Scheduling, planning and follow-through. Some questions

Posted by Paul Korm
May 17, 2014 at 08:08 PM

Perhaps the issue isn’t that you are now working in a less structured environment—but just that the environment is different and you haven’t learned all the cues yet? When I transitioned from 25 years of intense work in industry to a consulting practice in government I often wondered “what the heck are these people doing?” Ten years later, I get it and I understand the culture and its cues.

I’ve tried all the “productivity” software and eventually quit using most of them. There is way too much opinion on the internet about “productivity”—which is a cold and mechanistic concept.

Nothing substitutes for a good handwritten notebook—my freeform notes, drawings, arrows, and highlights work better for keeping track of meetings, problems and tasks than anything. I have dozens of notebooks created over the years with a Livescribe pen—I sync the notes, make a pdf from each page (each notebook is in its own folder), and I scan handouts and other work papers and interleave those scanned PDFs with the handwritten notes captured with Livescribe. I also prefer handwritten task (“to do”) lists—there is something about making a note by hand that makes the task more memorable than typing it into some software. I frequently consolidate my lists, and rewrite them—the physical act of working with pen and paper to do this routine during a quiet time every day seems to bring about a better understanding of priority and criticality among tasks. (Get yourself a very nice pen you enjoy holding and working with!)

Very few things anyone does are actual projects (in the formal PMP sense) and it’s not helpful to think of them as if they were project. Instead, consider that every job has its unique “realistic horizon”—the future period of days, weeks, or months for which it makes sense to plan because the probability of actually doing the thing you planned to do is high. For some jobs, the horizon is a few days—for others it is a few months. Once you get a good feeling of the realistic horizon for your own job, then you will know how far out to plan your work without experiencing frustration when plans fall apart.

A few simple techniques are helpful: as Dr. Andrus mentioned, Pomodoro is elegant and good discipline. I like the 1-3-5 model: make a daily note card (for your pocket) listing the one big thing that needs to be done today, the 3 important things that would be good to complete but could slip a day, and five small tasks that you can fit into breaks or as a diversion. Planning tomorrow’s work the night before is often helpful because your brain will ponder how to accomplish those things while you sleep—it can make the work day less stressful.