What I’ve Been Doing Lately

This is what I’ve been doing.

Examining my production lines

When I was a kid, I used to have lists of chores that I had to do every day over the summer in order to get my weekly allowance. Usually, the chores had to be completed before I left the house each day. In order to do this quickly, I came up with systems and orders in which to do things.

There are a couple different ways to do things that I used as a child and still use today:

Assembly line – take all the tasks for the day and break them into their component subtasks doing all of the similar subtasks at the same time.

1-1-1-1; 2-2; 3-3-3; 4-4-4-4

[example: writing emails to clients.] all four need to be set up with addressee information and salutation and closing. two of them need to have an introductory paragraph telling the reader that you are accepting their offer. three of them need a current project status update paragraph. all four need a closing paragraph stating that the project will last for a specific time frame and will end on a specific date.

Template – take all the tasks for the day and break them into their component subtasks; doing all of the subtasks for one task and then replicating it for the remaining tasks. (this only works if you use the most complicated task as your model)

1-2-3-4; 1-2-3-4; 1-3-4; 1-4

[example: writing emails to clients.] Write one client email with address information, salutation and closing; write the introductory paragraph; write a status update in an easy to reuse format; write a closing paragraph with specific duration and end date information. Once you have done one, it is simply a matter of plug and play for the remaining ones as shown above.

Degree of Difficulty – because I am a “law of diminishing returns” kinda guy, I believe that if you backload your tasks, you will run out of ability or desire, even if you are the kind of person who builds energy as you go along. Complete tasks from hardest to easiest and your day, or week, will end on a breezy note. [please note, that if the hardest task proves too difficult to complete in reasonable time, you should move on so as to maintain productivity]

Singularity – Group your tasks; and do all of the tasks for a group or set of groups on one day and save the others for another. I like to think of this as the bathroom/backyard grouping. I used to clean the bathrooms and the backyard (dog crap pickup) on the same day and then do the living room and family rooms (which needed vacuuming and dusting) on the next. This is thematic grouping, but you could use task oriented grouping as well (sometimes I grouped by location).

Each of these for methods is useful under different circumstances and the real purpose of this post isn’t to get you to follow them exactly. I hope that by describing the ways that I work, it might encourage you to take a moment to figure out why you do things the way that you do. When you understand your motivations and methods, you can improve upon them where needed.

Now I have to go write some emails and clean something.