Applying New Dimensions to Decision Making

You probably have a big backlog of bugs . And you're not gonna get any shame here. We all have those. The junk drawer . The long list of items that maybe you'll get to one day if it ever becomes important enough . The thing is, in so many cases it never does become important . And arguably it never was important in the first place , or at least the importance wasn't well understood . And other work , other opportunities took its place . Now you could make the argument that something in that list is important , that something in there is being ignored and it shouldn't be. It should be the most important thing that your team addresses, that it needs to be prioritized the highest . But it's hard to know. It's hard to look at that big list and make sense of it . In today's episode, I'm going to give you a very basic tool or a model of thinking that applies to this situation and many others . So it's hard to understand what specifically you should do with this big bucket . And there's a lot of different approaches you could take. So we're not giving you a magic bullet here on this episode . You could try to prioritize every item in the backl og and try to keep it up to date. Well now you probably have two different backlog s and you've had to quarantine this part of the backlog so that it doesn't get in the way . Once again, you found yourself in a position where despite being priorit ized , despite having all of those things figured out It still isn't really getting space with your real work . So what do you do next? Well, you could estimate the impact of these items. You could try to determine the value of the items. But even then , you're gonna have to figure out how to organize them in a way that you can execute on them. So I want to give you a way to change this problem altogether. And this applies not just to this problem, but to most problems where your perception seems limited . Quite literally, your perception is limit ed . And we want to change that. So what we're going to do is something called dimensional reframing . What does this mean? It means to change the way you're thinking about a given problem to respect and take into account a particular new dimension that you hadn't considered before . You're adding a dimension. That's why we say your perception is limited, because there's a dimension that you're not looking at about this problem . So in this case, um what I've seen be successful is to change the way you're thinking about your b ug management process and add the dimension of time . What this really looks like is having a bucket that is only so large . These are the bugs that you're going to address in a given time period. Maybe that's five bugs over the course of a sprint . And when you have those five slots identified Now the truth is nobody is going to judge whether or not you picked the five right things because if you don't understand the priority of your own bug backlog, certainly no one else will either. So what you're trying to do is find five things that you think are in the top 10% , maybe even the top 20% . Is you're going to deliver value and you slot those into that uh that slot of five or or that space that you've made. Now the key inside isn't how you manage your bugs. Of course, you know this is this is just a tactic that you can use, and there's a hundred other ways to manage bug backlogs. Don't uh go away thinking this is the only way to do it. The important thing is the perspective shift that this provides . What you've done is you've created a prioritization mechanism . Not just creating a sorting in you know a quarantined off location. You're bringing the important things into the line of work , and you're giving them a specific dimension, which is time . In a way, you're setting a deadline on these bugs. And so the dimensional reframing here is how can I look at these bugs not in terms of relative priority or in terms of which ones I feel like doing whenever, but instead which ones am I going to commit to doing in the next two weeks or this quarter for that matter? Let's take a different, totally different example. Let's imagine that you have a big big backlog of tasks, personal tasks in your task manager or in your notes app or where however you manage these things. And it feels overwhelming. It's hard to know when to do what . And especially if you are someone like me who has a lot of other things going on. I've got kids, I have many hobbies, I have a job, and a lot of that takes energy away from me. So if you were to sit down and just write out kind of your your daily experience, then you're going to notice words that might pop out as an axis. In this case, I said energy. So if you're looking at your tasks, you might want to pick a task that matches your energy level. Because think about it, if you were to do a low energy task when you have a high amount of energy, and you might get bored. It certainly isn't the most effective use of your time because when you're lower energy and you try to do a high energy task, you may not be bored, but you might be too tired to accomplish the task in the first place. So you want to take advantage of matching your energy level to whatever the task's requirement is. This is a new dimension that you may not have thought about actually thinking about your tasks through that lens. So what that would maybe entail is being able to track your you know various energy uh levels thro ughout the day, and then uh assigning energy levels to those tasks. Another good example of this comes from getting things done, uh, the task management framework. Once again, nothing is a silver bullet. So, you know, don't take this as your sign to go learn GTD or anything like that. But one of the things they do is they identify uh places, so contexts. Uh I think about this as outside, inside, at my computer, uh, you know, out, running errands. These are different contexts where I might have something to do. And whenever I'm in that context, if I were to look at just pure priorities, for example, that's a single axis, what I think is most important for the day, those priorities may not necessarily match my current context. So those things are not actionable, right? So I would have to go down that list to try to find something that is actionable. If I had my context defined, then I could clearly show uh you know what is highest priority in my current context. There's a specific example of this that you uh might be aware of, it might be relevant to you uh if you've cleaned out your closet um recently, uh Marie Kondo came out with the con mari method and this is probably about ten years ago or so. And the idea is to introduce the axis of joy when you're trying to sort through your items and decide what to keep and what to throw away. Previously, you might have used a different axis like utility . Maybe utility it overlaps with joy, but it is not the same thing. So what this provided uh was a new way of thinking about what to keep and what to give away or to donate or throw And for some people what this meant was keeping things that may have otherwise be s be seen as just trinkets or junk, right? That may have been seen as uh uh superfluous. But because that item brought somebody a bit of joy under the Kam ari method, because the Kam ari method utilizes a dimensional reframing where joy is a new axis that you can think on , uh then you change your prioritization method, right? You change your way of thinking about the topic. And this is a clear change, like a fundamental change in outcome from that exercise because of the dimensional refram ing. There are things that would have landed in the keep pile that don't actually matter all that much to you. You know, it's not really important to you. And then there's things that would land in the giveaway pile or the throwaway pile that you'd feel uh a little sad about leaving behind or about giving away. And so dimensional reframing can be used in so many different contexts. The key method here is to try to identify something that you may actually care about , right? Something that can help you make a decision , for example. In every case in this discussion today, the dimensions that we've added helped us make decisions . That is the critical factor. So when you have a dimensional reframing, you are giving yourself the opportunity to key off of information that you care about in order to make the decision. And you can do this both uh at the individual level, so if you're looking at a singular subject, but you can also do this at that batch level when you're looking at a list of things, especially if the axis that you're talking about is actually data driven in some way, right? You can sort it, it it's uh some kind of magnitude, maybe it's a number, uh maybe it's some kind of tag. So this method uh it it provides a new perspective, right? This this way of thinking of adding a new access to uh whatever it is that you're thinking about can help you see it from a different perspecti ve. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer T. Hopefully, this will be an inspiring concept to you as you go into your work uh or even into your personal life to think about things from a new axis, adding a new axis to think along. Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a moment to review the podcast in iTunes. iTunes is the best place to do it, uh, or whatever podcasting app you use beyond iTunes. Thanks so much for listening, and until next time, enjoy your tea .