The difference between To-Dos and Rocks may be confusing if you’re new to Rock management or have previously relied on a To-Do management system to manage your Rocks. To-Dos and Rocks are the main building blocks within Rock management that enable you to track and organize your work.
Here’s a working definition of the differences in GoExpand.
A To-Do is a single unit of work that needs to be accomplished within a Rock. A Rock is the entire series of To-Dos that need to be completed together to accomplish a single outcome or goal. For example, if you want to create a new widget, the entire creation process is your Rock. A single To-Do within that Rock may be “build widget prototype.”
A To-Do is similar to an item on a to-do list. It’s one action or step that’s required to move your Rock towards the desired outcome. To-Dos should be used to:
- Plan all the necessary steps to complete a Rock
- Visualize individual steps on a Rock Gantt chart
- Store detailed information about processes, how-tos, or notes
Typically, a To-Do will have a single person assigned to it and require a relatively short time-frame to complete. For instance, one best practice is for To-Do lengths to be between 1%–10% of the entire Rock length. This means that if your Rock takes 100 workdays to complete, each To-Do should be one to ten days in length. Any To-Do longer than ten days should, therefore, be divided into two or more To-Dos.
A Laundry Example
Breaking large Rock-based goals into smaller parts can be a little confusing. There’s an art to it. However, we like to think about it in terms of doing laundry.
There are probably a lot of other things that are needed to be done around the house. These might be things like “repaint the play room,” or “repair the deck,” or “do the laundry.” The latter is one of those common and recurring ones that we’ll use in this example.
“Do the Laundry,” is a Rock (especially if you have a lot of kids in the house). Let’s break this down into smaller, actionable To-Dos, like:
- Separate and Get Dry Cleaning Done
- Sort Laundry into Loads
- Wash, Dry, Fold. Repeat.
We wouldn’t want to break this Rock down too far or the number of To-Dos could become unmanageable. The purpose of breaking the Rock down into To-Dos is as much for making a big Rock manageable as it is for tracking progress. So, too many individual To-Dos provides information overload. Breaking a Rock down into the individual clothes you’re going to clean would end up making the Rock seem much bigger than it really is. You would be better suited if you broke each To-Do into sub-To-Dos (which you could just note within To-Do details).
Also, some of these To-Dos are dependent on others. You can’t start washing clothes until you’ve separated out your dry cleaning. However, some can be done in parallel. You can absolutely wash your laundry, while the dry cleaner does their work.
