projects

How to manage your time + energy when it’s split

July 31, 2012 by Michelle 15 Comments

This is a question I get a lot – and for good reason. Most people get their businesses started going as a side gig, so they have to manage their time & energy for their “day job” and their business at the same time, without letting either suffer; and if you’re running a service based business, once it’s churning along semi-smoothly, you then have to balance your attention between handling client work (which pays the bills now) and taking care of your business (which, if neglected, means you won’t be able to pay the bills in a month or three).

I’ve been working for myself for just over three years now, and the whole time I’ve been doing it, I’ve had more than one big project taking up my time & energy. First I was freelance writing and writing at Wicked Whimsy at the same time, then freelance writing and working on Let’s Radiate and with associated clients at the same time, and now I’m currently working on my business + handling client work + prepping for the relaunch in September. (Speaking of which, September looked so much further away from the other side of July. Yikes.)

In that meantime, I’ve tried a myriad of ways to balance these projects without taking too much away from any of them. Some tactics have been more successful than others…and at the moment, I’ve got some that’ve been working well. Can I guarantee it’ll work for you? Nope, but if you’ve had that feeling of too many plates spinning at once (and the really unpleasant feeling when one of them shatters), it can’t hurt to take a look.

What’s worked for me:

Assigning categories to each day of the week. This way, I get to stay in the same mental ballpark the whole day, without any drastic shifts, which allows me to get into a really good groove. (Which, it is not an exagerration to say, exponentially increases my productivity.) My loose categories are as follows: Mondays are admin days for my business, Tuesdays & Thursdays are client days, Wednesdays are mostly content creation, and Fridays are biz-dev days for my business.
Aiming for scheduling appointments either at the beginning or towards the end of the work day. Obviously, if mid-day is the only time that works for someone, I can & will schedule an appointment for then; but in general I try to put appointments in either 9 AM or 10 AM time-slots or after 2 PM. This way I can make sure I have a solid swathe of time to work without being interrupted by appointments for the bulk of my work day. And I try to schedule appointments roughly corresponding with the categories – coaching or consulting for me goes on Fridays or Mondays, client appointments are usually Tuesdays & Thursdays though sometimes Wednesdays.
Having a color-coded task list/calendar. This is probably the quirkiest item on the list, but having things color coded by client makes it incredibly easy to see at a glance if I’m spending the bulk of my time on one thing and possibly neglecting others. If my task list looks more like a rainbow across the week, I’m doing it right.

What has not worked for me:

Trying to work on multiple different big projects in one day. For example, splitting up one day between biz-dev & client work. It’s too big of a mindset shift for me and I end up making a lot of progress on one project and doing absolutely nothing on the other one.
Not making a distinction between work on my business & work in my business. Two entirely different things that require two wildly different mindsets and viewpoints. Working on my business (or your business) requires a really top-level, bird’s eye view; working in my business means taking more of a day-to-day, detail-oriented view. Learning the difference between those two mindsets was huge for me, because it meant I wasn’t wasting time trying to switch directly from one to another. Now, I know that trying to plan those two activities back to back won’t work & ends up more frustrating than anything else.
Attempting to split equally time-wise. Far more important than time spent is energy spent, and also important is if I’m actually feeling the project. If everything’s going well, I can get more done in 15 minutes than I’ve got done in an hour other times, so I don’t worry about dividing time up equally between important areas any more, I just make sure I’m moving forward on all of them.

There’s a lesson here – despite all of the productivity “rules”, sometimes you just have to do things by trial and error. What works for me might not work for you – sometimes I even break the golden productivity rule and *gasp* multi-task, though only when doing certain things on certain days. Sometimes listening to music makes me more productive, but only when I’m working on certain things, and only certain kinds of music. If you don’t feel like something is working for you, feel free to scrap it and try something else – even if it runs counter to traditional wisdom.

What about you? Do you have any specific tricks for working on multiple projects at the same time, without dropping the ball on any of them? Is there anything you do that makes you far more productive that goes against the usual productivity advice?

Photo Credit: Nick Wheeler

Filed Under: Avoiding Overwhelm, Systems + Streamlining Tagged With: energy management, projects, time management

How to stay on top of all of your projects, at a glance

February 1, 2012 by Michelle 26 Comments

One of the worst things about having multiple projects going on at any given time is knowing where you’re at on all of them. I do use Springpad to organize my projects, but it’s mostly a note-taking/resource-saving tool for me, not necessarily organizing tasks. Enter Trello – a free online project management tool that’s super versatile in its design, letting it be useful for organizing solo projects, team efforts, and of course, keeping track of all of your projects at once! In the short & sweet (under five minutes) video below I share how I use it to do that.

Let me know if you have any questions about getting started using Trello – I’d love to help. How do you keep track of all of your projects?

PS: Like I said – the Productivity for Multipotentialites course is now open for registration (registration closes on Friday night at midnight PST). If you want to stop spinning your wheels & start making more progress on + time for all of your projects, come join us!

Filed Under: Avoiding Overwhelm, Reviews, Tools + Resources Tagged With: multipotentialites, organizing, projects, tasks, trello, video

Sprinting vs. marathon running, and creating your finish lines

August 22, 2011 by Michelle 3 Comments

The key to productivity, Schwartz says, is to “recognize the power of renewal, and have a finish line.” He claims that “we’ve lost our finish lines.”

via the 99%

In other words: we need to be sprinters, not marathon runners. We need a finish line to keep our work life healthy. A finish line gives you a way and a reason to track your progress, see how far you’ve come, pat yourself on the back, and take a break before sprinting again.

