Why all tasks trackers kill people self-efficacy

During my work carrier I was working in many IT companies and organized my work according to many methodologies (Agile, Scrum, Kanban, Objectives and Key Results, Extreme Programming, etc.) and used many tasks and issue trackers (Bugzilla, Jira, YouTrack, Pivotal, Asana, Trello and other including developed in-house and not publicly available).

After all those years I can admit that I was most productive and people around me were most productive in those companies which do not follow any particular methodology at all (one of those companies were Google) and do not use any tool for task tracking.

To be precise they all use something for issue tracking, but it was only used to track bugs or write down nice-to-have-do-not-have-time-to-work-on-now ideas for future. Or track projects on a very high level when on a single task few engineers can work for few weeks and that single task used for commenting and logging all the activities. But not for day to day tasks tracking.

I also was trying to use tasks trackers to track my personal projects and day to day activities, but always after few days or weeks I stop using them. I found that it is also true for many people around me. (Jumping a bit forward I can say that I’ve developed own tasks tracker which I use for all aspects of my life now for a few months already and I happy with it. You can try it too — it’s free, get an account on https://app.taskmony.com. I’m going to describe it and why it improves your productivity in few articles later)

It looks like tasks trackers give us too little benefits and require too much effort to keep them up to date and finally we stop using them unless management enforce it and in that case, we became less productive.

Why tools which intended to improve our productivity in reality make as less productive both as persons and as a team?

This is my list of reasons.

Mixing all types of tasks in a single system

Not all tasks have the same life cycle. There are small tasks, like fix web city title, arrange some meeting or discuss the latest variant of your new product logo with a designer. You can do 5-15 or those tasks in a single day, and you need nothing more, but some help to do not forget them.

There are bugs or issues or some problems with your product, and you need lots of information attached to it like a screenshot of the problem, which versions or sites are affected, who is responsible for fixing it, severity, etc. They are often reported from outside of the team.

There are ideas, which you want to write down to return to them later, but don’t have resources to work on them right now. You need to remember them, maybe discuss it with co-workers. But you do not want to see them and think about them every day.

There are complex projects-like tasks which required many people work on them, coordinate, discuss, finish many smaller activities to make it done.

What I see in current modern issue trackers — they try to fit everything and if you do start to use them for everything you will get a complete mess in your task tracker which will slowly destroy your productivity. A thousand issues are not what you want to see when you are looking into your tasks tracker with the only goal — to know what to do next. Trying to fix that by introducing tags, due to dates, priorities makes it even worse — you start to spend to much time to manage all of that instead of doing actual work and still have a mess.

How productive companies address that? In my experience, they use trackers only for bug tracking, or sometimes for bug and ideas tracking or for big tasks to coordinate, but never for small day to day tasks. So you still need some tools for small tasks and rare go into actual task tracker. Ideas and big tasks are often tracked in a different tool, like Google Docs, or some wiki engine, like Confluence. It turns out they serve that purpose better.

Too many tools and information

Usually, modern tasks trackers allow you to store many metadata with your tasks. Start date, creator, assignment, deadline, project, picture, tags, priority, related tasks, dependent tasks, blockers, collaborators, etc.

On the first look, it can seem better to have the ability to have something than not to have. But when we are in the area of productivity that it can be the opposite: many possibilities destroy your productivity. You spend too much time by filling all of that usually un-needed information or too much energy to develop first and then to enforce practice to do not use all of that unnecessary crap.

Most effective companies in my experience use old simple software which cannot do much, but this make this software more helpful. They still do way too much in my opinion.

In my opinion, I need only single line description of my tasks to be most effective and quickly decide what to do next. To have tasks is better than not to have at all (because it keeps me focused and not to do what easier or more fun to do, but do is what needs to be done). But I do not need priorities (I remember them with no effort), deadline — I always remember them if I remember a task itself — it is the task that what I usually forget, not a deadline for the task. I do not need assignments, because I need only own tasks 99% of the time, etc.

And overall my job is not to fill all that information into the task tracker and my job is not to create methodology what to use or what not to use from all that crap I can fill in modern tasks tracker. Simplicity and keeping only important fields is the key for productivity.

Lack of personal tasks management

If you use tasks tracker for a team, usually all tasks for all members are mixed. So if you want to create your agenda for today which will be 10-15 small tasks, like select pictures for presentation or finally discuss this old bug with co-worker to get advice, you will mess with other people. They probably do not want to see all of that, it only your plan for the day and most of popular tasks trackers do not allow you create personal agenda for common projects.

But by itself to create such a plan is a critical tool to increase self-efficacy. It allows you to keep the focus on your important task and not to tend to do more easy tasks or more fun to do. If you have a task “Finish this fucking presentation” you more likely will finish it instead of spending time on a lower priority, but so exciting other tasks.

That’s all for today. In the next post, I’m going to explain how did I address all of that after quit my last job and started to work only on my own projects.