Double your Productivity with "A Game of Pairs"

Having been a project and program manager for many years, I often catch myself thinking about process when performing some of the more mundane things I do in my daily life. One day I was putting dishes away from the drying rack in our kitchen and I noticed that I tended to do things sequentially – picking up one or more of the same thing to put them in their respective storage location. That seemed somewhat inefficient, and I got me thinking about a piece of music I played a long time ago.

Years ago during my college days, wearing my other hat as a symphony orchestra clarinetist, I won an audition at the Aspen Music Festival to play Principal Clarinet in an orchestra that performed Hungarian composer Béla Bartók’s spectacular orchestra showpiece titled, Concerto for Orchestra. Every professional symphony orchestra performs it, as do many good college orchestras as well. Great piece – really fun to play, too!

His second movement is interesting from a theoretical standpoint (as well as because of some excellent clarinet solos). It starts with five sections featuring a different pair of instruments playing a different musical interval – clarinets in minor sevenths, flutes in fifths, etc. Accordingly, Bartók named this movement Giuoco delle coppie (in Hungarian) or "A Game of Pairs." [If you are interested, you can view the musical score at http://bit.ly/2lYAg6B, page 30, or listen to it at https://youtu.be/_9tO1uUbkqM]

So, going from Bartók back to dishes, that movement got me thinking that if I always attempted to do two of these tasks at the same time, I could conceivably double my productivity and get these things done a lot more quickly. They could be different pairs, but always in pairs. I noticed immediately that it worked quite well, and whenever I was faced with these kinds of tasks, I would immediately think of A Game of Pairs and what I could execute together.

Of course this is overly simplistic, and some things still need to be done sequentially, as in the old expression “putting on shorts one leg at a time.” Not sure what Bartók would think about this, but I find that it helps. And, as a project manager, I feel satisfied!