Work Is a Queue of Queues

I've been using the MYN system [1] for the last couple of years for work-related todos. One aspect of it is what you could call a "priority stack". That is, it behaves like a stack, except when you reprioritize items by pulling them towards the top of the stack (upon daily/weekly/monthly review). Items that turn out to be not important/urgent will tend to sink towards the bottom of the stack, and the further down the stack, the less frequently you review them. The algorithm is based on the insight that (a) you can't possibly get everything done that you capture as a todo item, and (b) you don't know beforehand which items are the ones that you can (or will have to) discard. The staggered review process however automatically sorts them out.

Like GTD, MYN is a commercial product, however the book is affordable and the main chapters are well worth reading, even if you don't use Outlook or Toodledo (the two main tools used to present MYN).

[1] https://www.michaellinenberger.com/AboutMYN.html

Transforming a team from stack to queue is one of the major improvements I aim for on any team I join, although I hadn't really conceptualized this process in those terms before this article.

The second is limiting who has access to enqueue work and the third is forcing alignment on the set of people who prioritize the queue. Once that is done I police any attempts to interrupt work-in-progress outside of established processes (e.g. emergency/urgent response).

His descriptions of the activities of a CEO-level organization leader really ring true to me. "1:1 meetings with staff, work anniversaries, performance reviews, prospective sales conversations, partner checkpoints, hiring calls, board meetings, investor update calls, and so on." It makes me wonder how well I would do in the role of a CEO.

A more formal approach to the surprising implications of modeling work as a queue: https://blog.acolyer.org/2015/04/29/applying-the-universal-s...

Excerpt:

"Email is interesting, because most people wish email were a queue, and many people try to turn email into a queue using a number of tools and practices, but, in its standard implementation, email behaves much more like a stack. (Some people joke that “email is your to-do list, but made by other people.”)"

Well said!

"I remember learning the definition of a stack in college and being a little surprised at “LIFO” behavior. [...] Practically speaking, this seems like a “frenetic” or “unfair” way to do work [...] That’s when you tend to learn that stacks aren’t usually used to track “work-in-progress”."

This tends to happen as a student learning abstractions - you judge them by how they apply to a concrete situation that you cooked up in your head instead of the ones they are actually applied to. One can, if they're not paying attention, accumulate this way loads of weird feelings towards impersonal abstractions.

I wish Jira would do something like this- collapse all dependencies between tickets and turn my work into a queue, notifying me when it changes.

I would say work is a PQ of Queues - but overall sounds about right. As someone with a 25hrs/week meeting load, lists and lists of lists are pretty much my go to for keeping sanity!

One big thing I see with feelin g like email is a stack is GMail's insistence on newest first and no sort option.

I have Thunderbird set up with IMAP'ed GMail accounts and it does allow oldest first, turning the process back into the queue it's supposed to be.

Everything that comes in is either GTD-style two minute rule handled immediately, or gets labeled "Next".

When I get to the Next label, they either get handled, or labeled Someday.

If I ever get to the Somedays, they get handled in further ways.

Several thoughts after reading this :

- it looks like a massive ad for the presented tools (look at all the "?utm_source=amontalenti" in all the links)

- if you receive 100s of mail/day, you are doing something wrong. Many of them are spam or automated notifications. The first step is to unsubscribe to some of them

- having 50 rules and google app script is a maintenance hell, it can break or be deprecated at anytime

- if you use gmail, gmail's filters and native update/main/priority/spam boxes does 80% of the job

- by treating everything as a computer queue, you are trying to behave like a computer, but you are not one

- it seems the author spend more time at creating kanban cards and to-do lists than actually doing the work

- the point of todo list and kanban is to eventually delegate the work or share it with coworkers. Any private form of organization of your work makes it unobservable, unshareable and unreviewable to your teammates

- if you are an executive/founder, your role is to lead and delegate work. if you have a manager, you role is to simply listen to the priorities given by the manager. If you are an independent worker, you will probably focus on one client at a time