A couple of weekends ago I was home watching a financial report on TV with my parents. (No, that’s not typically what I do when I’m home, but we just happened to be sitting on the living room couch as Dad was watching the show.) In any case, we somehow stumbled onto a metaphor of a bathtub from his old banking days. The main idea was that you need to keep x flowing into a system at approximately the same rate as it flows out of the system; otherwise, the bathtub overflows. After thinking about it, I realized that a bathtub is a good metaphor for two other important parts of my life: project flow and information consumption.
Project flow as a bathtub
I work for a services company. We deal with clients every day, in a lot of different ways. With that said, I have a great appreciation for the people who manage to schedule and budget the work that comes in while managing expectations and making everything just work. It’s one of those things that you never notice if it’s working correctly, but it’s really obvious if it gets out of whack (overflow).
After some discussions among the development team, I realized that the projects that stress me out the most are the ones where no visible progress is being made. These are the toughest types: the bug reports and feature requests come in at a race that (sometimes greatly) exceeds the amount of work that is being done on the project. In other words, the hardest projects are those that after six or eight hours of work, you don’t feel as though you’ve accomplished anything; you may even feel as though you’ve lost ground.
In project flow, it’s important to make sure the bathtub does not overflow with a continuous stream of new work that can’t be accomplished in a reasonable amount of time.
One possible remedy is to break down a large project into a few (or many) feature milestones. The ability to complete a feature in itself is much easier than completing a whole project. Another is to enforce a rule that a project must have clear objectives or boundaries within a certain phase; any additional features will be moved to a later release.
Information consumption as a bathtub
I follow a lot of people, read a lot of information, and listen to (and watch) a lot of podcasts. It’s simply overwhelming at times. I’ve been attempting over the last few days to reach RSS Zero, a modified version of Merlin Mann’s wonderful Inbox Zero system. (Inbox Zero will hopefully follow RSS Zero.) I’ve made some progress, but I’m still a long walk from the end of the tunnel.
Here’s the simple truth: there’s only so much time in a day. If you’re downloading more than 24 hours worth of content in a day, you won’t be able to listen to it all. Your information bathtub will overflow.
In information consumption, it’s important to make sure the bathtub does not overflow with an incoming stream of content that takes up more time than you physically have to consume it.
The solution may be the dreaded (or heralded) “Mark All as Read” button. Don’t worry. It’s OK. You can also reassess your feeds, podcasts, e-mail subscriptions, and everything else that flows into your readers each day.
Good luck! Now it’s back to tending my own tub.