This is one of the reasons I’m so insistent on deciding what “done” means before you even start working on a project. If you don’t decide what done means, it’s too easy to get lost in the intricacies of your work, and then when you do try to decide when you’ll be finished, you’re deciding from the trenches, in the moment, usually without looking at the longer term picture or seeing the project as a whole.

And, of course, when you love you work (like I know you do), you enjoy doing it, so it’s incredibly easy to say “Oh, I’ll just do this one more thing!” Except, it never is that one last thing, there’s another one after it, and one after this. This has two effects:

It never gets done, or it gets done much later than intended. This is part of what Seth Godin calls “thrashing” – we get nervous about putting something out in front of people, so we tweak and fiddle and revise and edit, telling ourselves that we’ll get it done…eventually. But we don’t. Understandable, but not very productive.
You end up burned out and unsatisfied. If you keep moving the finish line – even if it’s just a little bit at a time – the side effect is that you don’t feel like you’re making any progress, and you don’t build any momentum. This is draining. It sucks. Nobody likes feeling like they’re spinning their tires and getting nowhere. Quitting the project entirely and working on something else starts to sound awfully tempting.

If you have “shiny object syndrome” in the middle of a project (whether that’s with additions to this project or a new project entirely), resist the temptation to add something else to your plate & to move your finish line. Instead, store the idea somewhere safe – as per usual, I recommend Springpad - and come back to it in a future iteration of what you’re working on, or use it in a different project entirely.

The need to keep from forcing ourselves into a marathon-mindset is also one of the reasons that I love working with projects so much. If you think of something as a project (even if it’s an ongoing, constant project, like website maintenance or writing or what-have-you), it’s infinitely easier to set milestones and finish lines, to pick an oasis to rest in after your sprint.

With working in projects comes a natural cycle – start, work, finish, rest. It’s the same cycle we see in nature and elsewhere, and it’s arguably the healthiest cycle to mimic in your work life. I’ll discuss in a future post how to help create finish lines with ongoing projects – but, in the meantime, take some time today to sit & think about the finish lines you’re creating (or not creating), and how you can honor them.

What are you working on right now? What’s the finish line? And how will you know when you’ve reached it?

Filed Under: Going From Idea to Action Tagged With: completion, finish line, preventing burnout, projects, work life

How to use Springpad to stay on top of your projects & tasks

August 10, 2011 by Michelle 16 Comments

Goodness gracious, that hiatus was a bit longer than I meant it to be. Our move went just a tad bumpier than intended (and by just a tad bumpier, I mean a hell of a lot bumpier), so it took me longer to get back on my feet than I thought it would. But! I’m back, and with a video that several of you requested: how to use Springpad to stay on top of your projects and tasks.

Springpad is my note-saver and online organizer of choice, and I’ve mentioned it several times, but I’ve never given an in-depth explanation of why I really love it and how I use it. This video aims to remedy that:

Video notes:

Notebook: highest level of organization in Springpad – basically, the categories that you put notes in.

Notes: pieces of information, there are many different formats for you to pick from – so you can use the best format for the specific piece of information that you need to save, depending on what you want to do with it

A note can be in more than one notebook at once, which is hugely useful for reasons mentioned in the video.

How I use notebooks – two ways:

Projects/categories/clients
Sorting information for action

First way: Projects/Clients

Anything related to a specific project or client goes in that notebook. Examples:

Notes on specific services or ebooks
Notes on ideas you’ve had related to this particular project (it’s a great idea to have one note for each project that’s a dedicated idea garden)
Bookmarks of web pages you’ve created using the clipper that are relevant to this project or client (for reference or inspiration)
Checklist of actions that relate to a specific aspect of a project¹
Tasks or events related to a specific job or client (which you can then sync to your Google calendar, if you so choose)

Second use: Sorting information for action

Refer to this post for a detailed breakdown of the information sorting technique I’m talking about in the video.

Closing notes & project vs. action view:

When I want to look at things, I can choose whether I want to look at the project view or the action view. I can look at the action view at the beginning of every week and use the list of actions that I know need to get done to map out of my week. I can look at the project view to keep me on track with a particular project, find inspiration to work on that project, or figure out what to do next. This is another reason I really love Springpad: it lets you actively filter information instead of just flinging it at you all at once.

And there you have it, ladies and gentlemen! Any questions I can answer? Anything you wish I would have covered in the video? Any compliments on my choice of background & colors? I’d love to hear ‘em!

If you loved this post or found it super useful, please share it with your friends. After all, that’s how good ideas spread, right?

I didn’t want to get too into it in the video because I knew it would already be long, but I use checklists for a specific kind of tasks. Those tasks being short, relatively easy tasks that can be done in a few minutes and aren’t deadline oriented or time-specific. The way that I use the actionable checklists that I create from books or information is that I set aside some time on a specific day (an hour on Wednesday is my current choice) and for that hour, I work through the checklists. [↩]

Filed Under: Reviews, Tools + Resources Tagged With: action, actionables, clients, information, organization, projects, springpad

How to manage your time + energy when it’s split

What’s worked for me:

What has not worked for me:

How to stay on top of all of your projects, at a glance

Sprinting vs. marathon running, and creating your finish lines

How to use Springpad to stay on top of your projects & tasks

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How to manage your time + energy when it’s split

What’s worked for me:

What has not worked for me:

How to stay on top of *all* of your projects, at a glance

Sprinting vs. marathon running, and creating your finish lines

How to use Springpad to stay on top of your projects & tasks

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How to stay on top of all of your projects, at a glance