Oh, boy, am I struggling …
Are you struggling with organising your work, blogging time and home life? I am. These days anyway. In the past I juggled a multitude of projects no problem. These days I’m over-saturated.
(If you are a DWB regular, I’m sure you’ve noticed posts slipping)
I knew this was coming, so I started tackling the problem last year by stepping back from various commitments. Not enough apparently.
I also purchased Getting Things Done by David Allen, and placed the GTD blog on Bloglines (another time sapper).
I liked the concept of Getting Things Done. You know, getting all that ‘stuff’ out of my head and all. But, I found taking on the whole GTD lifestyle took away time from getting things done.
For me, I clearly need a simpler, stripped down version. A version with tweaks. And to give it a chance to work, I need to make a time commitment.
Starting last week, Creative Coach Mark McGuinness (from Wishful Thinking) posted the first of a series on Time Management for Creatives. A series running for eight weeks at BoDo: Business of Design online, going live each Friday.
October 11: Why you need to be organised to be creative
October 19: Prioritise work that is ‘important but not urgent’
October 26: Ring-fence your most creative time
November 2: Avoid the Sisyphus effect of endless to-do lists
November 9: Get things done by putting them off till tomorrow
November 16: Get things off your mind
November 23: Review your commitments
November 30: Resources to help you get things done
I coded the series into BoDo so I know what to expect. And knowing how I work, knowing my schedule for the next eight weeks, I believe Mark’s advice will work for me.
But only if I commit the time.
To make sure I keep the commitment, on Mondays I’ll answer each of Mark’s questions from the previous Friday. Right here on DWB, in the Time Management category.
I’d love the company so feel free to join me. I mean, what do you have to lose, but time?
Technorati Tags: business, creative, design, Time Management
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Hey Cat,
You know I’ll be following this one!
I’m the type that has a pile for everything and everything in it’s pile. :-)
Hey Joe, I also had a pile for everything. Then I took on MORE of everything but I don’t want to give up the new everythings :-)
I used to hate the very idea of organizing myself. I don’t like reading books on timemanagement. However, one of my friends is using wrike.com http://www.wrike.com/ for her projects. She wanted to share some of your tasks with me and I got an invitation to join the system. Then I went to the wrike blog http://www.wrike.com/blog.htm and found this post Getting things done with Wrike saves us hours I actually thought that they’ve got a point, so I decided to give it a try.
Melisa,
I checked out Wrike and it looks great! Thanks for sharing it, I’m going to give it a try too.