Too many open threads
For a good stretch of my career I was holding several roles at once. Not formally — nobody writes that down — but the sort of job that somehow accumulates them: projects running in parallel, people waiting on decisions only I could make, standing commitments that came round whether or not I was ready, and whatever landed last week that nobody else picked up.
None of it was hard in isolation. What made it hard was the count. A question sitting unanswered. A document half-written. A colleague who couldn’t move until I came back to them. Something due at month end that would take two days I hadn’t found yet. Hold thirty of those in your head at once and something gives.
And things got missed. Rarely dramatically — I didn’t often blow a deadline outright. What actually happened was quieter and more corrosive. The follow-up I meant to send on Tuesday went out the next Monday. The work I’d promised myself I’d start properly in the new quarter was still untouched at the end of it. The question buried in an email I’d read and fully intended to answer came back three weeks later as “just following up on the below”.
So I did what everyone does. I kept a list.
The list always wins
It lived in a notebook, then in Outlook, then in three apps I no longer use, and for one regrettable month, on a wall of sticky notes. The format changed. The feeling never did.
By any given Monday it held forty-odd things. Some were five-minute replies. Some were a fortnight of work wearing the disguise of a single line. Some were genuinely urgent. Some had been sitting there since March, still important, still not done.
The list was never the problem. The list gave me the full picture. The problem was what it asked of me. Every time I looked at it I had to decide from scratch what to do next — and make that decision on the worst possible information: a title, maybe a due date, and whatever I could remember about how big the thing actually was.
Do that ten times a day and the decision starts making itself. You pick what’s loud. You pick what’s small enough to finish. You pick the thing with a name attached to it, because someone’s going to ask.
A list tells you what. It never tells you when.
That sounds like a small gap. It’s where an entire working week goes wrong.
Nothing on a list has a claim on any actual moment of your day. Your calendar, meanwhile, is full — largely of other people’s priorities. So your own work goes into whatever’s left, and “whatever’s left” isn’t a plan. It’s a hope.
It’s why the same things slip, over and over, and why they’re so often the things that mattered most. Urgent work has a habit of somehow getting done: it has a deadline, and usually somebody chasing. Important work that’s due in three weeks has neither. It never gets to be today’s problem until, abruptly, it is.
The work that suffers is never the loud work. It’s the strategy paper, the thinking time, the piece of long-term work that would genuinely change something — the work with nobody chasing it and no natural moment to start.
It nearly all arrives by email
There’s something else that has to be true, or none of the rest matters. Capture has to be almost free. A planning system that depends on you diligently retyping your commitments into it will be accurate for about a week.
And for most people I know, the majority of new work doesn’t arrive as a neat task. It arrives as email. Buried in a thread. Third paragraph down. Phrased as a question.
So the inbox can’t be a separate problem to be solved later. It’s the front door. If getting something out of a message and into a plan takes more than a moment, it won’t happen, and the plan turns into fiction.
What the inbox can’t be is the plan itself. I ran my work out of mine for longer than I’d like to admit — leave it unread if it needs something, flag it if it matters, clear the flags when you can. Plenty of people work that way, because it’s where the work turns up and it feels like the shortest route. But email is a communications tool. It’s a good one, but it was never built to plan time. A message tells you that somebody asked; it doesn’t tell you how long your answer will take, when you’re going to do it, or what it’s competing with. The inbox sorts by arrival, which has nothing to do with what should happen next. And anything that didn’t come by email — the thing you thought of on the way in, the promise you made in a corridor — has nowhere to live at all.
Which is what Smart Sweep is for: to get through the volume, sort out what’s genuinely noise, and turn the messages that actually need you into tasks — with a duration, an importance and a sense of how demanding they are — so they go through the same planning as everything else. Not filed. Not flagged. Scheduled.
Not all hours are equal
The other thing a list can’t see is that your day isn’t a uniform block of interchangeable time.
Twenty minutes before a meeting isn’t the same as twenty minutes first thing on a quiet Tuesday. You can clear a few short replies in the first. Opening a serious piece of work there is close to pointless — by the time you’ve found the thread and remembered where you were, you have to stop, and you’ll pay the reload cost all over again this afternoon.
Energy isn’t uniform either. Most of us have a couple of hours where hard thinking is genuinely possible, and a longer stretch where it really isn’t. Spending your sharpest hour on expenses and then meeting the difficult document at half past four is a very ordinary way to lose a week. Nobody plans it. It just happens, because nothing was doing the planning.
It also means the work needs a second measure alongside importance and duration: how much of you it takes. Two tasks can both be high priority, both due Friday, both an hour long, and still be nothing alike — filling in a form, against writing the section of a proposal that decides whether you win it. On a list they’re identical. In a working day they couldn’t be less so. That’s what intensity is for in MyPA, and it’s why demanding work lands where you’ve got the capacity for it while lighter work fills the fragments that would otherwise go to waste.
So a plan worth having needs to know more than what’s outstanding. It needs the shape of the day it’s planning into: where the meetings are, how long the gaps are, when you’re at your best, and how long it takes you to get anywhere useful once you’ve started.
Why it lives in Outlook
I didn’t want to build another app to move into. I’ve watched too many people, myself included, adopt a beautiful new productivity tool, run it faithfully for a fortnight, and then drift back to the inbox where the actual work was all along.
If your mail and your calendar are in Outlook, the planning belongs in Outlook. The plan should show up in the calendar you already check on your phone. Nobody should have to visit a second place to find out what they’re meant to be doing.
From writing about it to building it
For a few years I wrote about all of this — first through the pandemic, when everybody’s working day came apart at once, and since then for anyone splitting the week between home and the office. A newsletter, and then a book about managing time, tasks and email.
But writing about a system leaves the hard part to the reader. You can describe how to weigh importance against energy against the shape of the afternoon, and people will nod, and agree, and then not do it — because doing it properly, every day, by hand, is genuinely too much work. That’s exactly the sort of job you should hand to software.
What it adds up to is time blocking — every piece of work given a real slot in a real day — done for you rather than by hand. So MyPA is that system, automated, in the place where the work already is. It takes what you have to do, works out when you’re realistically going to do it, puts it in your calendar, and rearranges it when the day changes — which it will.
What actually changed
I won’t pretend the work went away. Monday still has forty things on it, and I’d be suspicious of any tool that promised otherwise. What changed is everything around them. I open Outlook and the question of what to do next has already been answered: this is the morning, this is after lunch, and the report has two hours on Thursday because Thursday is the last point where two hours still exist before it’s due.
That turned out to matter far more than I expected. The time I used to spend deciding now goes into doing. Demanding work lands in the hours I’m actually good for, and the small things fill the gaps that used to go to waste. Email stopped being a second job: what needs me becomes a task with time set aside for it, and the rest is out of the way in minutes rather than an evening. The same week holds more finished work — and more of it is the work that matters.
And when the day gets overtaken — a meeting runs long, something urgent lands, half the plan has shifted by eleven — it no longer costs me the afternoon as well. The plan reshuffles, and whatever got pushed is still accounted for later in the week rather than silently rejoining the pile. I can see when a week is too full while there’s still time to do something about it: move a deadline, hand something on, ask for help. Not at ten o’clock on Thursday night.
The list isn’t shorter. It just gets done. On time, in a sensible order, and without burning yourself out on late nights and the low-level dread of wondering what you’ve forgotten. The thing you cared about in March no longer turns up untouched in November.
If that sounds like your week, the trial runs for 45 days. That’s long enough to find out what it does for yours.
