#143: Conquer the task confetti
Think you can cope with a two-minute task? How about a zillion two-minute tasks? Do you do them right away, as they come in, to get them out the way? Or do you push them aside and risk forgetting about them? You could write them down to ensure you remember them, I suppose - but wouldn't it be just as quick to do them? But if you do them, how are you ever going to have time to do anything else - finish your thesis, submit that grant application, apply for that job? If you've ever sat down to tackle a quick bit of desk-clearing admin before you get on with the real work only to find yourself exhausted, hours later, having made no progress on the projects you actually care about, this episode is for you. Plug in the vacuum cleaner, friends. We're going in.
Episode transcript:
What do you do about that mess of tasks in your inbox?
You’re listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. I’m Dr Rebecca Roache. I’m a coach and a philosopher at the University of London, and in this podcast I draw on philosophical analysis and coaching insights to help you dump perfectionism and flourish on your own terms.
Hello again, everyone! I’m back, and I’m fully into the new teaching term now. The relative peace of the summer is a distant memory. Nothing for it but to look ahead to reading week, when I can come up for air. I’m wistfully thinking of this time last year, when I was looking forward to an end-of-October holiday in the sun … no such luck this year, everything has got too bonkers expensive. I need some sad background music here, but I don’t want to get into sound effects and other fancy podcast bells and whistles. It’s strictly no-frills here at Imperfectionist Towers. I turn up, I talk, and then you don’t hear from me for a couple of weeks.
So, you know how, at the start of the previous episode, I was talking about losing a day to silly, small tasks that I was trying to get out of the way before getting on with some proper work, but which ended up becoming the proper work, or at least taking up so much time and energy that I didn’t get to the important stuff? Oh, did you skip that bit? Tapping the old ‘skip ahead 15 seconds’ button while muttering things like, ‘Oh, shut up, woman’ and ‘Get on with it’ - the universal podcast-listening experience. I know how it is. Do you know, about a year ago I even bought a new bluetooth speaker with a fast-forward button on it so I could skip ads and other nonsense when I settle down for a nap with a podcast, which I do very often, especially on Saturday afternoons, after parkrun and brunch. I doze off with my thumb on the button, listening to the latest Casefile episode, but not the ads. What a hypocrite, given that I occasionally have ads on this podcast. Not for anything really daft, mind you. No weight loss or snake-oil supplements or smart mattresses.
Anyway, back to those annoying death-by-a-thousand-cuts tasks. Things that will only take a few minutes, but there’s so many of them: reply to this email, make that appointment, reformat a document, look up a reference, pay that invoice. I got to thinking, after the last episode, that really this is a topic in itself. How do you deal with it all? How do you avoid getting ground down by it? How do you stop all these unrelated, mix-and-match tasks from pushing out everything else and making the real work impossible? As I was pondering all this, some new terminology for this pesky accumulation of small tasks popped into my mind: task confetti. There’s a risk here, I realise, of making it all sound rather celebratory. If that’s the association you make with the word ‘confetti’, colour me envious. My immediate thought when I see confetti is ‘imagine having to clear that up’. A while back, my daughter went to someone’s party and there was a confetti machine. In the person’s actual house. Indoors. Just imagine. Maybe ‘task crumbs’ or ‘task dust’ would be a better term - but I’m sticking with the confetti. I want to talk to you, in this episode, about why task confetti is a problem, and what you can do to avoid being de-railed by it.
I think there are a few reasons why task confetti is a problem. One is that even conceptualising it is difficult, and … kind of enraging. Because, on the one hand, there’s the sense that these are very small, quick things that it ought to be possible to get off your plate without much bother. But on the other hand, when there’s a lot of them, it’s a huge amount of work even keeping track of them and working out what you need to do and when and how to prioritise it all - the organising and planning and general not-forgetting-about and keeping-track-of parts are actually a huge burden, much more so than organising yourself to do the same amount of work when it’s part of a single, overarching project. And, that advice (including from me), to write down what you need to do? When it comes to task confetti, we can feel exhausted before we even begin, because where do we even start with writing it down? We’d start and never stop. And why write it all down when, in many cases, we may as well just do the thing? Because, in the time it takes to write down ‘Email colleague to arrange a time to discuss X’ you could have sent the email. So it feels like the planning and writing-down part demands a disproportionate amount of time, but then if you don’t plan or write it down, you’re worried you’ll lose track of what you’re meant to be doing, and even if you don’t actually lose track, there’s that nagging background anxiety that there is probably something, some unknown unknown, that you’re unknowingly overlooking, with potentially disastrous (or just inconvenient) consequences. And then there’s the fact that, even if you do write all this stuff down, you just end up with a long and disorganised list because none of these things are necessarily part of a cohesive whole, and then you end up with a big list that is not very easy to read through and make sense of. And why is it all so difficult to manage, anyway? We’ve all heard that advice about breaking a big task down into smaller ones to make it easier to get started, and yet here we are with a load of ready-made small tasks that, far from being easy to start, are absolutely overwhelming.
