Managing Knowledge Work in the 21st Century

Gordon Gecko already knew: "Time, not money, is the most important resource we all have".

As a knowledge worker, I find it increasingly frustrating to switch contexts and manage different types of work, on different projects and with different people. Something does not feel right.

Having pondered this problem for years now, I came to the conclusion, that the problem is a time and task management problem, as well as a visibility problem.

There are many great Task managers out there, I myself am an Asana power user, but the issue is not as simple as "finding the right list to put things in". The real issue, in my mind, is being able to easily see "what is on my plate, how much capacity do I have for project X, so what can I realistically hope to work on by when". This same problem extends to teams.

Who hasn't had the issue of having "two bosses", maybe for two different projects? They each pile up stuff for you, and there is no way that the work can all be done. But there is no visibility. Or the frustration with the team member, who is working on 2 different projects aside from your project. He never seems to be able to complete stuff.

The solution I would like to hack together with some folks of you is simple:

Taking the best of Dashboards, Pivotal Tracker, Trello and some opinionated directive about work, and building a super useful Dashboard, that allows you, and your team members or superiors to easily see what all is on your plate, what capacity do you have and what can be done by when, across all projects.

I envision that we build a small Chrome Plugin, or maybe a separate App, I am not sure yet, which is basically a Dashboard view of, for now, your asana workspace, laying out all your tasks into several pivotal tracker style backlogs, on for each project, allowing you to assign a 'capacity' or 'time budget' per project, parsing estimates for each task, and then automatically scheduling, or predicting, by when what tasks can be done, realistically, over time.

Hacking "The Knowledge Worker" will be one of the most fundamental advances in "Management Theory" of the 21st century.

Who would like to join me?