Managing the day
I’ve been searching for more effective ways to manage my days. Where I presently work is about twice the size of any place I’ve worked before (in terms of people in the office that I’m in) and my job encompasses two areas that involve a lot of impromptu people contact, HR and Billing. This means a lot of interruptions that can’t necessarily be put off and those interruptions are important in their own right both for what I learn from each conversation and what help I can give the other person. My position also has been in a fire-fighting mode since I started and that hasn’t let up much in the five months since.
My main goal at this point is to move out of that fire-fighting mode and into not just getting all the tasks done but seeing more of the bigger picture and more long-term planning. I work with some terrific people so I’ve been letting their good management techniques rub off on me as well as taking all the input I can get from them about the company and the projects we’re working on together but I’ve still been looking for a better way to handle my to-do list.
Recently a friend who’s job hunting posted a link to a post about resumes on Rands in Repose and in checking out the rest of the site, I found two great posts about handling tasks and to-do lists that sparked some light bulbs above my head. The first one, The Taste of the Day, minimizes the task list to three areas. I particularly like his thoughts about how priorities are fluid and therefore it’s pointless to simply set priorities on each task. And I’m all for not spending time managing the structure of my to-do list! I have a tendency to take work to sleep with me – to either dream about it or wake up and start thinking about it and I liked his idea of scrubbing the to-do list each evening, it may help me put work aside at the end of the work day, give me a feeling that I’m ready for the next day with no need to stress over it all night.
The second post is The Trickle List and most of it is something I’ve already been doing intuitively without the structure he gives it. The focus is more about the future, about moving forward and planning and it’s too easy to get caught up in simply crossing things off the task list without ever looking up to see the rest of the world.
Tags: Career/Geek, gtd