Wow. I’m tiring myself out just talking about this stuff now. Let’s all pause and take a deep breath together, which is also an opportunity for me to test whether the ‘remove breaths’ function in my audio processing software actually does anything.
Done? Ok. Time to take stock. Broadly speaking, I think there are two important lessons to draw from the experience of grappling with task confetti. One is that there is a practical challenge of how to organise it. How to keep track, how to prioritise, how to introduce some sort of order. And, importantly, how to balance the time you spend on task confetti alongside the time you want to spend on other projects. When it comes to striking that balance, a lot of the advice out there about prioritising and dealing with small tasks is not always helpful. You might, for example, have heard the advice that, if a task will take you less than two minutes to complete, do it immediately, otherwise add it to the growing list of things to do later. The problem is, though, that task confetti is largely made up of tasks that will take less than two minutes. But there are just so many of them. And if you were to do them immediately, as they land on your desk, so to speak, you wouldn’t get around to anything else. If you ever want to get those bigger, important projects done - your thesis, that grant application, that book proposal, that business plan - you’re going to have to ignore the task confetti to make time.
The other important lesson about task confetti relates to the way you think about it. Probably without realising, you’re making life harder for yourself because of the stories you’re telling yourself about your task confetti. I’ve seen people doing this. I’ve heard them talk about it in coaching sessions. I’ve done it myself, too. There are a few ways in which the way we think about task confetti makes it more stressful than it needs to be. One involves underestimating how much time each task is going to take. What looks like a two-minute task often expands when you make a start as you realise it’s more complicated than you assumed or that it just takes more effort and time than you hoped it would. I think that, because task confetti tends to be made up of annoying stuff that we want to get out of the way without pouring too much of ourselves into it, we tell ourselves that we’ll just get it out of the way quickly. ‘Not very important’ becomes - in our minds, often through pure wishful thinking - ‘not very time consuming’. This happened to me yesterday. I had to write new essay questions for a module I’m teaching this term. I’ve done this lots of times before and I knew what it involved. In my mind, it was a 30-minute task, which I was going to dash off before getting back to work on my writing. Instead, what with needing to check previous years’ essay questions to ensure I wasn’t repeating myself, and reacquainting myself with what I’m going to be teaching in the coming weeks, along with trying to do a bit of pre-emptive AI firefighting, it took me most of the day. Technically, I still had time to work on my writing after I was finished, but in reality I’d used up my limited supply of cognitive sharpness and I wasn’t in a good writing mindset afterwards. I’d done something that needed to get done - it was ticked off the list, and I’d made a decent job of it - but I felt frustrated with myself anyway, for reasons that have to do with the somewhat unhelpful way I was thinking about the task; reasons that might resonate with you.
One is that the task just took longer than I’d hoped it would, and I was left feeling like I’d wasted time as a result. I hadn’t, really. My mistake had been my fantasy that this was something that I could do within 30 minutes in the first place - a target that wasn’t rooted in reality at all. I’d set myself an unrealistic goal. If I’d been supervising a junior colleague and set them the task of coming up with these essay questions, I would have been a lot more reasonable. I wouldn’t have demanded they get it done in 30 minutes. Especially given the AI-related stuff surrounding this task, I would have given them a morning for it. I’ve talked before about how bad we all are at estimating how long it will take us to do what we need to do - back in episode #117: Intervention for inept time management. I explained in that episode how we’re actually doing something quite complicated when we try to manage our time. It’s not just about the task and the time. Go and have a listen, if you haven’t already, and if that sounds like something that you’d find helpful.
