Peace of Mind Organizing

Adding structure to an unstructured day

21 March 2014

The other day I found myself with a work day with no appointments in it all. Nothing to structure the day into chunks. I had a task list, but I found the lack of structure made it a little hard for me to focus on what I needed to get done.

I find it easier when I have phone appointments or other commitments to put brackets around time slots and give me tiny deadlines throughout the day.

So I decided to create my own structure. Here’s how I did it. I wrote down the top five things I wanted to get done. One of those things I called Power Hour. I took a look at my task list and marked those small admin items that had been piling up and decided I’d try to get seven of them done during a Power Hour. (I created a tag called Power Hour in Springpad so I could easily group together these tasks on my Ninja Task Manager notebook.)

On a piece of paper, I wrote down five two-hour time slots and slotted in four of the major tasks categories. I doubled up a little, actually—I put “work out” and “blog” in one time slot, for instance.

Here’s a photo of that piece of paper.

Doing that created some structure, with a little urgency built in. It’s amazing to me what a difference that made in my productivity. It allowed me to focus on the task at hand. It helped me keep an eye on the clock and gauge my progress. And I did get a whole lot done!

True confession: I didn’t everything done. As you can see in the illustration, I didn’t manage to do any of the financial work (either Quickbooks or Turbo Tax) that I’d set out to do. The lesson here is to schedule the important stuff in the first part of the day.

Next time you feel like you’re floating around an unstructured day, perhaps you can create a little structure for it!

Tagged with: springpad, task list, task management, time management

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