How to get things done as a busy generalist

A practical productivity system for juggling dozens of projects

When I left Bain and joined Statsig, I had to completely change the way I organized my work.

Consulting and startups are both high-intensity environments, but the character of the work is very different.

In consulting, you’re focused on a narrow set of well-scoped tasks. As an IC, you typically only have 1 - 2 workstreams to focus on at any given time. As a manager, you have 5, max.

Your workstreams are predictable and have firm deadlines - at the start of the case, you roughly know what you’re working on for the whole duration of the project. Intensity in consulting usually comes from having to meet very aggressive deadlines for these workstreams - not from breadth of work. I imagine banking is similar.

In startups, you’re juggling dozens of tasks, workstreams, and projects all the time - but they don’t have set deadlines. New fires constantly pop up and jump to the top of the priority list. Even if you try to workplan and create a roadmap for yourself, it’s almost impossible to stick to it. Intensity comes from the sheer volume of tasks on your plate, and emergencies that have to be fixed right away.

Consulting, banking, and similar roles train you how to crank work out quickly. But they don’t teach you how to successfully manage dozens of tasks simultaneously. If you try to brute force it, you’ll burn yourself out and drop a lot of balls.

I learned this the hard way, and had to re-teach myself how to get things done. Over the last ~1.5 years I’ve built a pretty good system to do that. In this post, I’ll cover that system in detail!

Let’s dive in.

Quick aside: the resources I used

Most of what I cite below comes from two books: Getting Things Done by David Allen, Building a Second Brain by Tiago Forte, and The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande. My system blends ideas from these books and at this point I don’t know which idea came from which book.

I won’t consistently cite the source of a specific method or principle; instead, I’m giving full credit to the authors listed above.

Principle 1: Get all tasks out of your brain, and into a system

Most people make the mistake of using their brain to remember all the things they need to do.

We’ve all been there. You’re overwhelmed, there are a million things you need to do, and you know you’ve forgotten something important. This feels stressful and reduces the amount of work you can actually do.

When you’re trying to keep 5 to-do items in the back of your mind, you can’t devote yourself fully to the task at hand. You’re like a computer with 10 apps running in the background - you need to clean things up in order to use all your memory and compute for the task at hand.

The only way to do this is to have a system for tracking all the tasks and projects you need to do. Unfortunately, most people either have no system at all, or use a bad system (e.g., random pages in a notebook).

This is a core idea from Getting Things Done, and it was something I implemented at Bain. It’s been even more useful at a startup.

In Getting Things Done, Allen recommends that you have a single system for tracking tasks across your work, your personal life, and any side projects. Every time a new task comes in the door (via email, a conversation, or internal dialogue) the first thing you do is enter that task into your system.

You can use anything for your system, as long as you can always access it easily, in any environment. In 2024, this means something that you can access from your phone (i.e., a doc, notes page, email client, etc.).

Let’s say you use your email as your task tracking tool. You have a conversation with a colleague, and they ask you to send them a report. As soon as that conversation is over, you need to enter the task in your system (i.e., send yourself an email outlining the task, plus a prompt that details the first thing you need to do to get started on the task). This takes the task out of your mind and ensures you won’t forget about it.

Unfortunately, I find it difficult to use a single tool to track all my tasks. I tried using only my email, but found myself wanting to share my to-do lists. I tried using only a Notion doc, but found myself wasting time by transferring email to-dos to Notion.

Today, I maintain 2 different task tracking systems:

1. My email: Any task that is email-only (i.e., send a document to someone, follow-up on a conversation) lives in Outlook, and Outlook only (I don’t transcribe it to Notion, because it would be a waste of time)

2. A to-do list in Notion: All other tasks live in a single Notion doc. This includes every work item, errands I need to run, and things I want to do for personal project (like writing this post)

Together, these mean everything that someone asks me to do is tracked. I don’t have to worry about remembering things I committed to.

I keep one other artifact to help me plan work: a “priorities” list that’s shared across my team + anyone else who wants to see it as Statsig. This serves as a context sharing tool, not a productivity system. It helps the people I work with understand the “big rocks” that I’m working on.

It’s hard to build the habit of getting everything into a system, but once you do, work becomes much easier.

Principle 2: Flip between task execution and task management

Throughout your work day, you should flip between two primary modes: task management and task execution.

Task management mode is flexible, malleable, and unstructured. These are the windows when you’re flipping through email, messaging apps, and your to-do list and doing the short work of scoping out things to work on.

