Suffering From Project Overload
Lately, I have been a bit scatter-brained, which resulted in a one-night mass consumption of beer on Friday night. The main problem has been a bit of a project overload. There are several seemingly important things tugging at my attention from day to day, and it gets more and more difficult to figure out which takes precedence. If you find yourself in a similar situation, maybe you can do what I propose doing, a triage of sorts.
First, Make Money
First, I have a responsibility to earn a living. I am responsible for my family and myself. Tasks that relate to doing business will have to take precedence. Some of the fun things I enjoy doing will have to take a back seat.
Second, do one thing at a time
This may seem like, “Duh!”; but you should probably tackle one project at a time. I don’t have the capacity to quickly and continuously retool my brain from one task to the next all day. You may find a similar inability to focus on more than a couple projects in a day. I’m just going to have to designate my projects by day of the week. This will ensure that I have the right mindset and tools for that one project or two on that day.
Third, Get Smart
In order to improve my chances at landing better deals, it is in my best interest, now that I am a freelancer, to keep honing my skills. This means that I must set time aside to learning how to do new things and improve on those I already do well.
Fourth, lay off the computer
In today’s climate of downsizing, I find that I am more inclined to lay off my computer as well. Computers carry some productivity overhead that make it difficult to focus. I’ve been going back to good old paper and pen to write notes. A big chunk of my computing lately, is going towards my phone. Even so, I am reviving the art of the phone call. OK, so I won’t completely let go of the computer; let’s just say it will be welcome to stay on part-time.
Cut back on the social media
There are several folks out there that swear you can check your email once a day, or once per week, and you would not miss anything important. Thanks to Gmail’s spam filter, I don’t get much spam; however, I get tons of bacn. Informative, yes; useful, no. They’re right. I don’t get any meaningful email that must be addressed right now. Mostly, urgent matters result in phone calls. I’m willing to guess that if I check my Facebook and other apps just once a week, I’ll save lots of time. The same is true for other networks. Twitter, well, that’s going to require medical intervention; maybe there’s a patch for it.
UPDATE
I ran across this video from Chris Brogan soon after writing this post.
Marc Rohde 4:32 pm on February 20, 2009 Permalink |
One hint that I have found works well for my personal e-mail is to aggressively filter mail from the inbox. The less I see at a glance the more I can concentrate on what is flowing in.
For the “bacon” I setup filters as early as possible to keep down the clutter and once it is automatically filed I can concentrate on what is left and should be critical.
This doesn’t work as well on my work in boxes since they are far less certain but in that case I establish automated alerts to raise the truly critical (like e-mail from my boss) to the top.