also resulted in the discovery of some sweet gossip, gave me a chance to deliver some quiet career advice, allowed me to unearth an impending, avoidable disaster, and, oddly, taught me a lot about high-definition TVs.