It’s not just inept time management, though. We also cause trouble for ourselves by refusing to allow ourselves to think of task confetti as real work. The real work is the fancy stuff, the stuff that results in an outcome that is important to us - not just pesky stuff we want to swat out of our way before we get to the real work. So, there you are, answering your emails and doing all those annoying 2-minute (you wish) admin tasks, and all the while, in the back of your mind, you’re telling yourself that you’re not working. You get it done, it’s finally time to get on with the real work … and now you’re exhausted and most of the day is gone. Maybe you make a few limp attempts at the work that you actually care about, but it’s no good, you’re spent. Best to leave it until tomorrow. You’re completely useless.
You’re really short-changing yourself when you do this. You’re doing stuff you need to do, trying to clear your desk, making space for the valuable work - and you won’t even give yourself credit for the effort you’ve made. Imagine, again, if you were supervising a junior colleague. They spend hours doing all the stuff you’ve asked them to do, and at the end of it, you tell them they haven’t even started their work yet. Wow, congratulations - you’re a psychopath. Don’t worry, I know you wouldn’t really treat another person like this - only yourself. Now, a big lesson here is that it’s not just the tasks that help you make progress on your pet projects that count as work. Even so, there are a few things to be aware of here to help you avoid your valuable time and energy getting swallowed up by task confetti.
One is that it’s not always the case that everything that makes up task confetti needs to be done. Take a moment to reflect before you dive in. You know the term ‘busy work’, right? It’s work that doesn’t really need to be done, but which makes you look busy. If you’re someone who worries about being perceived as lazy, you might be vulnerable to the lure of the old busy work. Before you reply to that email, ask yourself whether you really need to. Is it a big ‘reply all’ thread in which a handful of colleagues are chiming in seemingly without purpose? Are you worried that, if you don’t get involved, everyone is going to think you’re a bad colleague or that you’re not reading your emails? Stop: and trust me when I tell you that there will be plenty of opportunities for you to prove that you’re reading your emails that don’t involve busy work. In other words: don’t do tasks that don’t actually need to be done.
The second thing to be aware of is that the idea that tackling task confetti will result in a nice, calm, distraction-free paradise in which you can get on with your important work in peace is pure fantasy. Joli Jensen talks about this ‘clear desk’ myth in her wonderful book, Write No Matter What - go and listen to my interview with her in episode #93 if you haven’t already. You’re never going to get to the end of the task confetti. You’re never going to have a clear desk. If you try to delay the projects you care about until you do, you’re in for a big disappointment. The nonsense will keep coming, I’m afraid. So, don’t fall into the trap of thinking of task confetti as something to get out of the way before you get on with your work. It’s work - see the last point - that will always be with you. You need to factor it into your day, or your week, or your month, every day or week or month.
This brings me to my third important thing to be aware of. It matters when you do this stuff. At least, it matters if you also want to make progress on the projects you care about. Take care not to use up your best quality mental energy on task confetti. If you’re a morning person, then the worst thing you can do is try to clear up the confetti before you make a start on your writing. If you do that, then the confetti gets the best version of you, and you only have the wrung-out old rag version of yourself (so to speak) for the important work. If you accept that task confetti is work, and that it will always be with you, this is easier to do. There is really no rush. (Well, sometimes there is, when there’s a deadline, but you know what I mean, I hope.) Pay attention to the ebb and flow of your energy, your enthusiasm, your mental sharpness. When you’re at your peak, it’s time to work on the stuff you care about, if you can. When you’re not at your sharpest, you’re probably still sharp enough for task confetti. You can even turn this into something quite pleasant, if you’re careful. Take yourself off to a coffee shop and treat yourself to a cake while you catch up on emails. Sort through that meeting agenda with one eye on your favourite Netflix show. There’s no law saying you have to make these tasks as miserable as possible. I did say you need to be careful, though - and what I mean is that, once again, task confetti is work. Doing it in a coffee shop with a mouthful of cake doesn’t make it rest time. There’s a big difference between making your work a little bit more pleasant, and taking time off. If you’re working through your task confetti, it’s not time off. Got it? Great.
