Avoiding Yak Shaving: Do Now, Today or Due Soon

For years I have been playing and exploring how to be productive in my work. The impetus to this exploration has come as a result of increased workload or complexity in the work I do. As work responsibilities grow, it takes more effort to manage the work, and that leads to more work on top of the “real” work to be done. Think of it as work to manage work, a sort of “meta-work.” A serious challenge is when your “meta-work” becomes more work than the real work. That’s a real drain in productivity as you spend more time planning work than doing work. I like to think of it as the equivalent to “rearranging the chairs in the deck of the Titanic”. A total and real boondoggle. In operating systems it is called “page thrashing”, and even denial-of-service attacks can be consider an example of this situation where management takes longer than real work. But the best name for this is Yak Shaving. To understand this phenomenon, I encourage you to read this blog post https://seths.blog/2005/03/dont_shave_that/ or this one https://joi.ito.com/weblog/2005/03/05/yak-shaving.html.

So, I consider managing due dates of tasks as an example of yak shaving. It takes effort to manage deadlines and that adds complications to my daily management of work. Over time I have struggled managing my work day and often the management part overshadows the work part. Recently, I had a realization that there are two types of deadlines. One type is the deadline associated with date-based activities. These include activities that have a date imposed by the activity itself. For example, I have to submit a paper to a conference by a specific date. Or I have to turn in grades by a specific date. Proposals, taxes, bills, recommendation letters, doctor appointments, and others similar tasks have a due date by when they need to be completed. The due-date is typically fixed and largely outside of my control. Yes, I acknowledge that I could ask for extensions or change appointments, but that just moves the due-date to another time, literally kicking the can down the road.

The other type of deadline is a self-imposed deadline. For example, exercising every other day or mowing the lawn or replying to an email requesting some information are all tasks with a self-imposed deadline. All of these tasks either have no due-date or the date is less binding than the date-based activity described above. I can skip a day of exercises and continue the every-other day routine without much of a difference. If I promised to send some information to someone, I can do that a day later and just say sorry, things were busy, here is what you needed. Or I can postpone mowing the lawn till Saturday. These non-dated tasks is where my yak shaving machine gets all the work.

The challenge with these two types of deadlines is that for the first, time management tools provide a lot of automatic support. I can easily see what is due today, due this week, even see what is overdue. Tools have support to easily move tasks in a calendar view by just dragging things from one day to another. Some tools even have a quick “reschedule” button that moves all overdue tasks forward to today.

That’s all fantastic… for dated-tasks. For the second type of task, however, there is little support. The strong support for date-based tasks thus encourages users to add fake-dates to non-dated tasks and treat them like they are dated-entries. And that’s when you head to the zoo looking for a yak to shave.

This fools me (and possibly you, if you are still reading this far) into thinking that these non-dated tasks actually can be “scheduled” into slots. That’s where I do my best yak shaving, I spend time doing pointless tasks that have nothing to do with productivity in the name of managing my productivity. Some of the problems of this approach include:

1. More work: I now have to manage dates for things that have no date. I have to explicitly make decisions of time allocation for things that need to be done but don’t have a date associated with them.
2. Conflict resolution: I now have tasks that will conflict with other tasks in my calendar. I end up making decisions of time allocation between things that are immovable (dated tasks) and things that it really doesn’t matter when I do them as long as I don’t lose them in my task manager.
3. Updating dates: Invariably, I now have to keep updating these fake dates, sometimes multiple times for each task. And often this is for tasks that are either not high priority but would get lost if I don’t assign a date to them.

These fake dates are indeed meta-work, the worst form of yak shaving. I get no work done in updating fake dates for things in my todo list. And due-dates are not the only form of meta-work. For my work style, a lot of the ideas of adding performance time to individual tasks, adding priorities, ordering tasks within a project, or specifying context where work is to be performed, etc… all increase the time to manage the work, thus invariably reducing the amount of time available to do the work. Yak Shaving.

My Solution

To address this challenge, I have ended up doing the following. I use tags (labels) for non-date based actions and have filters that organize tasks into various actionable lists combining due dates and tags into a single set of actionable items. In a routine review session, typically done weekly, I tag a task that needs to be done “soon”… in this context I consider “soon” as within a week, i.e., the next 7 days. I do this quickly going through my active projects tagging only those tasks that have no due dates.

In one special case, I use the “soon” tag if I have a deadline approaching, but beyond the next 7 days. I typically do this for tasks that requires some prep work. For example, I do this for research proposals due in the next 90 days, so that they start showing up on my actionable lists early enough to work on them.

I also do an almost daily review session. Then I look at the “soon” list and select those things with higher priority that I should work on them next. For those tasks, I use a “now” tag.

With these 2 tags (soon and now) and with the date of dated-tasks, I organize my action views into three lists. These lists are “Do Now”, “Do Today” and “Due Soon”. These are filters that pulls tasks from both dated and undated tasks but tagged accordingly into a focused set of tasks that I need to work on. The figure below might help understand the description of all of these types of lists. The natural way to think of them is in concentric groups, as shown in the figure, but the description that follows works better from the inside out.

Do Now List

Things to be done Now are literally things that I have to do next, as in this morning or the next couple of hours. This list if often short and more likely than not with tasks that are highly connected. I like to think of Now as things I need to do before lunch or sometimes before the end of the day, or tasks to do between meetings. In short, outside of meetings, this list is why I am working today, to do these Now things.

