How I Organize Work as an Individual Contributor

Like many engineers, I developed systems over time for keeping myself organized. I've travelled the gamut of organizational techniques, but, more often than not, they get abandoned for some reason or another. Some require mental gymnastics to fit work into; others are too loose to execute effectively. The process that I use today is, therefore, a smattering of all the previous processes I've tried.

Loosely, my current system involves:

Quality pens and paper
Daily todo lists
Room for ad-hoc notes in meetings or when researching a topic
Periodic reflection points

What I like about this system is that it allows me to do the following:

Reduce the likelihood that tasks get forgotten, dropped, or out of date
Record work and projects completed linearly over time
Help mitigate the anxiety of the workload I choose to take on

This process gives me the ability to have reflection points that allow for summarization of goals, making manager 1:1 conversations more fluid.

Feel free to take as much or as little of the following process for your own needs.

Pen & Paper

In 2021, it seems odd to prefer pen and paper¹ over digital note taking and organizational tools. The former takes up physical space while the latter is effectively limitless no matter how much text you have. The notebook is bound to a set space while the digital note is available anywhere thanks to our phones. Precisely because of that "always on" nature of digital tools, however, it's easier for me to hide the tab, open a different app on the phone, or otherwise escape from the system that's supposed to be helping me. By contrast, physical paper is present on my desk and provides a concrete space for me to ground myself throughout the day.

There's always a balance to play, however. If it's too much effort to write things down, then it's no better than any digital system. For that reason, I make intentional choices about the pens and paper that I use so that the experience is always enjoyable.

The pens should:

Have a pop cap so that it's easy to jot quick notes down
Use a re-fillable ink system, so I don't have to manage cartridges
Write cleanly and consistently so that lines are uniform

While the paper should:

Not allow running or bleed-through
Use some form of grid or dot system to make diagrams easier
Ideally, but not required, have pre-numbered pages

At the time of this writing, I use Lamy LX/Al-Star pens, Clairefontaine paper, and blue and red ink as my system of choice. One Lamy uses an extra-fine nib for notes and tasks, another with a broad nib for headings, and a third with red ink for highlights. Current ink choices include Iroshizuku Tsuki-yo for the blue and Diamine Oxblood for the red. Finally, I use bronze, silver and gold "darts" to bookmark important pages.

Notebook Layout

I organize notebooks in the following ways:

A few pages at the beginning for the index, done at the completion of a notebook or when a particular project is finished
Left-hand pages for general notes
Right-hand pages for daily tasks

Especially with new notebooks, the right-hand pages tend to lie flatter, so I find them better suited for daily task lists. The left-hand pages get taken up by research, experiments, or reading notes, which occur less frequently.

Organizing Tasks

I use a modified bullet journaling system for organizing tasks. I start by recording carry-over tasks from the previous day. Then, I move onto any meetings or pairing sessions I have for the current day. Occasionally, if the task is important enough, I'll let a personal item leak through that I know needs to get done (e.g. calling the dentist to schedule an appointment). When a task is in progress, I fill in half of the box diagonally to indicate that I made progress. When a task is complete, I fill in the rest of the box drawn to the left of the task. This gives me a complete picture of what needs to get done throughout the day.

Tasks by themselves are not complete descriptions of work. They contain just enough information to trigger my memory. Here is a recent example: [ ] Cards: Dinghy coveralls, Operator automation epic. I mentally expand this into "Create cards to fix the Coveralls reporting for the Dinghy project and create an Epic for automation work we need to do around our Operator releases".

Daily lists aren't always ordered. If I know a task needs immediate attention, I highlight a task with a red dot that signals higher precedence. I strive to make no more than 2-3 tasks in a day high priority, so that I have flexibility in how I structure the day. If I notice a task starts to carry over for several days, I often write how many days it's stayed on the list. If that number climbs above a work week, I either mark it high priority or I determine if that task actually needs to be done and strike it off my list if it doesn't. If there is a particular deadline (e.g. a teammate asked for review on a product document), then I'll mark the date that it must be completed by and plan accordingly.

At the end of each day, I strike through each uncompleted task in red and mark the date that it gets moved to. I add a silver book dart to the next day's work in the notebook so that it's obvious which day's list I should be looking at. When I reflect back on completed tasks, I can draw a clear line from the time that a task lands in my lap to the time it gets completed. I try and do this at the end of each day, but occasionally, it spills into the following morning. It's a nice ritual to signal that "work is done," and I can switch my brain to other things. Since starting a remote role in January of 2020, this ritual has become all the more important. I no longer have a commute home to signal the same shift in mindset.

