Bucketing your time - James Stanier, The Engineering Manager

This resource first appeared in issue #42 on 19 Sep 2020 and has tags Strategy: Prioritization, Becoming A Manager: Other

We’ve talked about organizing tasks in buckets before - In Issue 37 I’ve mentioned my experiments with trello, and in Issue 39 I linked to an article about having a “dashboard” that covers both issues, things to keep an eye on, and future-looking work.

This is a nice article about why I find these approaches work well for me - it’s a way of systematizing the discipline of not just getting lost in the day-to-day while also highlighting important-but-not-urgent tasks at a variety of timescales. If this something that you wrestle with too, this is a nice article to read. I’ve certainly found being able to keep track of “today/this week/coming month/coming quarter” tasks useful to keep my eye on the ball. Stanier also distinguishes between recurring tasks and one-off tasks, as a way of showing what tasks would be more valuable to delegate.