Healthy & Efficient 
self-organisation 
and coordination

Alice is an organized person. She uses a to-do list where she put personal stuff she wants to do and uses a Trello board to manage her team's tasks. However she also collaborates with a client's team that prefers to use Google tasks.

She usually knows what to do in the morning as she reviews her list the night before. But during the day, as she gets tired, her memory doesn't help her to know what to do next and she reverts to switching from her own list, to the corporate Trello board and the client's list. It's a bit painful to try to guess what's the most important thing to do by comparing the content of three different applications.

But the worst happens when she needs to communicate to someone to complete a task. Often, it takes her time to remember what tool was used to communicate about the task at hand. Was she discussing this topic using Slack or email? The same thing happens when she looks up for some references. She remembers who sent that to her but where? Which Slack channel? Finding out takes a bit of time and reduces her focus.

For a long time now, Bob has been in the habit of collecting all his tasks into one application. Whatever the source of a demand, he copies it into his own system, which is great as he can see all his tasks in just one place and have an overview of them.

During the day, Bob goes through his list to choose the next one to perform. He usually starts something quite quickly even though he's not convinced it's the best one to do but the number of tasks on his list is high. The only thing that bothers him is this feeling of not being really efficient and just overwhelmed by his list.

What Bob doesn't know is that by looking at his list each time he wants to start a new task his mind appraises inconsciously the list and increases his anxiety because it looks long or tough to complete. Also, by switching from one task to another, Bob switches from one brain mode to another. When performing one of the action of his list, his brain stays mainly in execution mode. But when he looks up for tasks in his list, his brain switches to strategic thinking. Then, when he chooses his next task and starts working on it, his brain reverts to execution mode. It's like switching from playing dominos to planning the next year's big holliday trip. The brain takes a hit and gets a bit more tired as a result.

Cathy has a leading role in her team. She helps closing the gap between the product management team and her own team. The most interesting but challenging part in her work is to keep the team aligned with the product management.

The team wants stability and the management wants reactivity. Her team meets once a week to discuss priority. But still, sometimes, urgency happens and it's quite difficult to change people directions between two meetings. It's difficult to make people change their plan as they manage their tasks for themselves in their own applications. If she insists in person, her team complains that she always changes her mind whereas she just wants people to focus on other tasks that already exist in the backlog.

Dany is performing tasks for himself but also for a lot of colleagues spanning different projects. When he needs information about something to do or just get feedback for a due task, he either uses email or the company instant messaging application.

Unfortunately, when he opens up one of those communication tools he instantly sees the new messages that just arrived. His mind zeroes in on those messages and he can sometimes spend 15 minutes before getting back to work. Needless to say that his focus level is not the same when he reverts to his first intention.

Emily uses an application to manage her todos. She carefully notes what she has to do and use this list to know what should be her next move. Usually, she uses due dates to drive her by focusing and what is urgent.

This strategy has two main issues. On the one hand, only what is urgent gets done even iif it is not important. Her deadline managemnt habit prevents her from doing a more complicated task which is thinking about important stuff. On the other one hand, the tasks that have no due date but are important get stuck on the bottom of her list with few hopes to start. She looks at those regularly in her list, with bit of hopelessness. 

Fabio is very efficient at managing his tasks. He plans what to do, review pending tasks, reschedule tasks when something unexpected happens, follow up with collegues or friends. He's really seen as a reliable and efficient guy.

However, whe lookoing globally at what he's doing, he's not able to say what he focuses on. He has so many competing topics he's just reacting to everything in an efficient manner but he's not leading toward any specific goal important for him. He knows whta the most important project is but how to know if he's doing his best for that? His strong skills to manage efficiently his tasks gets into his way when thinking about an efficient startegy to meet his goals.