Three Hours Tuning the Productivity App, Zero Minutes on the Report

The app on my phone had four colour themes, two of which I had designed myself. It had a tag called “deep,” a tag called “deeper,” and a recurring Tuesday task that read “review the review.” The report my manager had asked for, the one that would take most of a week, had not been opened. That was a Sunday last spring, and I had just finished my third hour of setting up the thing that was supposed to get me to the report.

This is my own story, told plainly, and I suspect you have a version of it. Mine happens to come with a 1958 book that explains it better than I can.

What is the law of triviality?

The law of triviality says that a group spends time on each agenda item in inverse proportion to how much money is at stake. C. Northcote Parkinson stated it in Parkinson’s Law, or The Pursuit of Progress (1958), in a chapter titled “High Finance, or the Point of Vanishing Interest.”

His example is a finance committee with three items. A £10 million atomic reactor goes through in about two and a half minutes, because almost nobody in the room understands it well enough to object. A £350 bicycle shed for the clerks takes about three quarters of an hour, because everyone has ridden a bicycle and everyone has a view on the roof. The £21 a year for office coffee, which every member can fully picture, gets the most attention of all.

The cause is not laziness; an opinion is cheap to form on a small, familiar thing and expensive to form on a large, unfamiliar one, so opinions pile up where they cost least.

Where did the word “bike-shedding” come from?

Programmers carried it out of Parkinson’s book and into daily speech. In October 1999 Poul-Henning Kamp, a leading FreeBSD developer, sent the project’s mailing list a message about a long thread over a trivial change. He retold Parkinson’s reactor-and-shed story, and the colour of the shed became shorthand: “why should I care what colour the bikeshed is?” The BSD community adopted it, and from there it spread through open-source projects and software teams generally. Calling a review “bikeshedding” now means the talk has drifted to whatever is easiest to argue about.

What I want to point out is that Parkinson wrote about committees, and Kamp wrote about mailing lists. Both are groups. Nobody warned me it also happens when the committee has one member, one phone and a Sunday.

Why does tuning my own system count as bike-shedding?

Because I was the whole committee, and I behaved exactly like one. The reactor was the report: large, ambiguous, and likely to make me look slow if I started it badly. The shed was the app. Should tasks be sorted by energy or by deadline? Should the “deep” tag be teal? Every one of those questions had an answer I could reach in under a minute, and each answer produced a small click of completion.

Here is how it feels from inside. You are not avoiding work, you are preparing to work properly. You are making decisions, and decisions feel like motion. The phone shows a tidier screen at the end of the hour than at the start — more than the report could say.

The same thing happens with the wake-up side of life. I once spent most of an evening building a morning playlist that rose from piano to something with drums over eleven tracks, with a fade I timed against a stopwatch. The playlist was a lovely object. I slept through the first three mornings it played, because the problem was never the music. (There are real differences between alarm sounds, and this ranking of alarm sounds is a fair place to see how small they are next to the question of whether you get up at all.)

How do you tell the bike shed from the reactor in your own week?

I use five questions now. They are crude, and they work better than any app setting I ever configured.

1. Could I undo this in five minutes? Colours, tags, playlist order and notification sounds are all reversible. The reactor tends to be something where a bad first draft costs a week.
2. Would a stranger have an opinion on it? If anybody on the internet could argue about it with me, it is probably a shed. Nobody has a hot take on the structure of my quarterly report.
3. Will it be finished by the end of this sitting? A shed task ends. A reactor task is still going when you stop, and it leaves a rough, unsatisfying edge.
4. Does my stomach do anything when I think about starting? A small dread is information. In my experience the dread points at the reactor, and the pleasant itch to open settings points at the shed.
5. If it all went perfectly, would anyone besides me notice? The report would be noticed. A teal tag would not.

Two or more “shed” answers and I stop calling it work. It is still allowed, as a treat, once the reactor has had its hour.

If you want a blunter sorting tool, the garden-peas history of Pareto is a good place to start. Parkinson’s committee is the same sorting problem with the sign flipped.

Is all tinkering a waste?

No, and I would be a hypocrite to say so. A planner that fits how you work is worth an hour. Parkinson’s point was never that sheds should go unbuilt. Somebody does need to decide how the bicycles are kept dry. His point was about proportion, and about the committee that leaves the reactor to the last minute and approves it in a rush.

The practical risk is that tuning grows to fill the time you meant to spend on the hard thing. Two hours of setup on a Sunday is a hobby. Two hours of setup that replaced the report is a hiding place with good typography.

What did I change?

Three small rules, none of them clever.

First, I cap tool time. Anything about the system itself gets a timer, and when it ends I stop in the middle of whatever I am doing. The app has not been touched in months and it has not noticed.

Second, the reactor goes first. The first block of the day belongs to the most frightening item on the list, and the planner stays closed until that block is done, since opening it is how the shed gets in.

Third, I moved the one piece of morning machinery that mattered out of my own hands. Every agreement I made with myself had exactly one party, who could also renegotiate it. I now use DontSnooze, an iOS alarm that gives me 30 seconds after it rings to film proof that I’m out of bed, and otherwise sends a random photo from my camera roll to my friends in the app for 48 hours. Watching friends is free, and posting your own proof needs Pro. I chose it because it is the opposite of a shed: there is nothing to configure and nobody to impress with a theme. The only decision left is whether to be upright by the deadline.

That left my mornings with one reactor-sized decision, and it was already made. The playlist is still lovely. I listen to it when I make coffee, which, if Parkinson is right, is the correct amount of committee time for it.

The report, for the record, took four days and was fine. It was the cheapest thing I had avoided all spring, and I spent most of my effort on the tags.

The smallest honest next step is the kaizen answer, one minute at a time.