Treat Your Day As A Poem - Draft 1

You are weighed down with work.  You can't possibly get everything done.  You are going to miss vital deadlines and have very little to show for a day of stress, activity and intense unhappiness.

That is what you signed up for by taking on too many projects.  However, that doesn't mean that you have to make today a day that has no value or meaning.  If you give some thought to it, you can turn today into a poem.  You are after all engaged in a struggle, a struggle against life's slings and arrows.  The way today turns out is in itself a story. It might be a triumph, or it might be a disaster.  But either way it can be turned into a narrative that is meaningful.

How do you do this?  First off, keep notes of what you are doing.  If possible, do this every fifteen minutes.  When you are stressed you won't remember what you did an hour ago.  But if you keep note you can see where your time is going.   There is a good chance you are wasting a lot of time doing stuff that doesn't take you forward.  But you can't be making progress all the time. You have other priorities.   For example, a phone call from a friend is actually one of life's great pleasures.  If you have one, don't regard it as a problem.  It was a life enhancing experience.

But you will also be doing a lot of stuff that actually does take you forward.

So every day is a bit of a mixture of the good, the bad and the unexpectedly beneficial.  Try and turn this into a story.  It isn't helpful to look at a day as one that is a failure to work as a robot.  You are not a robot, you are a human being on a journey.   The steps you take are important, but so is stopping to pick the daisies.  A good day is not one where you have squashed your humanity out of yourself to clock up points on your to do list.  It is a day where you have stretched yourself a bit, learnt a little, experienced some triumphs and endured some disasters.  Even when you are overwhelmed with work you are stilll a human and you can turn your day into  a very human story.   It might even make sense to write it up at the end of the day.  It doesn't have to rhyme, but it can still be very human and poetic.

The Project To Get Rid Of Projects - Draft 1

So you have too many projects.  I suggest you add another one.  After all, what harm can one more do?  The answer is a lot, but this one is special.  You need to create a project to get rid of your other projects.  If you have a well defined project system then simply add this to that system.  If you don't have a system, well let's add yet another project.  You need to start a project to define all your projects.

But for now let's leave organising projects and look at how you axe projects.  First off, you need to estimate how much time a particular project has committed you to.   This is of course a very difficult thing to do.  But it is essential.  You should not take on anything without some idea of what you are letting yourself in for. There are only 24 hours in a day and if you can work solidly for 8 of those hours then you are well into the top 10% or even the top 1% of human performance.  Realistically most people do well to get to six and I would estimate from my time as a manager of a laboratory, where all the workers were well above average in qualifications and to some extent in intelligence, that 5 hours would be the best you can hope for.

So on this basis, a five hour project robs you of a day of your life.   There are many 5 hour projects around.  For example, giving a talk at a trade fair is not going to take much less than 5 hours to prepare.   So you have lost a day's work even before you have booked the tickets.   Speaking personally, if I am giving a talk at a show I almost always end up chairing a couple of other sessions and talking to some people about the talk before and after I have given it.  So the day out at the trade fair is pretty much lost too, because I don't get to walk the show in the way I would if I wasn't speaking.

Smaller projects are even more of a menace.  Small blocks of time don't seem to count, but a couple of half hour jobs knock a big chunk out of a 5 hour day.

Basically, you need to guard your time jealously and zealously and be extremely aware of what you have committed yourself to.

Five Minute Dash Tactic - 1st Draft

A five minute dash is a technique that should only be used when the situation is really bad.  When you have more work than you can cope with spread over more projects than you can cope with, then there is simply no choice.  You have to get your work organised and you don't have time to stop.

The five minute dash is a tactic that allows you to get somewhere while also getting organised.  Basically you pick a task at random - but preferably the first one on your job list.  Set a timer for 5 minutes and get as much as you can get done.  Then put the project onto the appropriate place for when you need to work on it again.  For example, if it is basically the top priority task then schedule it for after your next five minute dash.

Keep this up as you go down your list.  Five minutes isn't very long, but it is not no time at all.  If nothing else you can get a job into order.  If it is a report you can get a couple of hundred words written.   If you do practical work you can find all the things you need to do something.

The most important thing is to work at switching rapidly from one task to another, and to leave every task on which you are working in a state that makes it easy to pick up again.  As you work through it your to do list becomes more and more realistic and your work becomes more organised.  You can schedule a few five minute sessions to specifcally work on organising your work if you have to.

It's all about lists - 1st draft

So when you are overwhelmed by too much work, there really is ultimately only one cure.  You need to work through your list of things you need to get done and to do them.

It really is that simple.

The problem is the list.  If you have a list of things to do that you trust to be comprehensive and properly prioritised then your problem becomes a much simpler one of simply getting on and doing it all.  If you can take it one stage further and have every item on your list representing a simple manageable task, then so much the better.

But most of us don't have such a list.  And the work needed to create such a list is simply too much to contemplate. It seems much easier to simply grab something that you know needs to be done and to do it.  That's progress at least.

The trouble is that the job you pick is usually a relatively easy one, or one that has a particular deadline.  It probably isn't the one that represents the most valuable use of your time that will pay off for years to come.

So I suggest you add creating, prioritising and polishing your list to your job list.  If you don't have a list, start it with that item.  And treat it as major objective of your life going forward that every day will end with your list in better shape than when you started it.

Coping WIth Panic Paralysis Draft 1

Panic Paralysis

So you have a whole load of jobs to do many of which are urgent and all of which will have to be done at some time.  The temptation is to pick the one that is easiest to deliver, and work on it exclusively until it is done.  As always, it takes longer to finish than you expect.  But at least you have made some progress.  You finish it off.  You then have to confront the same dilema again.  So the job that is now the least difficult to work on hits the top of the list.

Soon enough the day is gone.  Your job list is now fuller of difficult jobs than it was before, and the urgent ones are more urgent than they were before.  You go to be resolving that tomorrow is another day.

This is a state I have found myself in often and which I refer to as panic analysis.  These episodes are never fun and can be really traumatic.  And they tend on the whole to get worse rather than better.   In fact they are one of the biggest arguments I know for not taking on too many projects.  A day of simultaneously working hard and prevaricating is hard to beat for being soul destroying.  Wouldn't it be great if you could just focus on your key projects that are going to deliver great results?

But of course you can't.  You aren't at that stage yet.  So what is the best strategy to adopt?

The best thing is to do the exact opposite of what you would like to be doing and what you probably are doing.   Get a timer out, and stick to working out whatever you are doing now for a set period of time.  I'd suggest 15 minutes, but 10 minutes and even 5 minutes would work.   25 minutes is fine.  An hour is too long.  You only have a few hour long sessions available, and you need to cover everything on your list.

Use the first session to make sure you have a list of all the things you need to be working on.  If you have a good system this won't be too much of a problem.  In fact I'd say that the proof of a good system is that you have a good list of your priority activities.  If you don't, then you don't have a good system.  Start your good system by creating a list.

Now work down the list working for your set time period on each of them.  If there is one that is clearly the priority, then alternate that task with ones on the list.  Each time you start a new job off the list try and look at the job and break it down into small chunks that you can easily cope with.  As you come to the end of your timed session aim to finish it in such a way that you can easily pick it up again.  Remember your goal is to get clarity .