Catch up on my work

Dude, must gtd. GD facebook, ruining my life.

I’m trying!

Now that schools about over, I can focus on this area!

Still need to catch up…it’s like running after an illusion that you never catch.

That was the real problem. Things were getting left behind, forgotten about, or done poorly.

Over the last year, I’ve been perfecting a process that captures everything I want to manage – ideas, receipts, bills, notes, etc. – into different types of inboxes. Then it’s a matter of processing the inboxes.

For me, having a routine process helps get things done. It’s not as easy or automatic as brushing my teeth, but it helps. The tools that help me do this:

• The Hipster PDA: No, this isn’t a consumer electronics product. It’s a stack of index cards, two binder clips, and a pen. If I want to remember something, it is collected here. Later, the cards are thrown into an inbox to be processed later.
• Google Calendar: It’s secure and I can view it from any online connection and it syncs with my iPod through Thunderbird.
• Wikidot.com: I’ve created my own personal wiki to manage everything in my life. It’s easy to set up, easy to edit, and stores all of my notes.
• Remember the Milk.com: This site manages all of my tasks. It is also secure and viewable from any online connection.

My problem was that I didn’t know how to work for myself and by myself, but I’ve made some pretty big strides on this in the last year. Here’s what it comes down to:

• Desire: You won’t make a change in your life until you realize that you want to and why you want to. This part is pretty self-evident. Take your income taxes, for example. You don’t want to do them, but you will have to do them. Procrastinating only prolongs and exacerbates the discomfort of having to do them and you know you’ll feel so much better once it’s done.
• Planning: Using taxes as an example, you can’t just say, “I’m going to do my taxes today” (unless they’re really simple). It’s a project and projects have steps. If you plan by breaking down the large project into achievable steps, doing a little each day, success will come more easily.
• Discipline: This is the hardest part of the job—sticking to the plan. Say you have a five-hour project due on Friday. Monday, you break it into five one-hour tasks (they rarely divide this easily, but just to illustrate a point). If for some reason you don’t do the work on Tuesday, you’re making Wednesday, Thursday, and definitely Friday more difficult and stressful for yourself. Stress is the enemy. It uses up a part of your working memory and makes it even more difficult to get things done.
• Feedback: Keep track of your time. I did this as an exercise for a week back in October and have been doing it ever since. I created a spreadsheet and as I do different tasks, it takes me about 10 seconds each to write a few descriptive words and the time I started doing it (the defactor end-time for the previous task) and a general category for the task. It provides a constant reminder of how I’m using my time. Also, I make a point at the end of the month to look over these time sheets and tally up time spent on A and B priority tasks versus other uses of my time.

Other important things for me are having a clean, organized workspace (I try to devote 20 minutes a day to cleaning and filing) that includes a “trusted system” (see David Allen’s excellent Getting Things Done ) for managing all of my different projects and tasks and scheduling monthly strategy moments to pull back and figure out where I’m trying to go.

I am getting close to checking this off as done. The two issues I’m working on now is the discipline and the strategic planning.

I am caught up on accounting and inventory! I am counting fountain drinks and fraggrlz as side projects, not catching up.

Oh my stress is SOMUCHLESS now! Hooray!

Hmm, here is a to do list:

1. Prepare fountain vs bottle report
2. Start Fragrrlz, the female gamers club for my city
3. Catch up on igames center operator posts
4. Catch up on accounting from when I was on vacation (oh my god, I am going to die)
5. Prepare sales reports and market analysis to figure out what new things we should offer
6. Keep owner from exploding

Tommorow, I address the pile of receipts that is my accounting work! AAAGHHH!!!

I woke up yesterday morning feeling as positive as I’ve felt in the last six months. It’s spring and warmer now, the sun was shining when I woke up. It was Friday. I had accomplished a lot in the last week while feeling sick, and now I was feeling better.

An interesting thing happened. I was in my messy, messy closet finding clean clothes to wear to work and I thought, “I want to clean out and organize this closet.”

Wow.

If I had been feeling negative, I would not have had that impulse. I would have thought, “This is one more thing I must endure.”

Staying in a positive frame of mind enables me to get things done. Getting things done makes it easier for me to get into a positive state of mind. It’s an upward spiral.

So I’m starting to come back from the brink. I had been struggling with this task for quite some time and recent events have literally turned my life upside down.

I’m starting to come back, though, by setting up routines where I work for 20 minutes on a project on a regular basis. One example of this is cleaning the house. If you clean the house for 20 minutes a day, 6 days a week, you will make great strides. You get more done that way than if you devoted 2 hours once a week. Believe me. Yesterday, I opened a dresser drawer that I expected to be full of crap and it was empty. I didn’t even remember cleaning it out.

I’m really trying to devote myself to this 20 minute burst routine. I hope it will continue to work.