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An idea to end “follow-ups” at work
Hi, folks. Long time lurker, first-time poster. I've worked at companies for the better part of 20 years in the IT/software area. I'm a productivity fanatic, and recently I had an epiphany around a way to make people more productive.
Despite todo lists, Asana, Github, JIRA, Workast, Trello, butcher paper, and who knows what else - I spend countless hours in meetings where people give each other things to do. Sometimes people write them down; sometimes they don't. Sometimes there is an email follow-up, and sometimes if there is a program manager, they put it on a spreadsheet. Inevitably, what ends up happening is a human being has to send an email, Slack, call a meeting and ask - "Are we on track?," "Is this done?" and so on.
The problem with many lists/tickets/task systems, I think, is that they are focused on the capture, but not the delegation.
What if there was a system that would do the nagging for you, and when you give someone something to do, it attempts to suggest what's a reasonable due date or reassigns the tasks to someone else? What if the system plays the middle-person in terms of resetting expectations, by prompting the person executing the task if they can do it, and when? And in between checks in with the person to see if they are on track? The system would also keep all parties informed.
Do you think this would be useful?
I'd build it much like how operating systems work. Instead of threads, the backend would model people, each with their load. The system would basically act as a scheduler, and recommend when a thread (person) is overloaded, and similarly check on each thread for health. I want to build a virtual operating system for how work gets done by focusing on the inter-process communication between the people in a company.
If you think this idea has legs - how would it work best for you in practice? How could you get other people to adopt it?
Thank you, and I look forward to your feedback!
- jlongr 6y agoHow will this system know what due date is 'reasonable', and whom to assign it to? How does it know if someone is 'overloaded'?
- chrisraible 6y agoThese are good points - may not work for more creative/specialized teams where the tasks are all relatively unique and not well quantified. Might work for teams that have layers of people in the same role (e.g. Supervisors) all doing more or less the same tasks (e.g. interviewing new hires). Things like manufacturing, IT ops, sales ops, service industries...
- a_lifters_life 6y agoThought about this question myself too.. I think a tie into jira or other platform could help here.
- hanshenyuan 6y agoThis is a great question! I think the hipster thing to do is say AI/ML but I actually have an Operations Research background and I can tell you the word AI is overloaded. I have some practical thoughts and I'd love to see if you folks think it will work. The big idea is to leverage three pieces of information: 1. The due date the tasker agrees to do, 2. The date in which the task actually gets done, 3. Resets of the date one way or another. In general, the system continuously catalogues the difference between 1 and 2, and 1 and 3 and computes an average +/-. The +/- is then shown to anyone who attempts to request a due date on the individual. People who are well loaded would have +/- close to 0 and those who are overloaded would have more negative numbers. My thought is that just exposing these numbers would allow people to factor in more reasonable asks for the individual much like showing one's CPU load.
- chrisraible 6y agoThis is a really cool idea. I've been working on something kind of similar (auto follow-ups), except it focuses on recurring tasks rather than trying to ascertain individuals capacity or to load balance people. Basically if a task is X minutes before due and it is not completed, it will text you "Did you do this thing?", and you can just reply Yes/No to the text and it will mark it as complete or not.