Hi everyone,
A subject that has come up in a couple of unrelated conversations recently (largely because once I saw it I started seeing the pattern everywhere) is decoupling tasks.
The problem scenario is this: suppose you have 100 tasks, and you can do most of them independently of the others (e.g. sorting mail, answering emails, reviewing code, tidying, etc). There is a tendency to think of this problem as I’m not on top of my tasks and that the thing you need to do to fix this problem is to “get on top of my tasks”.
But that’s not actually what’s going on. You don’t have a single big task, you have a hundred small tasks, and actually the thing you need to do is “this one small task” one hundred times.
This distinction is important because “get on top of my tasks” feels impossibly huge (it’s 100 times larger than any one task!), and by considering that the task to be done, each of those individual tasks becomes identified with the impossibly huge task. You can’t answer one email, because answering one email is the same as answering 100 emails, and that’s just too much.
One way out of this problem is to decouple the tasks from each other: To give yourself permission to do one of the tasks without doing any of the others, and to feel the fact that that is possible at an emotional level. This allows you to look at the individual tasks as being the amount of work that they actually are, and to make progress on them at the rate that seems doable to you.
The easiest way to start to feel this emotionally is to actually do it. If you’ve got a large backlog of tasks, commit to doing exactly one of those tasks and then stopping. Answer one email, do five minutes of cleaning, open one big scary letter that’s been piling up.
Importantly, don’t commit to doing this on any given schedule. You’re not committing to doing that once per day or anything like that. You’re committing to doing that one thing now, and then stopping, without taking on any further obligations about how many more to do by any particular time. It’s just doing one, to see how it feels. If and when you feel like you can do more, you can do more, but the fact that you have done one doesn’t oblige you to do the rest.
I think it’s that sense of obligation that ends up being at the root of a lot of coupling. There’s an internal sense of “Well if I can do this one then that proves that I can do all the others too”. But that’s actually not a reasonable feeling - the fact that you can do something isn’t actually a sign you can do 100 of those things.
There’s also a degree of decision paralysis going on - the tasks are coupled by prioritisation by the idea that in order to work on them you have to pick the most important one. But this too is not reasonable: You don’t have to pick the best one, you can just pick the easiest one, or pick one at random even (cf. How to make decisions). Picking one and doing it is always going to be better than doing none of them, regardless of how bad your decision making protocol is. It might even be helpful to deliberately pick the least important one until you internalise the idea that it’s OK to do that.
In general, guilt seems to be a great coupler of tasks, because we’re very good at pattern matching. We feel guilty about a thing, and it reminds us of all of the other things we feel guilty about. Noticing and retargeting that thought process (cf. A crash course in having feelings) by reminding ourselves that we’re just focused on the current task and getting that done is good independently of all of the other things is an important part of relearning the emotion (cf. Emotional reactions as legacy code).
Untangling this network of guilt around task backlogs seems like an essential feature in getting out of procrastinating on a backlog, and starting by beginning to decouple the tasks at the actual practical end of it and noticing how that feels is probably the best way to get there.
Postscript
Speaking of tasks piling up, it’s been a bit of A Week, and as a result I’ve done nothing on my new book Notes on Emotions despite having intended to, but I still think it’s worth purchasing now! Some of the notebook posts (particularly the legacy code one) are already incorporated into there and better explained there, and it’s still available on a very cheap pay what you want scheme which will get you access to all future versions.