As I wrestle with my own tendency to goblin mode I have come up with a few systems that may finally be sticking longer than a month or two. It’s been going for 3 years, in fact!! This system is a combination of day planner, a check list on custom printed post-it notes, Google Calendar(s), and a github project board.
The custom printed post-its are crucial to get me to do the basic human tasks one should do in the morning. Yes it’s a little embarrassing that I need a checklist to tell me to floss and put on deodorant and take my meds. But it’s been incredibly helpful! The checklist is roughly in the order that I actually do things. It has blank space to write extra items. A stack of post-its from Vistaprint is something like 10 bucks, and now that I have refined the list to a consistently useful form, I print more at once.
The day planner is a 12-month spiral bound notebook from Rifle Paper Co, and I’ve been using this type for the last two years. It’s not something I normally care around with me – it lives on my desk or the spot I sit on the couch in the morning. Every day gets a new post-it checklist.
So first thing in the morning I can look at my planner, start a new daily post-it checklist, transfer anything I didn’t do from yesterday to today’s post-it, and start checking and syncing things i need to do written on the planner to the stuff that’s in my google calendar.
That already sounds overly complicated but it works ok!
I have at least 3 google calendars I have to make sure are all synced. The 2 contract work ones are hooked into my main (personal) one. But I have to make sure all that stuff is represented in the weekly planner.
The next step is to look at the giant project board. Anything that I think needs to be done I slam into a new github issue and put it into a column like today, tomorrow, next up, backlog. There is also a column for repeating and in progress. Issues have tags, so I can filter on different contracting jobs or look at only creative or domestic tasks.
This board is hard to keep in check. Every day I need to make sure that I clear “today” to a reasonable amount of tasks, and that “tomorrow” has not filled up with 30 things.
It is SO MUCH better though than having 100 tabs open plus a giant email inbox full of things I need to pay attention to.
I have a time tracker, Tmetric, hooked up to the github project board. So, when I sit down to work on a contract job I hit “start” on it and when I switch tasks I hit stop. In practice, I have to correct this tracker a couple of times a day when I forget to manage it. But it helps me track my hours and also to see interesting facts like, Oh, hmm, I spend like 2 hours a day doing domestic chores.
I am never going to do all the things I think of doing.
So, re-prioritizing every few days or at LEAST every week is incredibly important.
It isn’t perfect but it’s helping me a lot!
It also sounds like a lot of overhead, but it is normally 15 minutes to an hour a day, spread out over the entire day, and it’s INCREDIBILY WORTH IT. Because I am getting more shit done and it is more often (alas not always) the correct shit to not fail/disappoint other people or myself.
Elements of this system:
– Routine stuff checklist
– Physical object planner
– Daily sync of checklist, planner, calendar, and project board
– Time tracker on the github board, mainly for consulting work
– Frequent (at least weekly, ideally, daily) comb through of project board to re-prioritize, check of what’s stuck in “in progress”, etc.
– Daily translation of things in inbox to project board tasks
– Sunday evening calendar/planner sync is critical for starting my work week right
It does strike me this is the sort of system everyone was trying to drum into me during my entire junior high/high school existence, but that I absolutely did not master and that I experienced only as horrible torture. Like, I think I spent much of middle school with a weird little planner book that I was forced to get every teacher to initial at the end of every period, and then my parents had to sign it too every night because I would forget stuff. Did i have my book? no. did i have the worksheet? no. did i have the permission slip or wahtever the fuck? no. did i have my 3 week progress report or 6 week report card signed off on by a parent and returned for a grade? No, i forgot it, and fuck you all very much for the useless “study skills” class and endless school psychologists and unhelpful underachieving gifted child label/damage.
Oh, well!!!!! Apparently in my 50s I have finally learned.
