For the past few months, I’ve been experimenting with organizing my work around “efforts” rather than traditional projects and tasks. This shift in perspective has transformed how I think about and manage my work.

To be clear: this isn’t a call to drop projects! It’s about thinking of how you plan and organize your work differently. I do still use projects and tasks, in addition to tracking efforts.

The ACE Framework: a foundation for organization

I’ve borrowed this idea from Nick Milo’s ACE framework. Paraphrasing his notes: the reason why the ACE Folder Framework works is because it allows you to organize by intention.

• Atlas: The space of ideas, assets, and knowledge (“Knowledge is Power”)
• Calendar: Moments in time, capturing meeting notes and daily thoughts
• Efforts: Actions of importance

While the entire framework is valuable, I’ve found the “Efforts” component particularly valuable.

Why efforts over projects?

As someone with a project management background, I appreciate well-defined projects. However, not everything we do fits neatly into the “project” box. Some work defies traditional project boundaries, or we’re contributing to projects without managing them directly. Or something may be too small or nebulous to be categorized as a project, so it doesn’t fit – what do you do with it? This is where thinking in terms of “efforts” becomes powerful.

The beauty of framing work as “efforts” lies in its balance of clarity and flexibility:

1. Clear intent: An effort implies action and commitment. When you label something as an effort, you’re acknowledging that it requires meaningful work and attention.
2. Flexible scope: Unlike projects with their rigid structures and expectations, efforts can breathe and evolve. This flexibility isn’t a weakness – it’s a feature that allows for organic development and creative exploration.
3. Natural evolution: Efforts can grow, shrink, or transform based on circumstances, without the constraints of traditional project frameworks.

In Nick’s words:

For endeavors of an unclear scale, “efforts” allow ideas to breath, while “projects” smother creativity and development by forcing too much structure too early.

I’ve been organizing my work by effort for few months now and it has been both helpful and freeing.

Organizing efforts: a practical system

Here are the categories that I’ve landed on, based on Nick’s work:

• 🔥 On: Your most active efforts and projects, urrent focus areas requiring significant attention
• ♻️ Ongoing: Broader, continuous efforts, work that remains important but doesn’t always need active attention
• 〰️ Simmering: Back-burner initiatives Ideas and work that need occasional attention or are slowly developing
• 😴 Sleeping: Inactive efforts, potential future work
• ✅ Archive: Definitely done, valuable for reference

The beauty of this system lies in its fluidity – efforts can move between categories as priorities and circumstances change. A 😴 sleeping effort might suddenly become urgent, while an active effort might need to simmer for a while.

Setting up your effort tracking system

One of the great things about this concept is that it’s not tied to a specific application. You can implement this via a Kanban board overview, a spreadsheet, app (Obsidian? :)), or task management system, using the efforts as a header.

I’m using it in Obsidian as described in the Ideaverse for Obsidian kit, where each effort is a note and they can be moved between folders.

If you’re curious, here’s Nick’s full video that covers the context as well as his setup.

Featured photo by Sage Friedman on Unsplash