Time Management Part IV: The Isle Of Dreams

Part One
Part Two
Part Three

Dave Allen, author of *Getting Things Done*, says that we should write EVERYTHING down.  Everything we ever think we might ever do maybe possibly someday. As a result, you end up with a long list of things you're never going to get to - paradoxically, writing a task down becomes a way of giving yourself permission to not do it!  We see this in the game industry as those priority 4 and 5 bugs and tasks. 

Mary Poppendieck, in this video (which I discovered thanks to Clinton Keith's blog), says the opposite:  having a long queue of things to do prevents agility, because you're so busy working on the next thing you don't have time to do the right thing.  She says to dump the queues.  "Dump them where?" a Google guy asks.  "On the floor," she says. "If you aren't going to get to them anyway, at least be honest about it."

If I had to choose between the two viewpoints, I'd take David Allen's.  A nice thing about getting those tasks you're never going to actually do onto the wishlist is it means you can stop freaking talking about them!  If you don't write it down, then the same conversation keeps popping up: 

"I think we should do this"

"It's a good idea but it would take too much time"

"Isn't there something else we can cut to get this in?"

"Didn't we have this conversation before?"

etc.

But if you get it on the wishlist, it becomes:

"I think we should do this"

"Yeah.  It's on the wishlist."

But that is a little disingenuous, isn't it?  Passive agressive, if you will.  You're saying "Yeah, we'll do that," when you know you won't.  It prevents an argument now but leads to disappointment later.

Lately, I've reconciled the two viewpoints like so.  Whenever a good idea is put on the wishlist, I'm honest about its chances:  "We'll put that on the wishlist, and I'd really like to get to it, but the truth is stuff on the wishlist almost never happens." 

"The Isle of Dreams," Richard Garfield called it.

And it seems like that extra dose of honesty really does help.  Because of it, we've been prioritizing features more accurately and more aggressively - the end result, a closer eye on scope.  Why that's important I'll get to in another article.

Writing these has been fun - it's like I've revived Manager In A Strange Land here in my blog.

Comments

[Robert 'Groby' Blum]

Of course, the real beauty of a wishlist comes in if you are able to share it - there might be somebody else creating the thing you dreamt up. (That's a good thing - you wouldn't have done it anyway... ;)

[Chris Busse]

I've just started reading "Agile Software Development with Scrum" and they'd agree with your get it on the list idea. Without presuming to speak for the authors, they'd say you should take it to the next level and revisit that list on a monthy basis based on progress and features taht come in, it may reprioritize your list again.

[Damion Schubert]

I always advocate saving the ideas SOMEWHERE. But then I work on MMOs, and thus my games have a long and storied life after ship. A lot of those ideas become patches or expansion packs.