My desk notebook is up and running and so far proving helpful. I'm sure how it goes together will change over time, but yesterday I started five pages, one for each of the organizations for which I volunteer, one for personal, and one for blog and journal.
Then, for each page, I wrote down all the deadlines and meetings with their dates. I thought of the page as roughly representing the rest of the month and spaced the items out accordingly. In other words, a project due towards the middle of the time period was written about halfway down the page and one due at the end of the month was written towards the bottom. The spaces in between were used to list the things I needed to do in preparation for a particular project or meeting.
Next, of course, I worked backward. The draft for the presentation I will be making on the 28th has to be submitted for final approval two weeks before, so that is the 14th. And it needs to be circulated by the 11th (that's tomorrow!) for pre-approval at a meeting on the 13th.
Yes, see how tight this all is! I am probably not going to making these deadlines and am going to have to negotiate more time. But at least I know that I am going to have to do that now, which I wouldn't have if I was sticking to my old, no longer working, seat-of-my-pants ways.
It seems strange that I need to be learning this now, but the old ways used to work. And right now, the new ways are difficult. Working backwards was hard, even though I guess, in some ways, I had always been doing it. Otherwise, I could never have functioned as well as I did.
But getting it down on paper was new. And I realized how useful it was once I had finished all the pages, and highlighted the various deadlines and meetings. It is easy now to look at all of them together and see the scheduling I will need if I am to get everything done in time.
It was also easy to see that I needed to stop my planning and quickly finish off a report due this morning. That was close!
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