Spring Cleaning
OK, I realize I am trying to force spring to happen. Daffodils and now this.
I am used to being very organized. The difference now that I am back to work after staying home with the girls is that I am no longer willing to bring home hours of work each night to finish.
So I decided to list every current project, personal or work:
I eventually ran out of post it notes
.
I got this idea from skimming “Getting things Done” by David Allen. Apparently he’s a guru of such things. I didn’t even know such things had gurus. What can I say, I broke up two girl fights in the past week, I don’t get out much.
Then I grouped everything into three piles…must do, maybe and manana (later). The idea is you develop a system to track all ongoing projects so that you do not have to actively think about it. You create routines to check your system, and have a less cluttered brain.
My poor brain needs all the dusting it can get. I have to teach recursive algorithms next week…enough said.
I needed to focus on. In the middle of the pictures is the calendar I use to organize house and kid stuff. (click here to see it better). I might eventually try to rework it along the lines oprojects.Anyone
Anyone else have any ideas? I can’t be the only one a bit overwhelmed with the to do list…
February 15th, 2007 at 7:06 am
Well I’m often in the same boat. I give myself a deadline as to when I need to finish it. I too do the sticky notes. I tell myself at the beginning of the week, how many I need to accomplish and then I actually schedule it into my planner when these are going to get done. New things that come up have to go on a different colored sticky note. Well, at least it works for me. Hope you find something that works for you soon!
February 15th, 2007 at 2:36 pm
Spring cleaning, painting kitchen and kids room,… I really need quite a supply of those post-its!
February 15th, 2007 at 5:50 pm
I listen to a podcast called 43 Folders which is by a guy called Merlin Mann (who is, btw, hilarious) based off of that book. It’s just a short one, maybe you should check it out.
One of the best things I got from it was this: the point of an organisation system is to help you get organised. It is not to let you make perfectly organised folders, or find the exactly right colour of dividers. I’m a stationary geek, so I get caught up in that kind of stuff. But the point is, as soon as the system takes more time to maintain than it saves you, you’ve defeated the purpose. With that in mind, you should only be exaclty as organised as you need to be - at least that’s what I got.
Also, my problem is that I get excited about writing down things and start coming up with things to do - but what you really need is to know that if you write it down, it will get done eventually. that way, it’s out of your head and on the list. If you know you wont check/update your list, you’ll still be thinking about it, since you know you can’t trust your system.
The biggest thing, though, is that it is more important that it works for you rather than what some book/guru says. It’s just a case of finding what that thing is that works… that’s easy, right? ;-P