How to Organize Personal Work 🧺
A small framework for knowledge work and personal productivity.
Since I moved from being a manager to a writer, the way I plan for time off has changed dramatically.
With respect to my previous work, I have found it to be easier to take a little time off, like half or one day, and extremely harder to take true time off, like one or two weeks.
In fact, for the first couple of years—been doing this since late 2021—I never stayed away for more than ~4-5 days.
Then last year, for the first time, I was able to shut ~95% of my work off for three weeks. I had to, because I got married and we went on honeymoon 😄🎉
It didn’t come easy. It required a lot of prep, which, combined with everything else going on in our lives, made those months extreme. In fact, other than the day-to-day work, we organized the wedding (which, in Italy, is a big deal), we relocated, and I anticipated the actual work for honeymoon — that is, I wrote 6 newsletter editions in advance.
All of this meant fitting ~2x the regular work into an already packed schedule.
Everything turned out fine, and, in retrospect, that period taught me a lot about myself, productivity, and work in general.
So, this piece introduces a simple framework to organize knowledge work and maximize your personal output. I have put it together throughout the years and it draws from my own personal experience, which combines 3+ years of solo writing work, and 10+ years of engineering / management.
Here is what we will cover today:
🪨 Rocks, pebbles, and sand — a familiar metaphor, borrowed for managing work.
🧺 Work basket — what should go into your basket? How should you spend your time?
⏱️ Managing time — scheduling work and handling interruptions.
⚖️ Managers vs engineers — does this apply to both? Spoiler: yes.
Let’s dive in!
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Now back to the article!
🪨 Rocks, pebbles, and sand
There is a famous story, that you have probably heard, about a professor who teaches a life lesson to his students by means of a simple metaphor.
This metaphor is about a jar, that first gets filled with rocks, then pebbles are added, and finally sand. If you want to make room for everything, the order in which you put stuff in the jar matters: rocks leave room for pebbles, which in turn leave room for sand. The opposite is not true: if you put pebbles first then you can’t fit the rocks, and so on.
In the original story, the metaphor is about important things in your life. Today, I borrow this to talk about work.
Like the items in the story, not all work is created equal. If the jar is your time, or, better, your energy, the strategy you use to fill it matters.
So, let’s organize your work into three buckets 👇
1) Rocks — High Intensity 🔴
Rock work is your most important work: it is the one that requires the most of your energy and creativity. It produces original output and gives you a sense of fulfillment.
Examples of rock work for various tech roles might be: system design, creating design docs / PRDs, coding complex stuff, running good 1:1s, or, in my case, writing newsletter editions.
It is the work that you need to perform at your very best.
2) Pebbles — Medium Intensity 🟡
Pebbles aren’t necessarily smaller tasks than rocks, but they require less of your energy per unit of time. While rocks need the best of you, for pebbles you just need to clear some bar, or keep a standard.
A litmus test to identify pebbles, for me (may not be the same for others) is whether I can do them with music on.
For example, as a writer, I can’t really write essays while listening to music, but I can reply to emails, or do some research for new articles. As a manager, I could go through status updates, check-in on things, and unblock small decisions. As an engineer, I could code small changes, squash some bugs or add missing tests.
3) Sand — Low Intensity 🟢
Sand work is basically chores — you do them because you have to, but there isn’t a lot of intelligence involved.
Examples of my personal chores are moving notes between various tools, publishing interviews on youtube, updating spreadsheets, or sending some email sequences.
Infamous engineering chores are: going through CI/CD, updating dependencies, or attending meetings where you never speak (sigh).
🧺 Work Basket
In my experience, you should always aim to spend ~50% of your day on rocks — high-intensity work.
In fact, there is a balance to be found here: you can’t do intense work all day long, as it is too draining and you can’t keep up in the long run. At the same time, spending most of your day on small things points to a lack of meaning, impact, and personal growth.
So, how do you optimize your basket? Here are a few strategies, based on the type of tasks:
🪚 Break Rocks — for hard, intense work, break it into smaller tasks and turn parts of some rocks into pebbles and sand. To simplify writing, create templates. To simplify processes, create checklists. To simplify coding, improve platform.
↪️ Delegate Pebbles — simpler tasks are easier to delegate. They also make for opportunities for younger co-workers to prove themselves.
🤖 Automate Sand — chores should simply be automated. For example, it is easy these days to create workflows and integrate various tools by using AI and low-code tools.
This strategy is continuous: you take work that is hard, try to make it easier, and keep shifting your attention to stay focused on hard work.
To me, this looks like turning art into engineering:
🎨 Art — no clear rules, you apply your judgment in an instinctive way based on your experience.
🔨 Engineering — you follow well-defined rules to achieve an output.
All the tasks we do are part-art, part-engineering. Doing great work, to me, looks like:
Creating great art, plus
Continuously turning art into engineering.
So, once you are happy with your tasks, how do you fill your jar in a way that fits the most things?