The goal isn't to make sure the entire list is done every day. I choose to maintain a fairly high workload, which often makes it impractical to accomplish the list every day. What I optimize for, instead, is making sure priority work is done in a timely manner and that no task is unconsciously left behind.

The system isn't perfect by any means. One thing I don't get from this list is a clear way to see what proportion of my day is spent on which tasks. I plan on experimenting with grouping tasks by domain, so I can get another indicator of how much I'm focusing one particular area of my role.

/* gallery folder="images/organizing-tasks/" */

Longer-term Tasks and Notes

Some tasks don't fit neatly into a single day of work (or won't be relevant for some time). Other kinds of notes don't fall into the "task" category but are still useful to summarize and communicate somewhere when the work is done. Examples of this include research into a particular topic (such as Spinnaker's frontend plugin system, pictured in the previous image gallery) or are notes that I'd like to make sure I bring up in team retrospectives or other recurring meetings, such as weekly status meetings.

These items are tracked using bronze or gold colored book darts. One is typically reserved for team-level pages while the other is for research notes. There is no formal system for moving them, though the team-level notes tend to move on a two week cycle in line with our sprints. When notes on a longer term project or task are done, I move the dart once that information has been communicated to someone else.

Finishing a Notebook

Inevitably, the time comes when a notebook runs out of pages. This triggers one final set of tasks before moving onto the next book: I number pages in the notebook and create a loose table of contents according to topics that the notebook covers. While it's fun to look at notebooks from a few years ago, the realistic shelf-life for a notebook is three to six months after completion. This is typically the amount of time I'll need to refer to longer-term content like research or meeting notes before finally storing a notebook.

One project on my list is to start digitizing these notebooks and making them searchable. This would better help me refer to older content, but I haven't hit a situation yet where I wasn't able to refer to content from a previous notebook.

Previous Systems

It's important to highlight that this system didn't develop overnight. In the follow sections, I'll outline previous systems and why they don't work for me.

Personal Trello or JIRA Board

They sound nice in principle. As engineers, we often organize our work into sprints and tasks at the team level, so why wouldn't it work at a personal level? What I found is that the sprint/task cycle is too much overhead for day-to-day tasks. Simple things like "schedule a meeting with this set of people" becomes several clicks in a browser tab. Then, I need to make sure that it moves through the columns in a timely manner so that the content isn't stale. As I often have more than 100 tabs open at a time, it can be a chore to find an instance of the board that I can update. Therefore, I often forget.

While it may sound appealing to update the list anytime on a phone, what I've found in practice is that kanban-style boards are difficult to manage on a smaller screen. This adds friction to the process and makes me less likely to keep updating the board. If I really need to record a task while I'm not at my desk, I create reminders through Google's smart assistant for some hours into the future.

I've tried creating rituals around updating this system, but more often than not, I don't get the same feeling of finality in a day when updating a board.

Bullet Journaling

Bullet journaling is also appealing on the surface, but I find it too rigid for the kinds of work I want to track. The emphasis on rigid rules for formatting tasks means that if I mess up a particular task, I'm discouraged from keeping with the system.

Sometimes, I'll forget to record a high priority task, or strike off an uncompleted task from a previous day. I don't want to feel discouraged because I didn't record the information perfectly. So long as I'm making sure that work is eventually done, then I feel good.

Instead, what I've done is take the elements of bullet journaling that I like and dropped the rest. There's a powerful psychological element to not naming the system, which allows me to experiment and iterate on the process rather than feeling like I'm deviating from the norm.

Keeping a Mental List

The absolute worst system I've tried is just keeping a mental list of what needs to be done. This optimizes for the most amount of anxiety and dropped tasks. Memory is fallible, and priority is harder when I'm just trying to remember what needs to be done in the first place.

If I'm talking to someone and commit to a task, I immediately write it down and forget about it. This helps keep me present in the task at hand even if it makes conversation a little awkward when I pause to write something down. I find the tradeoff acceptable compared with forgetting about the task and feeling bad later.

Make It Your Own

I've outlined the system I use for organizing tasks in the hopes that you find it useful when figuring out your own. If you want to take the whole system, great! What I've found to be more lasting, however, is to slowly modify your existing system until it meets your needs. Take stock of what you do now. How does your day start? What activities do you do frequently? What tasks do you avoid, and why? How does your current process help or hurt your ability to complete these tasks? Make incremental changes to your process that make your frequent tasks more efficient, and the tasks you avoid more enjoyable. Over time, you'll find it's easier to stick to a process that's working.

In a future post, I'll cover how I manage my calendar. This is another critical component to how I'm able to chew through my workload and complements my physical system of pen and paper.

Interestingly enough, a recent article in the Economist notes that millenials are purchasing paper products now more than ever. ↩