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Tuesday, April 08, 2008

DEATH TO BACKLOG

This is Stephen V. Cole Posting:

I work 60+ hours a week, but it's never enough. More comes in than I can send back out. Some days, I get nothing done on new products because I'm just answering endless streams of Emails. Approve this, answer that, look up something else, evaluate another thing, on and on. Worse, sometimes I spend more time finding a lost Email than I would have spent answering it the day it came in. Things that could be resolved by just moving them to the file where they will eventually be used would save me time later. (Say I get an article for Captain's Log #37. If it actually put it into the Captain's Log #37 file the day it shows up, I don't have to hunt it down later, or worse, publish Captain's Log #37 without the article because I forgot I had it "somewhere" in the hard drive. Worst of all, if I don't answer something, I get eleven further Emails asking me when I'm going to answer it. Just a quick courtesy answer to all of those Emails takes an hour or two a week, every week.

I determined, as my New Year's Resolution 95 days ago, to end this. My theory is that if I had no backlog, or could at least better manage the backlog, I will be more efficient. I am eliminating the backlog in an attack that is two-fold.

First, following the infamous Lutwak theory of warfare, I need to stop things from getting worse. I must identify what is causing the problem and put a stop to it. What is causing the problem is: not dealing with Email when it comes in. Once an Email has been here for a few days without an answer, it gets lost (it scrolls off of the screen as later Emails arrive, and once out of sight, it's gone for good, or might as well be), which clutters up the computer (causing me to take more time to find things than it should), annoys those waiting for answers, and loses some good stuff that should be processed and published. The solution is to deal with things on the day they arrive. Read it, answer it, file it, and it's no longer a problem. Nice theory. The problem is that I need to be doing new products, and I just don't have the luxury to take a two-hour break from finishing Distant Kingdoms in order to review a fiction story somebody sent in. I'd be spending all of some days just on that day's Email. So, I use a triage system. I look at all of the day's Email. If it's junk that doesn't need an answer, I delete it. If it is something I can answer without breaking stride, I do so. The rest of it is left in the in box. So far, that's nothing different than the failed system that got me in this mess. So, the next step is to use some discipline. I give myself an amount of time each day (whatever I can afford to take from new products) and answer everything I can, from the easiest to the hardest, on the theory that if the same time will answer four easy things or a single hard thing, it's better to keep the pile of things to do small and get rid of the most Emails. (Hint: If you are working on some project and have 23 questions for me, ask them one or two at a time and you'll get on the fly answers over a week. Send them all at once and you are at the bottom of the stack and could wait for six weeks, or two years.) Anything else gets a note telling them that I got their Email and put it into the "One Day Grace" file and giving them a guess on when they will get an answer (so they won't bombard me with "when will you do it" Emails). The problem here is that the ODG file is out of sight and thus out of mind, and I take mental credit for "clearing the in box" when the 20% of Email that would consume 80% of my day if it could has never been answered, it was just sent to ODG. Thus, I saw my "ODG" file reach 70 Emails and be three or four weeks behind. The solution was to make doing some of the stuff in the "One Day Grace" part of my daily routine. So, I do five per day. I started with the easy ones and then started tackling some of the harder ones. I am, surprisingly, able to slowly catch up on ODG.

Some of this is training people how to get what they want from me in the least amount of my time. How to write clear questions is an art form, and I try to teach it. Some of this is just the mental discipline to force myself to keep up, even if it's like trying to sip water from a fire hose. But I no longer fear sending something to ODG, not when I know it's going to stay there no more than a week. I don't want to re-label it One Week's Grace since then I'd be comfortable dealing with it a month late. People have noticed the difference and are working with me, not asking me what happened to their item until several days later, and then only asking once a week.

The second prong of the spear is to eliminate the backlog of stuff that has built up. This is a multi-faceted operation, but basically, I try to do some of it every day. Every day I push the "most recent but never answered" Email back by one day, even if that's just putting it into ODG or the deeper "After Origins" folder. Every day, I do five from ODG. Every day, I try to leave my un-filed outgoing Email smaller than the day before. (If the "in box" is my "to do list", the "out box" is the "check to see if the assigned person ever did this list". By keeping the clutter out of this box, I can see what is there, and go through the ones I am waiting for answers to, hounding people to answer me or do their projects. (I cannot blame the guy doing an RPG book for me -- a book he hasn't finished in two years -- if I only remind him that he needs to finish it once every six months.) Every day, I clean up the "attachments received" file. Just throwing away the porn, advertising, and clutter that shows up every day makes it easier to find the stuff I do need to deal with. So every day, I file everything back to the "hard deck" (the point where I adopted my New Year's Resolution) and then push the hard deck back a few days, even if it means "put this submitted SSD into the submissions file" instead of actually dealing with it. When I started, the attachments file had over 4,000 items and I couldn't find anything. Now it's down to under 1,000 (just by deleting spam and obsolete items, such as photos of the sculpture-in-progress for miniature ships we put into production two years ago).

I don't know how long it will be before I have transferred everything in the in box and out box and attachment box to something else (trash or one of the pending files) but once that is done (six months?), the time spent sifting and filing can go into increasing the "pending" items actually dealt with, and eventually (a year or two?) I will have answered everything back to 1999.

Hope springs eternal.