Fractal Productivity

A Foray Into The Self-Similarity of Accomplishment

Personal productivity is surprisingly fractal.

It's "self-similar" in many ways, repeating itself on multiple levels.

Take the recurring cycles of weekly, monthly, and quarterly reviews. They sit in a "pinch-to-zoom"-relationship with each other.

Or consider the nature of rest. There’s a pause between single work sessions, work days, and workweeks (e.g., breaks, sleep, weekends).

There are many cases of what I call fractal productivity, but in this piece, I'd like to focus on the most essential one: units of work.

Let's start with some definitions.

A task is a piece of information that tells you what you have to do; it’s a reminder for a single action and the smallest unit of work we talk about.

A project is also a unit of work, albeit certainly a bigger one. It’s a stake in the ground for a certain desired outcome to be reached.

Here’s my spicy take: I think a project is not just a time-bounded set of bundled action items. A project is a zoomed-out version of a task.

Or, coming from an alternate angle, a task is a reduced-sized replica of a project. It’s a fractal representation of it.

A task is a concept we use to chunk together several connected physical movements and mental activities in order to achieve something. And we do that chiefly because this way, they become easier to manage, communicate, and reason about.

Likewise, a project is a concept that helps us group smaller steps (tasks) into a form that is easier to deal with.

So, in some strange way, a project essentially is a task. And a task essentially is a project.

This implies that we can handle both in a very similar way. We can take the principles and best practices for managing tasks and apply them equally well to projects (and vice versa).

Let's look at a concrete example.