This list includes only tasks tagged as Now. If there are tasks that have a due date of today, I also tag them as Now so they show up on my Do Now list. Note that if dated-tasks require lead work, I would have already tagged them as “soon”, so the deadline arriving has little work significance, it is mostly for the closing action for the task. For example, submitting a paper to a conference that is due today appears on my “Do Now” list mostly so I submit it, and not because I need to write it “now”. By tagging dated-task explicitly as Now, you make the final deadline a small actionable task to be considered among the short list of “do now” actions.

So, I apply a tag Now to those task that I have deemed of high priority and that I feel they need to be done next.

I have a filter that shows all of the tasks tagged Now. This is the list of tasks I use to focus my work, this is my actionable task list. This list is always intended to be small and to help me focus and remove the distractions caused by the “other things I have to do.” I rarely organize or sort this list, as it is typically a short list with 5–10 tasks. You could, however, order this list by projects or due dates with overdue at the top of the list and non-dated tasks at the bottom or you might even use priority flags that most task managers have to break the list into smaller pieces.

Do Today List

Again, I consider the “now” list as things do be working on right at this moment. But there are other things that I need to do today, just not now. For example, I might have a couple of open hours for work in the morning, followed by some meetings, follow by free time in the afternoon. I might tag as Now only the things that I need to do in the morning. Then when the afternoon comes, if I finished my Now list, I might check “what else do I need to do today.”

Things to be done Today are the next things to do after I am done with the Now list. Today tasks include all of the tasks in the Now list as well as anything with a due date before tomorrow. This builds a bridge between what I have to do now and what I have to do by tomorrow. If you are super productive and get all of your Now done, then you can start working on tasks that will be due tomorrow.

This view includes all of the tasks tagged as Now tasks as well as all of the dated-tasks that are due before tomorrow.

Due Soon List

The third list includes things that are Due Soon. I consider “soon” as due in the next 7 days. You can adjust this to a time frame that makes sense for your type of work. This list includes tasks that have the Now tag or the Soon tag or have a due date in the next 7 days. This is the list from where I select tasks to “do next.” In my daily review, I basically add the Now tag to things on this list.

Routine Reviews

Depending on your workload, you should do a routine review of all of your projects and tasks. I do two types of regular reviews of my project. I do a routine review about once a week. This changes depending on various things on my schedule. I am a professor and during finals week, for example, things are consumed with deadlines of grading and other meetings related with graduation, so my routine review might take a back seat that week. But in general, I try to do this routine review about once a week.

These are some of the things I do in this routine review. First, I make sure I look at all due dates in my tasks. If I see a task that is due in the near future and requires some lead preparation time, I tag it as Soon. This brings dated tasks into my Due Soon list.

For non-dated tasks I look for things that trigger a “I have to do this” feeling. I know that is loosely defined, but I really don’t have a clear definition for it. My task list works mostly as a memory aid, a place to store and organize things so that I do not forget them. Some of those eventually become urgent. So, when I feel “have to do it”, then I tag it as Soon. This selectively brings to my focus of attention things that I might consider important but have no date attached to them. Note that some weeks I might have only a handful of these because I might have a lot of dated-tasks or meetings. Other weeks, I might have many of these non-dated tasks simply because I have free time to work on them.

My Due soon list is then populated with dated-tasks requiring lead time and/or tasks that I consider “it is time to get it done.”

Daily Review

The second type of review I do is my daily review. In the morning, or sometimes the night before, I do a quick look at my Due Soon list and see which of those have a higher priority to get it done. I look at my calendar, and if the work day has a lot of free time, I tag a few tasks as Now. If it is one of those back-to-back meeting days, then might not tag as many.

This builds my Do Today and Do Now lists. The Do Today list includes things with a due date before tomorrow and also things tagged as Now. The Do Now list includes just those tasks with the Now tag.

Advantages of this approach

I have been using this approach for over a year and I really like how it works. There are a few odd things here and there caused as side effects of some of the tools I use, but in general it works great for me. In particular, these are the benefits I have seen:

1. This allows me to put on my attentional periphery tasks that are coming up soon so I can pay attention to them with proper lead time.
2. I don’t have to add a (fake) date to non-date tasks and more importantly I don’t have to routinely update these (fake) dates.
3. My list of “overdue” tasks has significantly been reduced largely because it used to be populated with non-dated (fake-date) tasks.
4. It is easier to update a non-dated task because it is simply a choice between two options (now/soon) as opposed to changing a date that requires finding availability among a lot of other dated tasks.
5. When work piles up, things are still in the “soon” or “now” list. You don’t have to rescue past event in the calendar or face a long list of overdue things. So, in a way, your to do task manager just sits patiently waiting till you get back to it.

In Closing

Tasks management is highly contextualized. Having an effective way to manage your work depends heavily on the type of work you do, the type of schedule you keep, and your working habits. For me, I have a lot of different projects with many tasks where most of them do not have a due date. Preparing my lectures for an undergraduate class, supervising a graduate student’s work, or participating in national committees (e.g., conference organization) are all common tasks without due dates. All of them might happen on the same day. Managing “what to do next” can be challenging.

Often I found myself doing more work managing the dates than actually getting things done. Yak shaving had become a significant task in my work day. The approach above seems to have solved some of that for me (for now). I hope you find this approach useful and it inspires you to be better organized or at the very least saves you time shaving a yak.