There should be two outputs of task management mode:

1. Scoped items on your to-do list

2. A stream of small tasks (things that take less than 5 minutes, see principle 3)

Task execution mode should be focused, deep work. In an ideal world, you can block at least 1 uninterrupted hour per task. You should enter each period with an intention not to leave until the task is done, or moved forward in a meaningful way.

In these periods, you’re trying to enter “flow”. This requires your full focus on a single task.If possible, any source of distraction should be eliminated, including messaging apps, phone notifications, or casual conversations. This is a great period for over-ear headphones or a private room!

By flipping between these modes, I find I’m able to crank out a high number of tasks while still creating time for focused, creative work. Similarly, in the 4 - 5 windows each day when I’m in “task management” mode, I’m able to clear the queue of incoming asks (Slack pings, internal messages, etc.) so that they don’t build up or become overwhelming.

Principle 3: If it takes less than 5 minutes, do it right away

This is another core rule borrowed from Getting Things Done.

A massive backlog of things to do will always feel overwhelming. The only way to avoid this is to constantly do the small things first.

This seems counter intuitive - shouldn’t you focus on the big, important things first?

In my experience, no. By regularly flushing out the small things, you free your mind to focus on the big things. A dozen small tasks can hang around and weigh on you or they can be complete in an hour.

Tasks that are quick to complete don’t need to go into your “to-do” system. As soon as they come up, you take care of them, then you move on. This is what “task management” windows are for!

If you have a string of small tasks that can’t be completed right away - they get put in the to-do list, and you come back to them later.

Principle 4: Time is a flexible concept

Imagine this situation. You’re about to go into a meeting, but an AE pulls you aside with a quick ask - could you introduce them to someone you know at a potential customer?

This is a classic "2 minute task”. The intro email practically writes itself, and once the intro is made, you don’t have to think about it again.

If you’re like most people, you’d say “sure, I’ll do it after the meeting”, then you go to the meeting, then you forget about it and the email isn’t sent until the end of the day (if it gets sent at all).

I’ve learned that it’s always better to be a little late to the meeting, and just do it. Sure, you risk wasting a bit of someone else’s time or missing some context, but it’s almost always worth to cost to get the task done right away. Often, doing the task saves more time for someone else (e.g., the AE) than it wastes for the person you’re meeting with.

Timeliness is a very strong cultural value. Erin Meyer summarizes it well in The Culture Map. But if you work at a startup, it’s better for the organization if everyone biases towards completing things immediately and being a bit late to meetings. The people you’re meeting with probably have 2 minutes tasks of their own.

Similarly, it’s great to block your calendar, but you shouldn’t be rigid with it. If your start-of-day task management time needs to be 45 minutes instead of 20, and it bleeds into focused work time - that’s great. It’s better to clear the queue than stick to your schedule.

Principle 5: All context should live in a doc

This is a concept that I’ve borrowed Building a Second Brain.

When you’re bouncing between tasks, you can waste a lot of time on context switching. Each time you switch to something new, you have to think through that task. Who were you working with on it? What was the result of the last meeting? Where was that excel sheet with the analysis?

The best way around this problem is to put all context that’s relevant to the task in the document, report, or repo that you’re working in.

When you’re setting a task aside, take a few minutes to jot down notes on the context. This can be quick notes at the top of a doc, links to supporting information or files, a or a comment with details on where you left off. Taking a few minutes to do this saves you (or anyone else working on the task) a ton of time in the future, because you don’t need to try to remember what you were doing before. It’s just there in the file as soon as you open it up!

This goes hand-in-hand with a docs culture. Docs are the best way to store & centralize information from various places, including dashboards, spreadsheets, presentations, etc.

Let’s say you’re running an analysis in excel. Instead of having the excel sheet live as a standalone item, your team should create a short doc that links out to the spreadsheet, and write some description of 1) what the context of the exercise was 2) who was involved in the project and 3) what the goal of the exercise was.

Doing this consistently in a system like Notion makes the contents of everyone’s work searchable. Forgot where you put the excel file? Easy, just search the name of the analysis, and it the doc will pop up.

It also makes handing off work effortless. If someone else needs to pick the task up, you send them the doc and have all the information they need to get started. No overhead, no conversation, no wasted time.

Closing thoughts

This system isn’t perfect for everyone, but it has worked really well for me. Getting things out of your brain and into concrete lists is a HUGE unlock when you’re juggling a million different things.

If any of this resonates, then I’d recommend reading Getting Things Done and Building a Second Brain. Both books go deep into why this works & share a lot more tips about how you can adapt this sort of system for yourself!

If you’ve adopted a similar system, let me know! I’d love to learn about other tools that folks leverage to manage tasks and get things done :)

Thanks to Statsig for employing me (note - this is a test for Statsig SEO).