How to Organize Personal Work 🧺
A small framework for knowledge work and personal productivity.
So, as you may have read last week, I am just back from honeymoon!
For three weeks I shut ~95% of my work off. I consider this a major accomplishment, as, in the past two years, I had never been able to stay away from Refactoring for more than ~4-5 days.
It didn’t come easy, though. It required a lot of prep, and that, combined with everything going on in our lives, made the last few 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 stuff 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, this period taught me a lot about myself, productivity, and knowledge work in general.
So, during a non-stop 12-hour flight to Los Angeles, I drafted this article.
This piece introduces a simple framework to organize knowledge work and maximize your personal output. It draws from the experience of the past few months, combined with that of two years of solo writing work, and 10+ 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!
🪨 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 👇
🔴 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.
🟡 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.
🟢 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: