I don't know how freelance folks manage to get anything done. I have always, since my earliest memory, had days structured by outside forces. My worklife has been a constant barrage of squeezing original work into the cracks left from a barrage of emails and phone calls and folks walking in the door. So faced with the prospect of retirement, I'm terrified I'll spend my day with the ipad on the couch and never get anything worthwhile done at all.
For this three day stormy weekend, I'm hunkering down and trying to get things done. I'm also experimenting with a time management system: I went old school analogue! No fancy gadgets for this $0 paycheck baby! I'm using the tools available to me, and having fun with visual cues, which so works for me.
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| At the start |
I started this morning with the brainstorm, and laid out the schedule on the whiteboard in my bedroom (yes, I have a whiteboard in my bedroom, I am a visual nerd), and on postit notes listed out all I wanted to get done. The list is both incomplete and aspirational - I fully expect I will do things not on the list, and I will not do everything on the list.
Then, I put the few fixed-time stickies in place, then tentatively scheduled some of the other things. Now, as the day progresses, I'm putting in things I'm doing and tentatively scheduling some others.
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| 10:15 am Saturday |
8:00 Sunday 1/20
How did I do yesterday? Not so bad. But I need to plan specific things in specific slots for today. I also discovered that my first pass at "tasks" didn't include any fun things. I thought about it, and added "reading" to the stickies. (A book I was waiting for from the library came through and I downloaded it Friday night.) As it turns out, I also watched some TV. That was on my list - catch up on season 3 of The Good Place - but I had planned to do it while filing paperwork. Instead, I vedged out, and was surprised when the first show was an hour instead of a half hour, watched the whole thing and then called it a night.
Now, catching up on February 2...
While I didn't keep up with the blogging about this, I did keep up the technique for the weekend - and even beyond. How I ended up using this continued to be as both planning and tracking. It continued to be unrealistically aspirational, as many things did not get addressed. But, I also kept on adding things to the board as they came up. I'll post a series of pictures of how it evolved over the weekend at the end, but first, some reflections on how it did or did not work.
What really worked for me was its visual cues, and being right at the entrance to my bedroom. It's oriented so it faces my closet, so I pass it all the time but it's not looming over me as I lie in bed - I think that would be too much. I looked at it every time I passed by, and I paused to see where I was and what I planned to do next. It is big, and colorful, and a novelty, all reasons to look rather than treat it as part of the furniture. It kept chores and projects front of mind, and forced me to schedule them. It's so easy at the beginning of a weekend (ie now) to have list, most often just mentally, of all the things I'll get done this weekend. But time slips away. I was constantly putting my postits into specific time slots - I'm going to start this by 2 pm, or else it's likely to not get done today. I was unrealistic and ambitious, but I have no doubt I got a lot more done than I would have otherwise. Part of it was just a reminder - so easy to forget something that isn't a habit but rather an occasional chore - stop at the dry-cleaners on the way to the grocery store.
I think it's the time management aspect that really helped boost how much got done. And, I would adjust the stickies to reflect what I actually did, keeping the history up to date, so I would be realistic about how much time I spent on various things.
I've kept the stickies, and have been using them to manage the weekends since. During the week I pretty much go to work and that's it, though I've added weekday slots and am trying to get one chore a day done. So it's a technique that has promise for me, and one I'll keep playing with for a while.
As you look at the photos below, I think it's less about what is written on the stickies than how the weekend filled out, and different things in different colors got added, subtracted, and moved around.
For those who scroll to the bottom, there's a look at another project tool I use.
So here's how the weekend evolved:
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| Sunday 8:30 am |
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| Sunday, 3:30 pm |
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| Monday, 8 am |
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| Monday, 7 pm |
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| Weekend over |
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| The following weekend, when done |
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| Trello |
4 comments:
In my home work life, I was very folder based. Each project had its own folder. I will not bore you with the intricacies of the folder set-up. But at work, after a few months, I realized that a bazillion folders for every bubka flier was not practical. Now, I only keep folders for major, ongoing projects, categories. And have stacks of papers, marked with post-it notes to distinguish what’s going on. I literally and physically move the stacks around accdg to the day’s priorities, with larger piles that distinguish days.
It’s hard to envision with pictures. There are also so many cross currents of other organizing things around me. Work Daughter and I had a few bucks left in the budget end of year and at Boss’ urging to “spend it,” we bought more whiteboards for each of our offices. We also still employ the giant postersize sticky pages of long-term goals hung up around the room. So I am literally surrounded by calendars and lists and I love that. I never did that in my home work life—it was all neatly contained in my physical planner and my steno notebook of daily to-do lists. With the sheer number of tasks it has exploded into the physicality of the office.
Anyhoo, this is all to say, I think it’s great that you’re experimenting with this now. A) it’s mad fun for organizing nerds like us and B) it has taken me a full 18 months to adapt and fine-tune to a new reality. A good system remains malleable and open to change, but it’s wise to start playing with your ideas now!
rereading my comments: with the extra bucks, we also bought more advertising, stocked up on brochures for our own inventory, booked consultants for discovery processes for a possible new website...like did more sweeping things than whiteboards! LOL!
Hi Nan. Wow, you continue to inspire me in so many ways. As in, I wish I could be more like you. One of my affectionate nicknames for Dan is "Mr. List," because he loves to make lists (kind of like Kim's freelancer steno pad lists, but smaller) of things to do--his life....his work...but one of my favorites is when we are on vacation, esp Cape Cod, and he makes lists of what we want to do while there, including "Get to Chatham Bars Beach at low tide," etc.
I love the white board idea but don't know if it is pretty enough to work for me. Love the colored Post-its. And esp love the way lists have us eye to eye with what is most important in life, from people to healthy cooking.....visit Mom, call Liz, cook cauliflower. I should probably go back to lists again. I fall in love and then break up as with many, many things in my life, from using facial washes to keeping my closet neat.
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Love, Alice
Agree this is a fascinating post. I agree that making yourself update generates more productivity. I generally have a list at both home and work, but if it goes off the rails, I usually do not go back. Also I think updatingto reflect actual time spent is a great idea. Sometimes my lists are aspirational, and sometimes just unrealistic, and it would be good to have more info on the difference. I might try it as an experiment one day, butI hate recordkeeping too much for it to be a daily thing.
Liz
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