Aannd we're back! I hope you all had a safe and pleasant new year. I spent the past two weeks preparing a housewarming-cum-new-years-eve party and trying to work out how I'd tackle my projects this year so that they actually eventuated, instead of being hijacked by the new shiny every month.

It involved a lot of reading various books and a lot of internet searches. I discovered a disturbing number of books that claimed to tell you how to organise yourself in a right-brain way, spent chapters telling you how hard it was for right-brainers to keep to schedules and organise in a standard pattern, only to culminate their advice with "make schedules and keep to them".

Welp, if only someone had thought of that.

I came up with two main realisations:

Realisation 1.

I'm very visual, I like pretty things, and I love infographics. When I stumbled across a coffee company that had produced an infographic poster for people to fill in to record their consumption I had a brainwave - that recording my project time and progress in a similarly visually pleasing way would probably do a great deal towards rewarding me for getting work done, especially during the long slogs like draft writing, where there's no "I've finished this bit!" buzz for weeks.

I spent some time devising various templates to show what I wanted, but was ultimately displeased with what I could achieve with the programs I had to hand (no Creative Suite for me yet.) The necessity of having 'guides' so that I could manually colour in the graphic as I went automatically made it much less visually pleasing to me. So I went with my next choice - devise a program that will show me pretty things if I put in the data. I'm creating it as a mobile web-app (there'll be a desktop equivilent eventually, too). I'm using it as the first stage in learning HTML5 and Dojo, which is what my other software is going to be coded in, and I'll be putting up the occasional blog post about my experience trasitioning over from Java and strict-typed OO (if that sentence was so much greek to you, don't worry. The programming-posts will be clearly marked).

However, I did discover that the act of designing the infographics was quite enjoyable, so at some point I'm going to finish them up and put them up here, in case other people find them useful.

Realisation 2.

Common sense says to look back at a time when I consistently completed things under my own initiative, and see how I did it. University is a prime example - after two years of the traditional student method (aka write an essay at 4am when it's due at 9am that morning) I realised that completing things before they were due was much less stressful (duh). My honours thesis, something that students traditionally run late with, was finished with a month to spare. I juggled two masters degrees at once, with all assignments finished well before the deadline.

The interesting thing is that I didn't use any manner of scheduling to do this. I had the hard deadlines of the due date, and soft deadlines of when I'd *like* to have it done by, and that formed the priority for any spare time I had to work. 

On a notepad on my desk I would keep a list of the next two weeks' worth of assignments (or parts of larger projects) in order of their due date (modified by how much work they represented). In the space below (or around, or on top of, or wherever else there was space) I would break it down into components or steps where necessary, and assign deadlines to those, too.

The deadlines on my notepad became immutable - though they were actually at least a week before the final assignment was due, I would work to my dates, instead of the formal ones. I made no plans for when I would do something, just when it had to be done by. And when I sat down to work, I would work on something that had an approaching deadline. Not always the one that was soonest - I would work on what I felt like working on, but it would be tempered by the knowledge that X and Y had to be finished this weekend.

And it worked.

The problem I've had in the past is that, when I create deadlines for my creative work, they're always wishy-washy. I'm aware that I don't know how long something will take me, so I estimate long, and then give a heap of leeway, and the deadline ends up meaningless.

But when looking at how I managed for university, I realised: deadlines aren't a magical number for how long you think something should take. And they're not always fair - sometimes you have to crunch to get that assignment in on time, or sometimes four or five deadlines coincide on the same day. That's just tough. The deadline stands unless you have seriously mitigating circumstances (and any kind of time management excuse was never accepted by university faculty).

So my approach for this year, as an experiment has been:

1. Decide which projects have priority
2. Break those projects down into stages and steps
3. Assign deadlines to each of those stages
4. Treat those deadlines like my university assignments - immutable, not always fair, only extendable in serious mitigating circumstances.
5. Record the time spent working on each project.

I've been doing this technique for a whole week now (hah) - so far, it's working. My brain doesn't question the deadlines/priorities on my notepad, it just accepts that these things have to be done by then. I'm not sure how long that spell will last, but I suspect the fact that almost all of these deadlines cascade into the next step (so being late on one will mean being late on a whole swathe of others) will help in taking it seriously.

When I have my little timekeeping app up and running, I'll be able to record how much time I'm spending on each project and when, and how much I'm getting done in that time, and that will arm me for planning how long these kinds of things will take in the future.

Generalising out

Obviously this solution is focused on a single person - I've worked out what should (probably) work for me. But the steps I took to do that should work just as well for you:

1. Think of a time when you got things done successfully. It might be university or high school, it might be at a particular job where you were given some freedom in working, it might be around the house with the household chores. Have a hard look at what you did to make sure those things were completed, and think about what you can take from that to use elsewhere.
2. Find something to help reward you for working on a task that you can't finish just yet - for keeping going through that draft, for making that fifth editing pass, etc. There are a number of techniques you can try, from paying yourself to rewarding yourself with a treat or activity after X minutes spent on the task, to just highlighting for yourself when you've worked.
3. Combine 1 and 2 to develop your approach - how you'll get the task done, and what you'll do to reward yourself for doing it.