Okay - I hope I’ve given you some ideas for how you can let yourself off the hook a bit here, and make task confetti work less fraught. There’s also the practical challenge of organising yourself to do this stuff, and to keep on top of it, so let’s turn to that now. Actually, though, you’ll never keep on top of it, so don’t go thinking that. So, that leaves the practical challenge of just getting it done, or getting some of it done. How do you work out what needs to be done, and what needs to be prioritised? I have a few things to say about this, and I just want to flag up front that I am not a task confetti guru. I am a chronic email non-responder, a recidivist deadline-misser, someone who is as likely to drop plates as keep them spinning. I am, in other words, a board certified task confetti imperfectionist. I don’t want to give you the impression that this doesn’t cause me stress, but I have made peace with the fact that - with my limited time and resources - I can’t do everything well, and I try to direct most of my effort to the most important things. I’d rather be known for insightful and inspiring writing than for being a prompt responder to emails. Don’t get me wrong - I wish I didn’t spend quite so much time apologising to people for not replying sooner, but I know that realistically, changing that would come at a cost that I am not prepared to pay, all things considered. With that out of the way, I have a few points to make about how to manage your task confetti.
First, accept that it’s chaotic. That’s kind of the point. By definition - did I define it? Okay, I’ll do that now - task confetti is composed of lots of little tasks that are not parts of one single, overarching project. The itty bitty randomness of it is not a reflection of your lack of organisation or ineptitude, so don’t go making it about you. If you go in there determined to bring order to the chaos, you’re going to be left frustrated. And that chaos makes it much harder work than it would be if the tasks were related. Getting through a dozen task confetti tasks is more work than getting through a dozen similar-sized tasks that are all related to a single project, like a research article. Getting through the task confetti is stop/start, it involves the mental burdens of task-switching and context-switching, there’s no flow between tasks, no satisfying sense of a larger picture emerging. It’s like the difference between doing a jigsaw puzzle where the pieces come together to form a larger picture, and one where the pieces just have random designs or marks on them.
While there is no ‘bigger picture’ that you’re building towards as you get to grips with your task confetti, there are various ways of organising it so that it’s a little bit easier. To a large extent, you probably do a lot of this without realising. You can group together similar tasks - reply to 10 emails - which helps you minimise the cognitive effort associated with switching between tasks. You can group together tasks that relate to a particular topic or area - like doing the outstanding tasks relating to a particular module you’re teaching, or working through the admin for an event you’re organising - so that you’re not constantly adjusting to different contexts. You can sort things by deadline - work through everything that needs to be done by the end of this week - so that you can soothe that nagging pit-of-the-stomach anxiety about falling behind. You can do a mixture of all these things - I worked with one client who tackled their task confetti by ticking one thing off various lists each day: so, every day they would reply to one email, check through the calendar for the next day, do one outstanding teaching-related task. That way, although each day’s task confetti work involved quite a bit of switching between tasks and projects, there was the same structure each time, which introduced its own sense of rhythm and predictability. For other people, time-blocking works well: set a timer for 30 minutes and just go hard at whatever needs to be done, then stop. You can experiment here and find what works for you. Take care to set some boundaries: work out how much time you’re willing to devote to this, and how often, given all the other stuff you have going on, and given your very real need for rest too. If you’re doing that, and there are still loose ends to tie up, then it might be time to shrug your shoulders and accept that you can’t get everything done. Nobody promised that your task confetti would fit neatly into the time you have available, if only you were competent enough to work out how to get it all done. It’s mayhem forever, I’m afraid.
That’s it from me, my friends. Take care.
I’m Dr Rebecca Roache, and you’ve been listening to The Academic Imperfectionist. If you enjoyed the episode, please subscribe on whatever podcast app you use. I want to help as many people as I can with these episodes, and I’d really appreciate it if you’d share the podcast with any friends who you think might find it useful, and if you’d leave a review on your podcast app. If you’d like to support the podcast financially, you can do that at patreon.com/academicimperfectionist. For more information about me, the podcast, and my coaching, please visit the website - academicimperfectionist.com. You can find me on Medium too, as AcademicImperfectionist. If you have an idea or a request for a future episode of The Academic Imperfectionist, please drop me a line, either via the contact form on my website or via Medium. Thanks for listening, and see you next time!
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